Amenemopet’s wooden painter’s palette — he was a vizier to Pharaoh Amenhotep III around 1350 BC — still carries dabs of the actual red, yellow, blue, and green pigment its owner mixed, dried in place for more than three thousand years. It sits in the Egyptian wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, where you can stand a couple of feet from the real tool an ancient hand once dipped and blended with. Open Culture’s piece is the kind of small, specific object that collapses the distance to the ancient world.