In 1922, Howard Carter’s team lifted a sealed alabaster jar from Tutankhamun’s tomb and found paint pigments still vivid after 3,300 years — the Egyptian blue on the walls owed its endurance to calcium copper silicate, a synthetic pigment so stable that modern conservators now use it to trace ancien

Egyptian blue — the world's first synthetic pigment — held its colour inside Tutankhamun's tomb for 3,300 years, and its strange near-infrared glow now lets conservators separate genuine ancient paint from modern forgery with a single photograph. The post In …