James, P. & van der Sluijs, M. A., 2008. “Ziggurats, Colours and Planets – Rawlinson Revisited”, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 60, 93-115 (original) (raw)

Color and Meaning in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Case of Egyptian Blue

Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie, 2016

Despite its ubiquitous presence and obvious cultural significance in Mesopotamian art and architecture, the Akkadian language never developed a specific term for the color 'blue.' This article seeks to explain this omission and the Akkadian color system in light of ethno-linguistic data collected in the University of California-based World Color Survey project and the physical evidence for blue pigments and colorants. Special attention is paid to the results of multispectral-imaging analysis conducted on Yale University's Assyrian relief sculpture from Nimrud. This investigation has revealed the use of Egyptian blue pigment in unexpected and hitherto unknown contexts in Assyrian architectural design.

Color in Ancient Religion and Ritual

A Cultural History of Color in Antiquity, ed. D. Wharton, 2020

What color are the gods? How does color shape religious experience? Historians of ancient religion have not traditionally paid much attention to these questions; nevertheless, I was compelled to address them when choosing cover designs for a book on divine epiphany (Platt 2011). 1 The image I had chosenof the dramatic arrival of the goddess Selene on a Roman sarcophagus-was predictably monochrome, any traces of pigment having long since vanished from the marble. As so often, antiquity was destined to appear in shades of black and white (Manfrini 2009; Stager 2016: 97-8). When the press's first design arrived on my desktop, however, the cover's accent color was the deep orangey-red so familiar to us from Greek vases. For me, this earthbound tone was not the color of epiphany! After consideration, I requested an ethereal lilac-a shade that evoked the shimmering violet of the rainbow (Bradley 2011: 48-50); the divine porphyreos "purple" that featured in so many sacred garments (Grand-Clément 2011: 116-21; 2016); or the rich drapery that frames the body of Persephone in one of antiquity's most striking scenes of epiphany, from a painted Macedonian tomb (Brecoulaki 2006b; see Figure 4.1). My more allusive approach to imagining ancient color conflicted with one that drew more directly upon antiquity's material relics (in the press's case, vases of Attic clay). Conveying my idea to the designers, moreover, required its reduction to a Pantone number-a branded, standardized system of hues based on specific combinations of pigments designed for modern-day printing (Eiseman and Recker 2011). The challenges I encountered in accessing and reproducing the chromatic qualities of ancient visionary experiences illustrate how difficult it is for 9781474273275_txt_print.indd 63 2/9/2021 8:19:11 AM

Review of Sh. Thavapalan, The Meaning of Color in Ancient Mesopotamia, RBL 12 (2021)

There are few semantic categories as ubiquitous yet elusive as those designating colors. Shiyanthi Thavapalan's The Meaning of Color in Ancient Mesopotamia (based on her 2017 doctoral thesis submitted to the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University) is a major contribution to the study of colors in the ancient Near East, both in terms of philology and material culture. The study is well-conceived and wellwritten, and its insights will enlighten anyone interested in how Akkadian, and language more generally, divides and describes the visible segment of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Did the Ancient Greeks perceive the color ‘blue’? An interdisciplinary approach

CRC Press eBooks, 2022

Were the Ancient Greeks able to see the color 'blue'? This question is still posed, and its answer has been a matter of much debate. The issue raised was based on Pliny's list of the palette used by Ancient Greek painters that did not include a 'blue' pigment, coupled with Homer's poems whose interpret ation did not seem to contain a term to designate 'blue.' This paper addresses the reasons underlying such arguments and contributes to the discussion by pointing out why Ancient Greeks were able to see blue. For such purpose, the adopted approach brings together data from disciplines that range Greek philosophy on the ories of color and vision-bridging them to later achievements when necessary-, color terminology, and the archaeological hypothesis that stems from the application of color to art and architecture in Ancient Greece.

Color in ancient and medieval East Asia

Asian Studies Review, 2016

Many years ago I went to talk to Wai-kam Ho, then curator of Chinese art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Wai-kam told me that if I wanted to understand color in ancient China, the first thing I should comprehend was that color is a source of power. We talked further, but he brushed aside lesser questions to emphasize the importance of understanding that color has power. It was a potent force in ancient Chinese society. This book is the outcome of years of research and the collaboration of chemists, conservators, archaeologists, dyers, historians of art and literature, and scholars of Buddhism and Daoism. Separately and together we have worked to explore the roles that color-and specific dyes and mineral pigments-played in the social and political life, thought, art, and ritual practices of ancient and medieval East Asia. The source material is rich and includes dynastic histories, court documents, travelers' journals, merchants' ledgers, literature, Daoist liturgical and meditative manuals, paintings in tombs and Buddhist grottoes, religious icons, paintings on silk and on paper, pottery, lacquer, and textiles. The seeds for this book were sown at a College Art Association conference. In 2003 I organized a panel, Languages of Color in East Asian Visual Culture, for that conference and invited several scholars represented in this volume to discuss the role of color in East Asian cultures. Guolong Lai, Amy McNair, and I were joined later by chemist Richard Laursen at a small, exploratory colloquium, The Power of Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia, at the University of Kansas in September 2010. The meeting was sponsored by the Spencer Museum of Art and supported by a seed grant from The Commons Research Initiative in Nature and Culture, a grant designed to nurture and develop interdisciplinary, collaborative research at the University of Kansas. After two days of sharing research and learning each other' s vocabulary, 4. Color was used to indicate political authority, rank, and prestige in systems understood throughout East Asia. 5. The courts, aristocracies, and bureaucrats of kingdoms throughout East Asia were color-literate. They knew the dye plants that produced the correct colors and those that produced non-official popular colors. They understood the particularities of each plant, the properties of the colors it yielded, and the principles of dye technology. Poets could, and did, use 8. Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T' ang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 208. Schafer referenced the Tang liudian [Compendium of administrative law of the six divisions of the Tang bureaucracy] (Kyoto, 1935), 22, 21a. For an English translation of the Tang liudian, see: Wallace Johnson, The T'ang Code, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979 and 1997). Core components of the Five Agents Direction Season Element Color Planet Directional Animal Musical tones South Summer Fire Red Mars Vermilion Bird jue (mi) East Spring Wood Blue/green Jupiter Azure Dragon zhi (sol) North Winter Water Black Mercury Black Tortoise/ Snake gong (do) West Autumn Metal White Venus White Tiger shang (re) Center * Earth Yellow Saturn Yellow Dragon yu (la) * an intercalary period sometimes described as midsummer and sometimes as a period between summer and autumn. essays. I am greatly indebted to him as a friend and colleague. Colleagues across the University of Kansas have supported the project as participants in the two colloquia and as consultants. In addition to Amy McNair, I would like to thank

Aspects of Colour in Ancient Egypt

Egyptological Journal Articles, Edition 6, 2012

This paper discusses three colour aspects in ancient Egypt during the time period of the Old (ca.2584-2117 B.C.), Middle (ca.2066-1650 B.C.) and New Kingdoms (ca.1549-1069 B.C.) (dates according to Dodson 2004, pp.287-291): the two aspects of colour, colour palettes used in painted artistic representation, with, here, specific attention to the colour palettes used in wall paintings and painted reliefs, and colour terminology, discussed in Baines (1985) and a third aspect, the materials used to create pigments for paint. The paper follows each of these aspects through the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, and then discusses the potential relationships among these colour aspects. Because of the complexity of this subject, and on-going revision of research conclusions in this area, this paper provides a broad view of this topic. Other aspects of colour, such as a specific attention to hieroglyphics, textile media and dyes, the effects of varnish or binding media on colour, and other topics or time periods are not detailed in this paper.

Implications of Colour Terminology

&Kay (1969t, 999\. 5 Baines (2007:241). 6 Kay &Maffr(1999:746). 7 I neglect Sumerian here as the Akkadian and Sumerian terminology appears to be identi<zl-In an1-case, given the sources, it would be diflicult to understand how one could identift anv colour terms in Sumerian that are not known from Akkadian.

Περὶ χρωμάτων (Peri chrōmatōn): Colour formation and investigation method.

Colour Culture and Science Journal Vol. 12 (2), 2020

In this essay, the attention is focused on the method used to investigate colours, as produced in nature. This method was proposed by the author of the treatise Peri chrōmatōn, which has become part of the Corpus Aristotelicum. The colours are first divided into two large categories, simple and mixed, in accordance with other scientific and philosophical approaches. Simple (primary) colours are considered to be white and yellow, and are associated with the elements (air, water, earth, and fire/sun); black is also associated with the elements as they transform into one another. This division is new in comparison with previous theories based on two or four fundamental colours. The endless range of colours seen in objects, plants and animals, is connected to the mechanisms of mixing different qualities and quantities, inherent in what it comes into contact with, and in the consequent changes, in conditions and states of matter, in the incidence of light, qualitatively and quantitatively different. The heuristic reference scheme and the analogical model are represented by the dyeing process. The essentially phenomenological treatise contains historically significant insights: no colour can be seen in its purity; the reciprocal interaction of colours; the variability of conditions that determine the chromatic impression; light as a component of mixtures, and its diversity depending on the source; and the chromatic value of shade. In it, we can also see the formation of a classification of colours and a nomenclature, founded on the relationship of distinct chromatic notations with light and darkness.