Scientists Successfully Recreate Ancient Egypt’s Highly Valued Blue Pigment

Thousands of years before Yves Klein, Joni Mitchell, Pablo Picasso, or Miles Davis, blue was famously the obsession of the Ancient Egyptians, who used different hues of the color to permanently adorn the tombs of pharaohs, wall paintings, statues, and myriad objets d’art. The earliest-known artificial pigment, so-called “Egyptian blue” was created by heating malachite, quartz sand, and other materials at 1,500 to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit in a process later adopted by the Romans, but was largely forgotten by the time of the Renaissance.

Now, a team of researchers has concocted not one but a dozen recipes for the prized dye. The group published their findings last month in the journal NPJ Heritage Science, delving into the various combinations of raw materials and heating times used to develop the Egyptian blue.

The research, which employed modern technologies and analysis procedures that hadn’t been used in previous studies, was a collaboration among Washington State University, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH), and the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Conservation Institute.

For the project, researchers experimented with different powder formulas made from silicon dioxide, copper, calcium, malachite, and sodium carbonate that were then fired at 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit) for one to 11 hours. After cooling the formulas, the team studied the results using modern microscopy and microanalytical techniques such as X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy, and compared them to modern commercial pigments and Ancient Egyptian artifacts held in the CMNH collection.

The researchers found that Egyptian blue is highly incongruous, as results varied drastically depending on changes in processes. Experiments suggested that longer treatment at high temperature and slower cooling phases created bluer pigments. Notably, the most vibrant hues only required about 50 percent of blue-colored components.

“It doesn’t matter what the rest of it is, which was really quite surprising to us,” John S. McCloy, a Washington State University professor who was one of the lead authors of the paper, said in a press statement. “You can see that every single pigment particle has a bunch of stuff in it — it’s not uniform by any means.”

Hyperallergic has requested comment from McCloy and Edward P. Vicenzi, another lead author on the study.

McCloy also said that the project initially began “as something that was fun to do” after researchers had been asked to create materials for a museum exhibit. A recent resurgence of interest in Egyptian blue ultimately led the team down a rabbit hole of experimentation to gain insight into the methods that ancient cultures used to develop the elusive pigment. 

“We hope this will be a good case study in what science can bring to the study of our human past,” McCloy said. 

The Egyptian blue samples are currently on view at the CMNH as part of the Stories We Keep exhibition, which explores modern scientific research on Egyptian antiquity and conservation. In late 2026, the mixtures will be installed as a permanent display featured in the long-term exhibition Egypt on the Nile.