The Blue That Did Not Exist

Homer's sea was wine-dark. He described it that way repeatedly — across both the Iliad and the Odyssey, the sea is wine-dark, never blue. The sky is bronze. The descriptions are precise, even beautiful, but the color blue appears almost nowhere in either poem. Not in the sea, not in the sky, not in any of the vivid natural imagery that fills those texts. This would be unremarkable, except for what happened when scholars started looking at other ancient texts. Ancient Sanskrit. Ancient Chinese. Hebrew scripture. Old Norse. The pattern held. Blue is extraordinarily rare in ancient writing. The linguist Lazarus Geiger, working in the nineteenth century, surveyed texts from ancient cultures across the world — texts full of detailed color description — and found that blue was almost entirely absent. The sky is described in many ancient texts. It is described as bright, as dark, as clear, as stormy. It is almost never described as blue. Geiger also found something else. Across unrelated cultures, color terms appear to enter languages in a consistent order.