Colour and language
Homer's wine-dark sea
Homer never calls the sea blue. That does not mean the Greeks could not see blue, and the ancient world had blue pigment.
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In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the sea is described by a phrase usually translated as wine-dark, and the sky is never called blue. In 1858 the British politician William Gladstone concluded that the Greeks of Homer's time saw colour poorly. That idea is still repeated as proof that blue did not exist in antiquity. It is wrong. The evidence concerns words, not eyes.
What Gladstone noticed
Gladstone, a classical scholar as well as a future prime minister, counted the colour words in Homer and found them few and strange. The sea and oxen share the description oinops, wine-faced. Honey and frightened faces are both chloros, a word later used for green. Hair and the brows of Zeus are kyaneos, dark. He proposed that the Greek sense of colour was undeveloped. The German scholar Lazarus Geiger then found similar gaps in other ancient texts, including the Vedas, and suggested that colour words appear in a set order over time.
Why colour blindness is not the answer
Human colour vision has not changed in three thousand years. That is far too short a time, and the genes involved are much older. The better explanation is that Homeric Greek described surfaces by brightness, shimmer and movement more than by hue. Oinops may refer to a dark, glinting sea at dusk and not to its colour at all. Scholars still argue over the phrase. Greek certainly had the means to talk about blue things: kyanos named a dark blue material, and later Greek writers discuss colour at length.
Blue in the ancient world
The claim that the ancients had no blue falls apart on contact with objects. Egyptians were making a blue pigment, now called Egyptian blue, some five thousand years ago, and had a word for it. Lapis lazuli was traded from the mountains of what is now Afghanistan to Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus cities. Sanskrit has nila, and Krishna is described as dark as a rain cloud. What is true is the narrower point: a separate everyday word for blue tends to arrive late in a language, after black, white, red, yellow and green.
Colours on this page
Sources and further reading
- Wine-dark sea on Wikipedia
- Aeon: The sea was never blue
- ColourLex: Egyptian blue
- Online Etymology Dictionary: blue
Original text by the Rang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.