For millennia, humans have beautified their world and expressed their thoughts by painting. Over the years, paintings have been made on virtually every imaginable surface.
The common characteristic is that paint consists of ground up pigment in some sort of liquid. When the liquid dries into a film, the ground pigment is stuck to the painting surface. The first paintings were cave paintings, such as those pictured at right. Ancient peoples would decorate walls of protected caves with paint made from dirt or charcoal mixed with spit or animal fat. In cave paintings, the pigments (often carbon black or ochre) stick to the wall partially because the pigment gets trapped in the porous wall, and partially because the binding media (the spit or fat) dries, adhering the pigment to the wall.
Over the years, countless graves unearthed by archaeologists exposed bodies covered in red pigment or chunks of pigment buried alongside bodies. Red, associated with blood, the most life-sustaining of a bodily fluids. was the appropriate color to symbolize life’s meaning and end. The word hematite (the source of many iron oxide pigments) is derived from the Greek word, hema meaning blood.
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