Why Blue Is the Last Color Named by Ancient Cultures
How colors were introduced little by little into societies
As a child, I always wondered if other people saw colors differently. When there was some color combination that just didn’t work for me, and yet people around me called it beautiful and said there are different tastes, I did not get that. The theory of “different tastes” was just not plausible to me. How could someone find a color combination beautiful, that is just plain ugly? I didn’t get it. So, I rather imagined that everyone just saw colors differently. Maybe what I saw as green someone else saw as red? Nobody would know. So that was my explanation.
Now, years later, after observing my own taste change several times and also watching trends go by, I get it. People do have different tastes. Yet, the idea that maybe not everyone sees or saw color in the same way, stayed in the back of my head. That’s why I was utterly excited when I found out that even my own ancestors seem to not have seen colors the same as I do.
Homer and William Gladstone
The former British Prime minister William Gladstone analyzed ancient books of the Greek author Homer. Gladstone seems to be the first to notice that in those books there is a rather odd ratio between the mentions of color words. In the Iliad, for example, black is mentioned 170 times, white is mentioned 100 times, red is mentioned 13 times, and yellow and green are mentioned 10 times each. Blue is not mentioned once, even though he describes things we would refer to as blue. The ocean, as an example, he calls wine-dark instead of blue (Business Insider, 2015). Why is that? Did the Greeks not see blue? Well, that would be rather odd for a culture that later becomes rather famous for its characteristically blue roofs.
Greeks are not the only ones
A German philologist named Lazarus Geiger found later that it was not only Homer and with him, we suppose the Greeks, who failed to mention blue. It seemed that nearly all ancient cultures had a similar pattern. He looked at different ancient texts like the original Hebrew Bible and old Icelandic and Indian texts. They all have in common that blue is not mentioned once. All of them mention black, white, and red, and most also mention green and yellow. They all describe things we would call blue, but always in a different way and without calling them blue.
Furthermore, he came up with a kind of color-naming timeline. It seems that every single ancient language introduced black and white first, then red, and after this yellow and green in no particular order. Blue always was last. So, why is that?
There are two theories:
The evolutionary theory
Black and white were essential to distinguish between night and day, dark and light. Red entered afterward because it was associated with blood and danger on the one hand and ripe fruit on the other. This also leads to yellow and green distinguishing between ripe and unripe fruits. But there are very few blue things that we interact with within nature. Even when blue does come up, in blue butterflies, for example, it's usually not the actual color of the butterflies but just a sort of light illusion. And blue fruits are rare and the ones that do exist mostly are so dark, that you could nearly call them black. Like blackberries.
The theory that colors only entered the language as humans learned to use that pigment
Black and white are still essential. And red would enter the language as humans found how to use that color. So after black and white, probably achieved with burnt wood on a rather light background, the next color to enter would be red as it's easily achieved by using the blood of hunted animals, and so forth. But the only ancient civilization to achieve a blue color was the Egyptians. And they had a word for it. So, maybe that’s the thing. Or maybe just a factor among many.
Does that mean people couldn’t see those colors?
Not exactly. It is to be expected that they had the same capability to see colors as we do today. It seems they just saw colors they didn’t have a name for as hues of colors that had names. Researchers found that people actually see differences between colors stronger when they have a word for it.
A vivid example of this in today’s society is pink. I will take myself as an example. As we learned about the color wheel in school, I was very excited, that I can make all the colors from just blue, and red, and yellow. But as I started painting I was missing pink for my princess's dress. I wholeheartedly thought they made a mistake with this color wheel. They missed a color. Pink for me was its own color. Until someone told me it's just a light red. Well, it is. But it kind of looks very different at the same time. It seems to be some kind of feedback loop in the brain, that makes colors that have names look more different from each other than ones that don't have names and are just perceived as hues of other colors.
Evidence for that is in a culture that is still living without a separate word for blue: the Himba people. In his investigations, British Professor Jules Davidoff presented them with a chart of 12 identical spots of green and one spot of a kind of greenish-blue. It took them a lot longer to spot the odd one out than you and I would. On the other side of the spectrum, the Himba people are quicker to find a different tone of green in a set of green spots than we would be because they have a lot more words for green.
If that doesn’t really make sense for you let me explain it with a totally different example. The interpretation of what we hear works in similar ways. Maybe you tried to learn a language at some point in your life. When we start learning a language everything sounds the same to us, but as we go on and learn more and more words, suddenly we learn to hear the differences in words and pronunciations. That’s kind of what happens in the perception of color as well.
But how did ancient people see the sky?
They still probably saw the sky as we see it today, but they would not have called it blue but the color of the sky for them would have been a hue of black. Which makes sense in some way. Even today, we refer to the night sky as black. It makes sense that during the day the sky is just lighter and does not change the color in their eyes.
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References
Radiolab, 2012, Colors, WNYC Studios
Guy Deutscher, 2010, Through the Language Glass. Why the world looks different in other languages.
Layarus Geiger, 1871, Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menschheit
