The first cover-up was literal

Tuesday!

Hello, Curse and Coffee friends,

Today, we look at ancient cover-ups.

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Coffee at the ready…

The take: The oldest known cover-up wasn't political. It was cosmetic.

What happened: Researchers at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum found 3,300-year-old correction fluid on a Book of the Dead papyrus made for royal scribe Ramose, used to slim down a painted jackal god called Wepwawet.

Why it matters: Egyptian craftspeople mixed calcite, huntite, and flecks of yellow orpiment (a toxic, arsenic-based pigment) into a paste that matched the papyrus colour. Engineering a formula to disappear.

What to watch: Senior Egyptologist Helen Strudwick says she's spotted the same technique on papyri at the British Museum and Cairo's Egyptian Museum, so expect more institutions to start re-examining their scrolls under infrared.

Light infrared photography confirmed the white lines were painted over the original figure to alter its shape.

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Egyptian artists brushed correction paste over errors on papyrus.

Infrared photography caught the trick — the paste reflects light differently from the original surface.

This was a burial scroll.

The Book of the Dead guided its owner through the afterlife. Get the spells wrong, and your patron doesn't pass the gatekeepers.

The stakes were eternal.

We treat ancient craftspeople like monks because their work survived 33 centuries.

This receipt tells a messier story.

A supervisor looked at a jackal drawing, told the artist it was too fat, and demanded a fix.

Three thousand years later, the revision notes are still visible under the right light.

Pro: The discovery shows ancient workshops doubled as chemistry labs — craftspeople matched pigment to surface with a precision we'd struggle to replicate casually today.

Con: One corrected jackal on one papyrus is a thin evidence base for sweeping claims about Egyptian production culture.

Our read: The bigger story is that nobody spotted these corrections on papyri sitting in major museums for over a century. Sometimes the best receipts are the ones everyone walked past.

The Art Newspaper — 9 March 2026.

First detailed report on the correction fluid's composition, the infrared method, and Strudwick's identification of similar corrections at the British Museum and Cairo. Changes the read because it confirms this wasn't a one-off. It was standard practice.

3,300 years between Egypt's white-out and yours. (Art Newspaper)

Artforum on the orpiment angle — the yellow pigment in the correction fluid doubled as a treatment for syphilis. Multitasking.

ARTnews on the Book of the Dead context — a clean summary of why accuracy mattered when your client was navigating the afterlife.

The Met's primer on papyrus in ancient Egypt — solid background on why this material was worth correcting, not scrapping.

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For the love of coffee, see you tomorrow!

Enjoy your Tuesday, keep it caffeinated.

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