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The other day I noticed a video from the Why Files called “Why Ancient People Didn’t See
the Color Blue,” which currently has 1.7 million views. It claims,
as the title suggests, that ancient people did not know about the color blue.
And then I saw that there were a number of other YouTube channels that made the same
claim. Supposedly the ancients either were not aware of the color or at the
very least did not have a word for the color. As a teacher of ancient history,
I was surprised I had never heard this before. Did I miss something? Is there
Welcome to the Myths of Ancient History series in which I point out popular misinformation
on YouTube and the internet and show you how we know it is misinformation. This one is about some
claims made by the Why Files, a popular YouTube channel with more than a million subscribers.
The Why Files has a reputation for mixing fact with fiction, but we are going to focus in on
one specific claim. I found it very intriguing. I mean, if true, the idea that ancient people
didn’t know blue is kind of an interesting factoid, isn’t it? Let’s see what he says.
- Here's a philosophical question for you. If a color doesn't have a name,
can we still see it? Well, many years ago the human eye evolved to give us the ability to see
about a million colors. that's a lot then how come until very recently nobody saw or
even heard of the color blue well it's because blue just didn't exist yet let's find out why.
- What? Blue didn’t exist? Nobody saw or even heard of it? I wanted to find out
where the Why Files got this idea. I couldn’t find anything in the scholarly literature.
But, after doing a little more digging, I found that, although he never cites it,
the Why Files basically is taking his video idea wholecloth from an article by Christopher Hall,
published in 2018, titled “Blue is the Rarest Color: Language and Visual Perception.” He seems
to have accepted the points of this article uncritically. So any errors presented on this
subject by the Why Files appear to be coming from Christopher Hall, an artist from Atlanta.
To be fair, the Why Files isn’t the only one who ran with Hall’s
article. A bunch of other people did as well.
- Blue is a mysterious color to people of the ancient world
like the Greeks. Blue wasn't a color at all.
- After I started writing the script for this video,
I thought to myself. ‘This sounds like a video topic Metatron may have tackled.’
So I checked, and he absolutely did make a video on it, called,
“That the Greeks Couldn’t See Blue Debunked Once and For All,” which you should check out.
And you can find out more about the Greek color palette in an earlier video, “Did the Ancient
Greeks really not see the color blue?”, by the Historian’s Craft. I will link those videos below.
Both of these videos, however, center attention on
whether the color blue existed in the ancient world and focus on the Greeks.
What I am going to center my attention on is whether blue had a name in ancient
times. Evidence is clear that blue was seen, that it was used in art,
but did people refer to the color blue? The Why Files says it didn’t have a name.
He may not be right about the existence of blue, but maybe he’s right about this.
- This weird story starts with William Gladstone, a four-time prime minister of Great Britain, and
he was a huge fan of Homer. Not that Homer. Greek Homer. Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey,
and these two epic poems are considered the foundation of all ancient Greek literature,
and much of modern literature is in some ways derivative of Homer. So Gladstone was
reading the Odyssey and noticed Homer described the wine-dark sea. Not blue.
Not green. Wine dark. And this description got Gladstone interested in other ways Homer used
color to describe things. Homer describes honey as being green, and sheep as being
violet-colored. Gladstone wondered if Homer was colorblind and saw blue as maybe something else.
- William Gladstone did, in fact, do a 3-volume study of Homer, called Studies on Homer and the
Homeric Age, and in vol. 3, there is a section on “Homer’s Perceptions and Use of Colour.” Gladstone
found a distinct absence of references to the color blue. But, although some people even at
the time thought that Gladstone was supposing that the ancient Greeks were colorblind,
he never made such a claim. For some reason, this is a popular misunderstanding of his study.
- So he went through thousands of pages of Homer's writing and counted his references.
The color black is mentioned almost 200 times, white about a hundred times,
red is mentioned 13 times, yellow and green fewer than 10 times, but blue zero. So
Gladstone looked through other ancient Greek writing. Nothing was ever described as being
blue. Gladstone's initial thought was maybe the Greeks saw color differently than other people.
- What Gladstone argued was that “the organ of colour and its impressions were but
partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age” and “heroic Greece may probably
have been far behind some countries of the east in the use and in the idea of colour,
which has always had a privileged home there.” This is a reference, not to ability of sight,
but to concepts. And notice that he clearly acknowledges that in the east,
people had the concept of blue. As for his claim about Greece, I’ll take you through the evidence.
- So researchers analyzed ancient texts from all over the world: the Quran, the Hebrew Bible,
ancient Chinese, Hindu, Icelandic... no blue. Not once. These ancient texts reference colors
with pretty much the same proportion as Homer's epics: black and white appear a lot,
red a few times, yellow and green appear very little, but blue never appears at all.
- Who the researchers were that analyzed ancient texts from all over the world and
found blue mentioned not even once, he doesn’t say. But I can tell you that,
whoever they were, if they exist, they didn’t look very hard.
We know that blue existed in ancient art. Logically, all pigments used in art would
have had a name. After all, artists and their patrons needed to keep the colors straight in
their heads so that they could communicate what should be applied to a surface. Now,
that alone should tell you they must have had a name for it. And even a small amount of
research will turn up evidence that they did. The ancient people did not usually use generic
color terms, such as we do, to refer to their colors. It was far more common to
name a color after a natural material, such as how we named the color gold after
the metal gold, or how we named the color orange after the fruit.
So, for example, in the ancient Near East, blue was named after a blue metamorphic
rock called lapis lazuli. This shows up in many of the ancient languages.
In Akkadian they called blue uqnû, in Ugaritic iqnu, in Hittite kuwanno,
in Egyptian ḫesbed, all meaning lapis lazuli. This despite the fact that
actual lapis lazuli was not commonly used to make blue paint and dyes.
We have specific references in Akkadian and Egyptian of
blue glass being called lapis lazuli, referring to the color, not the stone.
The Why Files says it isn’t in the Hebrew Bible. He is wrong. The Hebrew word sappir,
meaning lapis lazuli, often translated sapphire, is used to refer to color, such as when a throne
is described as blue in Ezekiel 1:26. Also there is another Hebrew word for blue, təḵēleṯ,
which is used numerous times to refer to a blue dye used for clothing in the book of Exodus.
He says blue isn’t found in ancient Hindu texts, and yet it is. It’s just that the Sanskrit word
for blue, nila, which literally means “dark color” included all shades of blue down to black.
And in ancient Chinese texts, the word qing includes blues and greens.
If you look at a color wheel, you must remember that various cultures of the world will divide
the colors up as they see fit. And this is where I have to give credit to the Why Files, because
his main point for saying any of this is to show that color names are a cultural construct. The
colors all exist, and we all know about them, but the way we divide them up is entirely our choice.
At the same time, it is inaccurate to say that certain ancient cultures
didn’t see blue or didn’t have a word for blue. They all did.
- Blue finally emerges as its own color when the Egyptians invented a way to produce a blue
dye. Suddenly the light black sky was blue. The Nile River, green for thousands of years,
finally became blue. As Egyptian blue dye made its way around the ancient world,
languages evolved to accommodate this new color, but before that nothing. So unless you
have a word to describe a color, it becomes really difficult for humans to perceive it.
- The Why Files first showed us that Homer didn’t have a word for blue, and then says the Egyptians
invented a blue dye, and after that people started talking about blue. He doesn’t seem
to realize that Homer lived a long time after the Egyptians started coloring things blue.
We are fortunate to have a number of inscriptions
from ancient Egypt that tell us about their pigments and how they were made.
The Egyptian blue that the Why Files is talking about, and it is more accurately referred to as
a pigment than a dye, was developed before the First Dynasty, that’s before 3000 BCE. Keep in
mind that Homer’s works are from after 700 BCE, so more than 2,000 years later.
As I mentioned before, the word that the Egyptians used for blue was ḫesbed, but their pigment they
usually called ḫesbed iryt (“lapis lazuli from the kiln,” in other words artificial lapis lazuli).
And the Mesopotamians, who purchased this pigment called it uknû merku (“molded lapis lazuli”).
But what about the Greeks? Why is blue not in Homer? A number
of possible explanations have been given for this.
One, and this appears to be the most common, is that we are simply looking at poetry,
and the way the poet wants to describe things is entirely up to him. Yeah, Homer refers to
the “wine-dark sea,” but how literally should we take this? It may be a metaphor intended to invoke
the fact that the sea is dangerous, and many men have died in it, linking wine color with blood.
Another explanation is that maybe the Greeks had a wine that was bluer in
color. The French make a blue wine today. Some think maybe the water used by the Greeks to
dilute their wine was high in alkaline and caused the wine to turn from red to blue.
Another proposal is that Homer was referring to red tide. Those
who live in Florida like me know that this refers to large concentrations
of algae that turn the color of the sea red at certain times of the year.
Christopher Hall, from whom the Why Files got his information, rejects these proposals, saying:
“All of these potential explanations fail to account for one very important thing,
however: the absence of the word “blue” in ancient
Greek literature. The Greek islands are practically surrounded by the color blue:
blue sky, blue sea—and yet the word for “blue” is conspicuously absent.”
Is that true? The color blue is not merely absent
from Homer. It’s absent from all ancient Greek literature?
Fortunately, we have a great deal more information about colors in ancient Greece
and Rome, and more specifically pigments used in their palette,
than on the cultures we’ve already gone over. This is because we have
four ancient writers whose extant books speak extensively about the names of the pigments:
Theophrastus, Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder, and Dioscorides. And we find out that the
Greeks and Romans had many names for colors, sometimes even more than one name for the
same color. The Greek word for color was χρῶμα, and the Latin word was pigmentum.
Now, way back in the Mycenaean period in Greece, this is hundreds of years before
Homer, we know from their tablets that they had a cobalt blue glass,
which they called kuwano. You may remember from earlier, the Hittite name for blue was kuwanno,
and this was also the Hittite word for lapis lazuli. This seems to indicate that the
Mycenaean Greeks used the name for lapis lazuli also for their cobalt blue glass.
And I should add that ingots of this glass were found in the Uluburun shipwreck from the 14th
century BCE (Mycenaean times), along with other materials from around the Eastern Mediterranean.
In time, the word kuwano evolved into κύανος. In the times after Homer,
the word referred to anything in the blue to black spectrum,
but it should be kept in mind that it originally meant blue and referred to the color of lapis
lazuli. The Latin term caeruleum comes from kuanos and means the same thing.
In order to differentiate between the various shades of kuanos or caeruleum,
they would employ adjectives along with it, or you would just have to figure it out from the context.
Much of the time, they differentiated the blues by their provenance. So they
would refer to Egyptian blue, Scythian blue, and Cypriot blue.
Cypriot blue (caeruleum Cyprium) was a pigment made from azurite,
a blue copper ore they would grind up.
Scythian blue was made from lazurite, the mineral taken from lapis lazuli and ground
up. Lapis lazuli came from Afghanistan, so why did they call it Scythian. Well,
it is thought that maybe it was brought to the Mediterranean region by Scythian traders.
Egyptian blue was produced by mixing silica, lime,
copper, and an alkali. It is the earliest known synthetic pigment. And it came in several forms.
There was the standard Egyptian blue, which was called Vestorian blue, Puteolan blue,
which Pliny says was also known as cyanon (cyan), and there was one called Lomentum, which came in
a paste and was made by washing and grinding the blue. There were also indigos and purples
in the Greco-Roman world. In other words, there was a whole host of colors, and plenty of blue.
The Why Files’ main point for making this video was to show how colors are culturally constructed,
and that is a valid point. He just didn’t bother to research much beyond the article
by Christopher Hall and concluded that blue didn’t have a name and that nobody saw or
heard it for a long time. As a result, this misinformation spread all over the internet.
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You might like my little e-booklet, Why Ancient History Matters. It's designed to persuade people
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Catch you later.