Nameless

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Pond in a Garden, Tomb of Nebamun
(with artificial lapis lazuli)

Next in our series investigating the colors we use to make art, is the color blue. Today, blue is ubiquitous, in our pigments and in our language. We can’t imagine a time when the word blue was not in our vocabulary. But, this was not always so. Many ancient cultures (and a few isolated native cultures still today), did or do not have a word for the color blue! Ancient Greece, surrounded by the blue Aegean and lit by the vast arching blue of the sky, did not have a word for it, even though their world was dominated by it.

We don’t know why blue was unnamed for so long. It appears from the historical record that it may have been unrecognized as a distinct hue, not seen as being too different from green or light gray. It’s unthinkable today, looking up at a bright blue sky or a vast expanse of deep blue ocean, to not have a word to describe those c…