The story of \u201cblue being invisible in history\u201d begins in 1858 when William Gladstone, who later became Chancellor of the Exchequer then Prime Minister of Great Britain, read Homer\u2019s The Odyssey . Gladstone noticed that Homer described the sea color as “wine-dark\u201d – leading him to ask the question; why not \u201cdeep blue?\u201d Gladstone investigated this curiosity and counted the color references in The Odyssey finding that while black was mentioned almost 200 times, and white about 100, blue did not appear once. Broadening his research he then determined that \u201cblue\u201d didn’t exist anywhere in Greek writing. Nowhere.<\/p>\n
German Jewish philosopher and philologist Lazarus Geiger passionately followed up on Gladstone\u2019s observations and analyzed ancient Icelandic sagas, the Koran, Hindu, Chinese folklore, Arabic, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. His studies discovered that \u2018blue\u2019 was never mentioned once in any of these cultures and he wrote:<\/p>\n
“These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn’s play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and ether, all these are unfolded before us, again and again … but there is one thing no one would ever learn from these ancient songs … and that is that the sky is blue.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Was the Color Blue Really Invisible to the Ancients?
\nNot having words for blue, scientists had to consider that maybe ancient people didn\u2019t see the color, thus not having descriptors for it. Were ancient people\u2019s eyes different from ours? Why didn\u2019t people see blue?<\/p>\n
It is not known exactly what was going through Homer’s mind when he described the \u201cwine-dark\u201d sea, but ancient people definitely had the same optical biology and capability to see blue that we do today. But do we really \u2018not see\u2019 things if we don’t have words for them? The answer is no. Because there was no \u2018blue\u2019 as a category of color in the way that we define it, the color wasn’t distinguished from green.<\/p>\n
The Blur of Blue and Green
\nSearching to discover when “blue” started to appear in language as a color in its own right, Geiger discovered a pattern repeated all over the world; every language first had words for black and white, representing darkness and light and soon after people used a word for red, the color of blood and wine. The next colors to appear in language were yellow then green and the last color to appear in every language across the globe was blue.<\/p>\n
In 2006, Jules Davidoff, a psychologist from Goldsmiths University of London, conducted a research project with members of the Himba tribe from Namibia, whose language neither has a word for blue nor distinguishes between green and blue. According to a BBC documentary (which has since been accused of over-dramatizing the results) members of the tribe were tested to find out if they could actually see blue or not by showing them a special pattern; a circle with 11 green squares and one blue square.<\/p>\n
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While it is very obvious to us, most of the Himba tribe members had more difficulty in telling Davidoff which of the squares was a different color. And those participants who noticed a difference took \u201cmuch longer and made more mistakes\u201d than you or I who can clearly and quickly spot the blue square. Not only did the experiment seem to confirm that language did affect what we perceive, it also revealed that the Himba language had many more descriptive words, terms and concepts for types of green than in English.<\/p>\n
Without a word for a particular color, there is no way of identifying it as different to the others close to it; and it is perceived as a shade of another color. So before blue became defined with a word, humans saw blue things as being shades of green.<\/p>\n
You can discover more about how language shapes our ability to detect color in Kevin Loria’s article at Business Insider, and in this fascinating RadioLab episode , which inspired his feature.<\/p>\n
What About the Creation of the Color Blue?
\nAncient Egyptian society was the first to adopt a word for the color blue because they were the first culture to produce blue dyes. The famous color \u201c Egyptian blue \u201d appears in artwork such as the tombs of Mereruka from the Old Kingdom (2600-2100 BC) and it is almost exactly the same blue as was found in a coffin dating from the Greco-Roman period (330 BC-AD 400), confirming well developed and standardized production systems being passed over two thousand years.<\/p>\n
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Blue came to represent the river Nile, the sky, and later the universe, creation, and fertility. The only natural source of blue was the rare and expensive mineral lapis lazuli which was mined in what is now Afghanistan. Vitruvius, the 1st century Roman architect and writer said that \u201csand, copper (from a mineral such as azurite or malachite) and natron (a naturally occurring mixture of sodium compounds, including sodium carbonate) were the ingredients.\u201d<\/p>\n
What Else are We Blind To?
\nTo think that we didn\u2019t see blue because we didn\u2019t have a word for it makes one ask, what might we be looking at every day and night, right under our noses, that we can\u2019t see because we don\u2019t have a word for it? Well, ironically, one answer to this question is\u2026more blue!<\/p>\n
In 2017, Oregon State University (OSU) chemist Mas Subramanian discovered \u201cYInMn blue\u201d named after the elements Yttrium, Indium, and Manganese, during experimentation \u201cwith materials for electronics applications.\u201d According to the OSU press release , the beautiful blue was discovered through a chemistry lab accident back in 2009 and is now going into the marketplace. \u201cIt was serendipity, actually; a happy, accidental discovery,\u201d Subramanian said in the paper .<\/p>\n
While this new blue looks similar to \u201cL’accord bleu\u201d (shown earlier), and \u201ccobalt blue,\u201d its properties \u201care stronger and more durable\u201d according to Subramanian. Formed by a unique crystal structure that allows the manganese ions to absorb red and green wavelengths of light, the pigment only reflects blue.<\/p>\n
This deep, vibrant blue is so durable \u201cand its compounds are so stable even in oil and water\u201d that the new pigment\u2019s versatility has a variety of commercial applications in paints. For example, \u201cto keep buildings cool by reflecting infrared light…[and] keeping with our requirements for sustainability, none of the new blue pigment\u2019s ingredients are toxic,\u201d according to the OSU press release.<\/p>\n
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Source: https:\/\/www.ancient-origins.net<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The story of \u201cblue being invisible in history\u201d begins in 1858 when William Gladstone, who later became Chancellor of the Exchequer then Prime Minister of Great Britain, read Homer\u2019s The Odyssey . 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