3 ms·
> Given that Egyptian Blue is a synthetic pigment that must be manufactured by human skill and ingenuity, it boggles the mind that people keep falling for this
by KevinMS 2y ago
> Given that Egyptian Blue is a synthetic pigment that must be manufactured by human skill and ingenuity, it boggles the mind that people keep falling for this idea that ancient peoples could not perceive blue.
Doesn't mean they perceived it as blue. Maybe they saw a weak green, or even a grey. Says it was named it 1809, so it wasn't Egyptians calling it blue.
- adrian_b 2y agoNo, already the Ancient Greeks called it like this (more precisely using a phrase meaning "Egyptian blue pigment"), because they were importing it from Egypt as a cheaper substitute for the ultramarine blue pigment. The name of the ultramarine blue pigment in all the ancient world was "cyano-" (cyanos in the nominative case in Ancient Greek; the name is already encountered in Hittite documents, a millennium before the Greek documents). The same name was used for the cheaper surrogate pigments, qualified when necessary to emphasize that substitutes were used, not the real thing. Due to the popularity of the ultramarine blue pigment, one of the most frequent ways to refer to "blue" was as "the color of cyano-", i.e. with the adjective "cyaneo-" (in Ancient Greek, a frequent method of coining color names was by deriving adjectives ending in -eo- from noun stems ending in -o-, e.g. chryseo- = golden from chryso- = gold).