The Color Old Books Forgot

In Homer's ancient Greek poems, the sea is often called 'wine-dark'. It is a beautiful phrase, but a strange one, because the sea is not usually the color of wine. Homer uses other surprising color words too, and one color seems to be almost missing from his poems: blue.

In the 1850s, the British writer William Gladstone, who later became prime minister, studied Homer's colors closely. He noticed that Homer had very few words for blue and often used the same word for colors we would separate. Gladstone even wondered whether the ancient Greeks saw colors less clearly than people do today.

Later scholars found the same pattern beyond Greece. In many ancient texts, and in many languages, a word for blue appears late, after words for black, white and red. Some languages still use one word for both green and blue. One possible reason is that blue things, apart from the sky and water, are rare in nature.

Does this mean people long ago could not see blue? No. Their eyes worked just like ours, and they could see the difference between the sky and a leaf. What changed was language: people may not have needed a separate word for blue until it became important to talk about. Words follow what people need to say.