‘THE ORIGINS, DEVELOPMENT, DIFFUSION AND SIGNIFICANCE OF EARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY Davip A. WARBURTON ‘The first use of color pigments (red ocher, ca. 100,000 BCE) in the Middle Palaeo- lithic was supplemented with yellow ocher and black carbon during the Upper Pal- aeolithic and then extended by the use of colored stones (white, red, green) from the very beginning of the Neolithic in the Near East. The late Neolithic saw the first use of the precious metals silver and gold. Aside from the actual materials, in the Near Eastern Bronze Age we also find names for gold, silver, lapis lazuli, cornelian, ame- thyst, greenstones, etc. It would appear that already in the third millennium, the po- ets of the highly developed civilizations of Near Eastern Antiquity used these pre- cious materials to designate colors. Conceptually abstract colors would appear to have emerged in China and Greece in the first millennium BCE. By contrast, even a. millennium later, Janguages such as English only had words for ‘sparkling’, ‘dark’, etc. + ‘ ‘ re ‘Thus, one'aspect of the discussion is the origins afd use of color terminology. , Another aspect of this is what was meant with any given term — and then there is the matter of the alternative interpretations introduced in the debate. In this essay, I will elaborate on my theory that the Bronze Age designations for precious materials contributed to the emergence and development of contemporary abstract color ter- minology, and then try to relate this to earlier and alternative hypotheses.! 1 Footnotes and references have been kept to a minimum here in order to aid the read- c+ in following the argument. My own contribution started with Egyptian, but rapidly led to other languages and to.theory. At the beginning of the study of Egyptian colors stands Schenkel whose first article appeared in 1963, before Berlin and Kay, and an approach can- onizing Schenkel’s work in the Berlin and Kay tradition was produced by Baines in 1985. My ‘own work has aimed at producing an alternative scheme, and the references will be found in the bibliography. 6566 DAVID A. WARBURTON INTRODUCTION TO THE ARGUMENT ‘The people of the Nile Valley were ruthlessly exposed to the merciless rays of the sun. Yet, as far as they were concerned, the world was dead when she left the world in darkness; she was joyously grected when she returned. Thus their lives were dom- inated by the sun, ‘The setting sun was occasionally described as ‘the ruddy one’, dirty (Se) ~ using the standard ancient Egyptian word for ‘ted’ ~ but ‘ted? is hard: ly the color we would associate with the sun. ‘The only Ligyptian color word which could be used to describe the color of the sun as we typically understand it was ‘gold? (nb.w, written with a necklace ™, the same word which gave its name to ‘Nu- bia’, whence the gold came). Describing the sun as ‘rising golden’ ‘in the ficld of turquoise’ (rising in gold’, wbm rm nbw, ©2831 me spt mfle't, SEMIN) may sound poetic to us. However, for the Hgyptians, the only way to describe the bright- ly shining sun appearing in the light blue sky at dawn was with the words for ‘gold” (nb.») and ‘turquoise’ (mfk’./, BO) since they did not have abstract words for ‘yel- low’ or ‘blue’ ~ and thus did they develop their color terminology based on the phe nomena of the world around them. Yo describe the white limestone of the mountains defining their valley, they used the word for ‘silver’, fd, written with a limestone mace and necklace (4) when referring to the precious metal silver imported from abroad, which served as money; but the limestone mace alone ()) served for ‘white’, sometimes complemented by the sun (0) for ‘brightness’, ‘light’. ‘The reader will thus readily understand that bsbd (21%), a foreign loanword designating the foreign stone ‘lapis lazuli’, could be used to describe the color of the night sky or water — if there was cause to. ‘The word for ‘green’ (wd, TM) was a loanword with the same etymology as Akkadian wargx, mean- ing ‘green-yellow’. Although frequently written as an abstract (in ligyptian with a papyrus scroll {as ‘classifier’ or ‘determinative’), the Egyptian word was also occa- sionally graphically determined with a stone (<) instead of the papyrus roll as the categorical classifier or determinative following the graphic part identifying the ver- bal expression (Tt), suggesting a ‘greenstone’ lay at the origin of their understanding, of the word. Thus a pattern at the base of Egyptian color terminology begins to ap- pear, one relating to rare and precious, hard materials.? 2 For clarity, I should explain that in Ancient Egyptian, written words consisted of sev- ‘eral different elements. One part was a graphically expressed phonetic rendering of a word, usually offering consonants, sometimes with ‘letters’ having a single value; another part of a written word was a ‘classifier’ or ‘determinative’ which followed the word to mark its catego- ty, but without any spoken phonetic value. A similar phenomenon exists in Sumerian and Akkadian. The Bronze Age Near Eastern systems differ from the Chinese systems where (a) radicals included in a writing offer additional information in a different fashion and (b) the Chinese system of ‘classifiers’ used to distinguish types of objects when naming or counting. Color words can be nouns, adjectives or verbs, and the classifiers differ accordingly. Talso hasten to note that in Akkadian one frequently wrote texts using Sumerian terms, but frequently in a fashion which would have been meaningless to a Sumerian. This usageEARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY 67 More interestingly, this whole approach defies our understanding of abstrac- tion and means that the Egyptian word for ‘green’ — recognized as a BCT by Baines in his application of the Berlin and Kay system — actually fails to match thei expec- tations as they exclude concrete materials. While accepting »°d, Baines had exclud- ed psbd ~ lapis lazuli — partly because it was a material, and partly because Baines denied that the Egyptians had a word for yellow (and including blue before yellow would have violated the Berlin and Kay acquisition sequence). Yet if green is al- lowed although related to stones, gold and lapis lazuli should also be allowed, and this leads to difficulties in understanding what modern scholars should make of Egyptian terminology. Following Schenkel (1963), and obeying a strict application of Berlin and Kay, Baines had four abstract color words in Egyptian: black (km alsh, white (bd 1S), sed (dir B®), and grue (wd, FW). Schenkel (2007) has since revised his position and shifted the focus of »°d to ‘green’ rather than ‘grue’. Based on the abstract words and the materials, I have argued that they had words for black, white, bright red (dir SD, dark red (dw roi green, yellow (jn.w n nb», \BIQM literally ‘color of gold), light blue (me's RUS ) and dark blue using a foreign loanword for ‘apis lazuli? (bsbd $13). More recently, Schenkel (2015) distinguishes between the ab- stract color terms and the color terms related to materials — and in addition to the materials I cite, he also adds ‘electrum-white’ (¢‘ni Tike), ‘soot/charcoal black’ (¢'b., Jem), ‘carnelian red? (brs.t Shem), and another ‘lapis lazuli blue’ (fr —=S™). ‘This latter, ffm, is probably derived from the name of a geographical region beyond the Zagros wherice lapis lazuli arrived in Mesopotamia (before being re-exported to” Egypt), and thus both a toponym and an object category. Schenkel’s approach of separating abstract and materials faces the difficulties that (a) his words for ‘white? and ‘green’ also have material associations and (b) some of his proposed words are rarer than the ones I have chosen, while there are more. + ‘And indeed there are far more words than can be discussed here. In Akkadian, T once casually noted 8 different terms for ‘bright, shining’, 7 for ‘dark, gloomy’, along with more than 15 meaning ‘red’.4 There are probably more. Egyptian is not so exuberant, but it may be assumed that a careful analysis of Egyptian and Akkadi- involves adding suffixes to Sumerian words so that the reader recognizes that Akkadian is to be read (thus Jad is to be read, although KUR is written). ‘This contrasts with our use of Lat- inisms where the term may be used oddly, but the original form and meaning is still intact and it is to be read in Latin. . For the benefit of readers, I have tried to distinguish the various languages in the tran- scriptions, using conventional transcriptions in italic for Egyptian, Akkadian, Sanskrit and the Chinese pinyin; transcriptions in small capitals for Sumerian, and the conventional italic syllabic writing for Linear B Mycenaean Greek. No philologists will find this satisfactory, but they will be able to read the texts (and correct them). 3 Baines (1985); Baines (2007); Berlin and Kay (1999) 6. 4 Warburton (20072) 233.68 DAVID A. WARBURTON an would probably produce far longer lists of words with color significance than could possibly be usefully discussed. For Egyptian, I mention just one useful and important example of such a word, in this case meaning ‘bright’, ‘sparkling’ (#m —I_ii). This is related to another word usually translated as ‘faience’ and assumed to mean ‘green-blue’ or something similar in color discussions. However, this definition of the material may be second- ary of tertiary since the original word might have referred to the desert sand melted to glass by a meteorite which crashed in the Libyan Desert, fragments of which oc casionally turn up in ancient Egyptian jewelry.> Depending upon the lighting, it looks pale or translucent off-white, yellow or green. This material is today termed ‘Libyan desert glass’, and the Egyptian word for Libya was fhm» (=kex), and thus the modern designation may accidentally reproduce the ancient Egyptian, linking a material with a geographical region and a vague color, in this case ‘sparkling’, ‘bright’ — but a word that never entered the vocabulary as a real color word in the sense of those Schenkel and I have discussed. T argue that the ancient color words (both ‘abstract’ and ‘material’) actually de- lineated specific clear segments of the spectrum, and that most of these words were ultimately related to precious materials. By contrast, Reitzenstein (2015) and Schen- kel (2015)'stress the abstract colors — but contest that they really represent specific hues. Reitzenstein pointed out quite poignantly that at the very dawn of the study of color terminology, Gladstone was already rather disturbed about Homer's lack of a word for blue, and Schenkel notes that the use of the Egyptian word for black seems to mean virtually anything from light brown to black. Their form of reference is to draw on the materials with which the words were associated, which leads to very vague meanings. By contrast, I refer to the strong hues of the artwork which reflect the oversimplified understanding which concentrates the hue — so that one sees pure blacks and whites. The jewelry naturally reproduces the colors of the pre- cious materials themselves, playing on the differences among lapis lazuli, gold, tur- quoise, amethyst, and carnelian (and these same materials were used to make the statues of the gods). I thus assume that the pure colors were what was evoked in the poetry, using the precious materials as a form of reference. Significantly, in painting, one sees deliberately created and differentiated light blues and dark blues, along with bright reds and dull reds, meaning that the Egyptians did not have only one ‘idea’ or red ot blue, but rather divided blue and red into two colors — and this is quite the opposite of having a vague word for green, blue or black. For me, it means that they were distinguishing hues ~ and this takes me back to the materials. However, despite my dogmatic claims to the significance of the color catego- ties thereby evoked, readers should be conscious that the ancient Egyptians rarely used colors as a means of categorizing the world, and thus there was no conscious need to aim at abstraction, except in a vague fashion. One very intriguing phenome- 5 One example is a scarab in the middle of one of Tutankhamun’s adornments, depict- ed by Aldred (1971) 110, pl. 106; but also available in Wikipedia (q.v., (Libyan Desert Glass’).\ EARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY oo non is that cattle markings are one of our best sources for the use of color as a means of classifying in the carly texts from Mesopotamia, Egypt and Mycenaean Greece (Linear B), I would tend to assume that this was not a ctoss-cultural phe- nomenon, but rather that the idea of applying color terminology to cattle in admin- isteative (and ritual) documents was transferred from the Mesopotamian culture to the Egyptian, and later the Aegean,* meaning that the idea of applying color terms to distinguish cattle was not a spontaneous idea, but rather one that was adopted in this specific domain — and not even unconsciously and involuntarily applied to other domains in the fashion to which we are accustomed. Use of color ~ like that for cattle and textiles is unusual in Bronze Age Antiquity. Other references to abstract colors (referring to eyes, water, the sky, celestial phenomena) are exceptional, ap- pearing rarely even in the highest registers of text. For example, a reference to what might be a ‘rainbow’ is not clear. ‘The text merely places the classifier or determina- tive for the sky, p.f-— after the word for the ‘(archer’s) bow’ pdt AS leaving us uncertain as to whether we should read ‘bow’ (pd) ot ‘heavenly bow" (pd.t p.f); in any case there is no reference to color, but only the form (and thus the correct translation might be ‘celestial vault’ or ‘arch of the heavens’ — even if the ‘rainbow’ is meant).’ By contrast, references to the colors in divine statues takes place via the yaluable materials of which they were made. Thus, color as such was rarely applied as we use it today — but nevertheless present at an embryonic level. Ta general, the same is true of Mesopotamia, where the Sumerian word for ‘white’ (BABBAR) was also related to the material silver. (the ‘white metal’, KU,BABBAR). Various forms of the Akkadian word sgnd, a loanword of unknown origin for the stone lapis, lazuli, weresused for ‘blue’. The Akkadian sdmfum for car- nelian ‘was related to sainum, the word used for ‘red’. , ‘And the Mesopotamian world offers an excellent insight into the complexities of color. Whereas Reitzenstein and Schenkel had doubts about the precision of the hues associated with the ancient words, I am skeptical about the relevance of this, problem, since I suspect that specific hues were envisaged. However, separating the words from their contexts is far more complicated. Above, we noted that the word for silver in Sumerian was ‘white metal’ effectively using the two words KU ‘white? and BABBAR ‘white’ (sé) and in fact pure silver is supposedly white. Thus, this Sume- tian word KU hints at the problem — and not merely because it also means both “white” and ‘bright (like the Egyptian Ad). The ‘teal’ problem is that the ‘real’ mean- 6 The earliest case is that of the earliest written documents of the fourth millennium, ‘BCH; Pientka-Hlinz (2015) 24-25 notes that in the Mesopotamian ‘sacred herds’, cattle skin colors were linked to light (white and black), vegetation (green/ellow) and life (red). In Egypt, one ritual makes explicit use of the same categories to categorize four different head of cattle: white, black, red, and variegated (¢g., Blackman and Fairman (1949) 99, lines 3, 11); green appears once, but is assumed to be a copying error. Blakolmer notes that cattle coloring is one of the rare areas (like textiles) where color categories play a prominent sole in the Mycenaean texts ~ as in Mesopotamia. Blakolmer (2000) 277. 7 Hannig (2006) q.v. pat70 DAVID A, WARBURTON ing of KU is probably ‘pure’, ‘noble’, ‘holy’, ‘sacred’ — aside from ‘money’, and the other meanings of KU) (‘pure’) overlap with those of BABBAR (white’, ‘bright). And ignificantly, both of these words appear in the earliest texts, written in Proto Cuneiform in the fourth millennium BCE, and thus they must have had meanings which were clear and different from that time.® “hus the color ‘white’ was shared by at least two words in the oldest language known to man, and with one of them, this color meaning was but a small slice of the range of meanings this word bore to the Sumerian — and by the end of the third millennium BCH, most of those using Sumerian were poets and bureaucrats rather than farmers, meaning that the figurative meanings will have been dominant. Yet we repeat as a mantra that BABBAR (rather than KU) is the word for ‘white’. Because BABBAR is used to describe sheep’s wool, white emmer and whitewash, this easier version is acceptable. Yet although BABBAR can refer to the moon, it can also refer to the rising sun, which the Egyptians called ‘golden’ not ‘silver’. And the 1.BABBAR temple of the Sun-god Shamash in Sippar served as a bank which dealt in silver which was moncy, so one could associate it with both silver and gold. ‘Thus a d tailed examination of cither a color (‘white’) or a term (BABBAR) would actually lead to further problems rather than resolving the matter. Yet strangely, there is a paradoxical interpretation which strengthens my own: contentions that we can understand thé texts as referring to the colors we know. ‘The present writer most certainly cannot recall ever having scen white cattle in modern Lebanon, Syria, Iraq or Egypt (and doubts that'many have). Yet the ligyp tian documents refer to ‘white’ sheep or goats (Egyptian jb-fd UPSle) belonging to various temples,’ and most of us have in fact seen white sheep on the Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge so (against our own intuition and experience), we (apparently involuntarily) consider it to be plausible that there were white sheep and goats in the Ancient Near East. ‘This may be at least partially because we know that they tried to * The term Proto-Cunciform is used to designate the texts written in the earliest pre~ served writing in Mesopotamia. It is widely assumed that the language used was Sumerian, but we have virtually no traces of syntax which can confirm this. Thus, itis possible (a) that this is Sumerian, (b) that this writing records another, older, language, ot (c) that this reflects an era when human language had not reached far beyond establishing the most rudimentary categories. Itis only several centuries later than we can confirm having sentences in gyptian Semitic loanwords present in both Figyptian and Sumerian, meaning that by around 2800 BCH; at least these three languages existed. Ie is assumed that the forerunners of the Indo-Furopean languages (the earliest succes- sors of Proto Indo-European, hereafter PIE) existed before this era, but there is no certainty that the Indo-Europeans had moved into Western Europe long before the earliest texts were recorded in the Middle East’This latter is important because the end of the distribution of jade axes in Western Europe may overlap or antedate the appearance of the Indo- Europeans, meaning that my interpretation of the Indo-Puropean word ‘green’ would imply that it is a loanword in Indo-Furopean (as well as Akkadian and Egyptian). ° Hannig (2006, q.v:); Gardiner (1941); Wilbour pl. 34, §190-193, and Sumerian ~ by whieh time we can seEARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY m1 bleach the wool to make it white, and that they aimed at purer and purer (sic) whites in their paintings. Yet one is relieved to read that ‘the white cows’ of the Sumerian Moon-god ‘ate like moonlight’ (BABBAR-BI SNANNA &-A-AM)."9 Although it uses a different word, a reference in a Sumerian myth to the ‘brilliant’ (DADAG, meaning ‘pure’, ‘brilliant’, ‘holy’) semen of the Moon-god Nanna-Suen (A éSUEN-NA A DADAG-Ga) confirms the same spirit. Thus, their concept of ‘white’ lay conceptually on the same level as ours — but the forms of expression (combining, ‘pure’, ‘bril- liant’, ‘holy’, ‘white’ all together in each of the words could drive one to despair. We tend to divide ‘white’ and ‘pure’ into related but different categories and words, but for the ancients ‘pure’, ‘white’ and ‘silver’ all came together into one category. That is, they did not necessarily describe the actual colors they saw, but based on some exceptionally clear elements — such as moonlight and silver or the night-sky and la~ pis lazuli — they refined them, and created ideal types. From there, they developed concepts of colors which fed into our own, and used these words to describe an ideal world they might not have experienced, but did depict in their poetry and art. ‘The means by which they did so were the materials. Somehow, using the color terminology that they developed, the Egyptians and ‘Mesopotamians (in Sumerian and Akkadian) were able to demarcate parts of the spectrum that we cari recognize. Among the most curious aspects of the earliest color terminologies are that although (a) they usiually had fewer colors than Berlin and Kay's 11, they did (b) have multiple reds and blues, as illustrated by the above- noted lists drawn up for Egyptian by Schenkel and myself. A similar phenomenon appears in Bronze Age Mycenaean Linear B, where (among-others) Blakolmer” + (2000) has found e-ru-too, po-ni-ki-jo, wo-no-go-so, po-pu-reja, ka-sa-to, ko-so-u-to, and ki ris. These are the ancestors of épuSp6s (entbres, red), owas (Phoencian pusple- red), olvowpbpa0s (oinoporsos, wine red) and mophtpeos (porphurecs, red) appearing "alongside av9d¢ (scanthos, yellow), EouSd¢ (xouthos, yellow) and xpiiceos (kbruseos, golden). Thus Mycenaean has several reds and yellows, but is strikingly lacking in blues and greens — which strangely adumbrates the problem with Classical Greek where xAwpés (kbléras) lies somewhere in green, yellow, pale, etc. And this takes us to xudveos (Ayaneos, dark blue, dark). In Mycenaean Linear B wwe find it as ku-wa-no, in Ugaritic as *ignu, in Hittite as kumannai, and in Akkadian as gna ~ all ultimately derived from some ancient word for the stone lapis lazuli, which somehow entered the languages of other lands and gave rise to the concept of ‘blue’.'! (Thanks to the Greek, this word also exists in English, in the ‘cyan’ famil- iar from ink-jet printers). ‘Thus they divided the spectrum differently than we do, but they also ap- proached the question quite differently, and probably specifically by using materials. In the case of Mycenaean, Blakolmer even sees a link between erythros-red and saf- fron. This strengthens the argument that even abstract colors — such as ery/brus-ted — 1 Sjoberg (1960) 13, 15, 19. 1 Von Soden (1965-1981) III: 1426.72 DAVID A. WARBURTON should actually be understood as having been originally related to the materials which were the basis for their colors. Furthermore, the ancients also created colors deliberately for dying textiles and painting statues, etc. ‘These creations tended to flect the same hues — and are described with the same words, so that in Akkadian, the colors of textiles are described with precious stones behind the words hasmndnum (Fhashmanum-stone blue, possibly a loanword derived from the Egyptian word for amethyst, hsm ila) and agnéim (lapis-lazuli stone). It will be noted that looking at the rainbow as we do, we can recognize ‘violet’ (which would be amethyst), ‘dark blue’ (lapis lazuli), ‘ight blue’ (turquoise), ‘green’ (jade), ‘yellow’ (gold), and shades of red ranging from ‘bright red’ (carnelian) to ‘dull red’ (which might be used for quartzite, but derived from a far older word for ocher), which could easily accom- modate a scarlet or purple. Together with black and white, those are the colors we find in the ancient texts. Orange and pink are more difficult to discern ~ and orange is only five centuries old!!? As with ‘orange’, the materials offered access to discern- ing colors. Readers should note that although 1 take this route further than others, draw- ing on different theoretical approaches to the sources, some kind of agreement is, gradually emerging that materials played a role in describing color in antiquity. | pur- sue this route further because it takes us.to the heart of the history of color termi- nology. I suggest that these ancient loanwords — used to designate precious materials ~ were, adopted by other cultures, and thus partially through (a) poetic usage and partially through (b) the use of loanwords with loose meanings the concept of color in abstract category was born. ‘THE TRANSFORMATORY ROLE OF LOANWORDS ‘Loanwords’ are foreign words adopted into another language or language family, as in the case of our English ‘cyan’. Our word is a rare term for a dark blue, adopted from the Greek which adopted it from the Semitic world where the Akkadian ugni for ‘lapis lazuli’ is the first attestation. However, the word is itself a loanword in Ak- kadian, and thus entered that language from some other (unknown) earlier language millennia ago. Whether the original word referred to the stone lapis lazuli or was 22 In Warburton (1999) and Warburton (2008) 236, 255 n. 177 I touch on the issue of the Arabic burtugali (g335.») ‘orange’ (an adjective derived from the name of the country “Por- tugal’) which appears in modern Greek moptuxadi as a color word, but is otherwise repre- sented in Indo-European languages (e.g, English ‘orange’) by words derived from the San- skrit term (ndraga). However, these were not linear derivatives from PIE, but come rather from the Spanish naranja which was the Spanish transliteration of the Arabic naranj (3), also used in Persian, Ironically like the Sanskrit, the Arabic primarily refers to the fruit or fruit tree whereas the Western European versions are related in equal measure to fruit and color. Thus, the words for the color ‘orange’ in Arabic and other related languages are relat- ed to the word for the country whence the sailors came, meaning that an accidental exchange of words for a fruit in the early days of Indian Ocean trade led to the introduction of the most recent abstract color word in both English and Arabic.EARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY 73 derived from the name of the geographical region whence it came will probably re- main forever unknown. If the latter, it will probably have referred to the neighbor- ing land from which it entered into the written records. Thus, although the lapis lazuli comes from northeastern Afghanistan, if ugndi refers to a region it could have been a word referring to one of many stations on the journey across Iran. However, it is worth noting that the geographical knowledge of the ancients might have been broader than our own image of those connections. ‘The Egyptian word for lapis lazuli is Jsbd. In Egyptian, as with the Akkadian xgnf, bsbd is a foreign loanword of unknown origin, of which we can reconstruct only these four conso- nants. Lapis lazuli was (and is) quarried high in the mountains of northeast Afghani- stan, and the modern name for the region is Badakhshan, of. which the consonants are /b/-/d/-/b/-/3/-/n/ — and thus exactly the same four radicals as in the Egyp- tian gsbd for lapis lazuli, merely somewhat garbled in the order, and also with the /3/ changing to an /s/. It should hardly be necessary to note that a final /n/ is fre- quently dropped — and this is possible in transmission. Even if shan in this case is admittedly the Chinese (and local) word for ‘mountain’ and thus not necessarily a case of an arbitrary /n/, the formation of the word in the receiving language is de- cided by people who cannot recognize a meaning, and thus an /n/ can drop out, as happens so often (even for local words in Akkadian). One should probably not mention that the Chinese shan [LI not only shatés the form, but also the phonetic value of the Hebrew sin/shin V. However, one could mention that Chinese shan {Ll is written in the same form as the Egyptian for ‘mountains’ (), and that identical phrases appear in, Egyptian (“wt Jpss.vt m-bnw » div») and Akkadian/Sumerian (du-~ * mug Ns KUR«) referring to, the ‘precigus stones of the mountains’, which carf only refer to the mountains to the east of Mesppotamia whence came lapis lazuli and carnelian (and jade2). Thus one could argue for rather remarkable and precise geo- graphical knowledge in third millennium BCE Egypt. Is this merely a product of the wild imagination of romantic modern philologists or the last trace of trade routes millennia older than the ancient Silk Road? If the former, then certainly both. Regardless of any speculation about the original meanings, these words ~ ugné and Jsbd — are perfect examples of the process by which foreign words are adopted into languages as loanwords and contribute to the development of abstraction. They also illustrate the contrast between the worldview of the Classical Mediterranean as ‘opposed to the Near Eastern Bronze Age. The original (for us, unknown) origin and meaning of the original Bronze Age word — perhaps ‘{hardstone from a) mountainous region’ — may have been known to the person who introduced it into a language (who may be a foreign trader, local merchant, watrior, diplomatic envoy, or imported bride), and the item associated with that word may also be familiar to that person. However, even if they actually see the object, other members of the community into which the word is introduced will not have any preconceived notions of what the word means, particularly so if they have never seen any mountains, as will have been true for most farmers on the south Mesopotamian plains. One result of this exchange is that consonants can be changed and metathesis, transform the words, but most significantly, the meaning of the word is either lost or transformed. And, in fact, the word itself can be lost, as ~ after a couple of thou-1 DAVID A, WARBURTON sand years of use — was the fate of bsbd and good many other words which were discarded lony, ago. Where they survived, however, initially a word possibly associat- ed with an object, material or region, will ultimately be passed on into domains where the associations are lost, as happened with the Akkadian loanword sgnd when it ended up as the English loanword ‘cyan’. By the time the word Aa-va-no was adopted in Mycenaean Greck (probably from the Ugaritic gnu), it had lost the meaning of ‘lapis lazuli’ and meant ‘blue glass’ ~ and by the time it arrived in Eng- lish, it had maintained only ‘dark blue’, which was but one part of the meaning of the Classical Greek xudveos. As noted, in the Bronze Age these stones were associated with Oriental moun- tains, and local words for ‘mountains’ or ‘steppe/desert’ (Sumerian KUR, Egyptian dy, Psat and Akkadian fad) were used adjectivally so as to become a word for d ignating neighboring regions — and also for the abstract idea of classifying things as ‘imports (from abroad)’, and thus already in the Bronze Age, the adjectival use of the word for ‘mountain’ in Sumerian, Egyptian and Akkadian may have frequently simply meant ‘foreign’. These foreign imports were of high value, and the precious stones and ores were the typical products of the mountains. ‘And this offers us to an insight into the paths of Mesopotamian thought. ‘The most important temple in Mesopotamia was that of the god Enlil in Nippur. The name of this temple was the’ !.KUR, superficially literally meaning the ‘mountain house’, We have no difficulties associating the ziqgurat with a mountain and could leave it at that. However, in Akkadian, the same sign KUR could be read as amit meaning simply ‘country’ ~ or even the flat land of Mesopotamia. Although in Su- merian KUR had doubtless originally specifically meant the ‘foreign highlands’ (in contrast to the flat south Mesopotamian alluvium), the emergence of the land of Ashur (mat Afi) in mountainous northern Mesopotamia may have changed the usage slightly. This difficulty increased since the Akkadian texts could use the sign KUR interchangeably for both ‘mountain’ and ‘country’, so that there was considera- ble room for confusion, since some people in Mesopotamia may have understood the F.KUR as being the ‘national temple’, or even the ‘temple of the nations’ — which itself could explain the mysterious use of Akkadian matum as ‘sanctuary’, in an ap- parently different word. Thus, even within closely linked languages (such as Akkadi- an and Sumerian which were not linguistically related, but both commonly used by bilingual scribes), usage and evolution could broaden and create meaning. However, there is a more important aspect, as Sjdberg suggests that the desig- nations 1'S-KU, the ‘pure sanctuary’ and 13.7.A.GIN, the ‘radiant house’ (the former epithet being based on the Sumerian word for ‘silver’ and the later, the word for lapis lazuli) both refer to the f!.KUR — and observes that this has the extended form, 'S-KU-ZA-GIN.NA, meaning ‘Sanctuary of silver and lapis lazuli’. These are of course among the most valuable foreign products which arrived in Mesopotamia (and were dedicated to the gods). Obviously, following this train of thought, the 1 Sjoberg (1960) 29.ARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY 75 {.KUR is thus related to valuable foreign imports, purity, and brilliance — as well as the colors of the materials — without recourse to additional words, enriching mean- ing through ambiguity. At the center lies the concept of the mountains as being for- eign, and the origins of the colorful stones and ores. For obvious reasons, these foreign loanwords are only known to us from the time of the first texts. Writing itself was invented by 3200 BCE in Mesopotamia and introduced into Egypt by 3000 BCE and it thus is impossible to know how much older the words are. However, we can be certain that the loanwords are not signifi- cantly older: lapis lazuli, carnelian, gold, silver, jade and similar precious materials are virtually unknown in the Near East before the fourth millennium BCE, and them- selves appear for the first time, in distant regions, very gradually from the seventh millennium BCE onwards (and mostly much later). Thus, fortunately, we can say (a) that the trade relations and state structures which eventually led to the invention of writing for administrative purposes are not significantly older than the appearance of the loanwords in writing, and (b) that the use of these materials (gold, silver, lapis lazuli, jade, turquoise, carnelian) by humans in a significant fashion began around a millennium or so before the invention of writing in Mesopotamia. That the usage of the materials increased during precisely the millennia of the Bronze Age when these materials are used in art and texts suggests that the early evolution of color termi- nology took place at that time ~ and thus loanwords probably played a fundamental, role in the development of color terminology (and abstraction in general). Tn this fashion, one can also gain an insight into the conceptual worlds separat- ing the Bronze Age from the Classical Mediterranean. In the Bronze Age, we have” + words, based on ‘mountain’ to describe the foreign, and the foreign loan words to describe foreign objects. In contrast to the Bronze Age situation, the Greeks used the terms Eévos and BapBaptxés to designate the foreign, which are social (hostile, non-Greek speaking) and ethnic (non-Hellenic) abstract categories. The ancestors of similar words — such as °.2, an Egyptian term for a foreigner who spoke an incom- prehensible language of a ‘dragoman’ who could translate an incomprehensible lan- guage — existed in the Bronze Age, but they were hardly abstract categories. Some terms we still have, such as ‘hillbllies’, may resemble the Bronze Age terms, but are much more meaningful than the ambiguous Bronze Age terms. Thus in the Bronze ‘Age, words of this kind were not the ordinary terms, and it was only in the Classical ‘Meditesranean that these types of words began to predominate — meaning that Clas- sical Greek thought differs from Egyptian thought. For us, this means that Classical color terminology is very different from Bronze Age color terminology, at least par- tially because Classical Mediterranean color terminology was building on Bronze ‘Age developments — by changing and developing concepts through exchange and usage. ‘Thus, somehow in the process of exchange, a meaning will be attached to the foreign word. Tn this fashion, loanwords may well not only have facilitated, but actually ena- bled the development of abstraction. The classic case is our word for (artistic) can- on’, derived from Greek xdwa, xavdv, but actually coming from Sumerian GI via ganim, an Akkadian word for ‘reed’. In Mesopotamia, reed was used both to write and as a measuring stick, and both meanings are preserved in the two different Greek words, but in Greek the grid used for outlining a piece of art was also trans-16 DAVID A. WARBURTON formed into a ‘tule’ or aw’, which is the abstract version of the conciett activity. Out words ‘prescribe’ and ‘proscribe’ reflect all the stages of similar development. However, at the earliest stage, there was no abstraction and this had to be brought rewthe world. I argue that the tortuous paths of the color words reflect precisely this development. “Thus, foreign words could add or lose consonants in the course of such travels, aside from gaining new vowels of undergoing metathesis, whereby the order of the ieifwideal consonants is inversed. Later on we will come to ‘green’ which is proba- bly derived from the same word as the Akkadian mani In this case, the /t/ and /g/q/ have reversed positions, with the latter radical undergoing a slight metamor- phosis potentially from the guttural /q/ which is slightly foreign to Europeans. hat the word originally meant, what it sounded like, and whence it came is and will remain unknown, Obviously, for Bronze Age élites, these foreign words were literal- ly exotic, and had meanings associated with ‘rary and ‘luxury’, as well ‘color’ and ‘foreign’ — but the meanings were not yet crystallized into sharply defined domains vcnere ‘color was separated out from the other geographical and material meanings. Such loanwords enriched the language, adding mystery and obscurity, in a fashion ‘Ghich is lost on us today, as we struggle for precision. We are ‘overwhelmed with distractions and pressed for time, ‘unable to savor philological treats ~ and thus out of touch with Bronze Age poets. LEXICAL CLASSIFICATION ‘And indeed, the Iron Age (of the fist millennium BCE) brought forth a new tradi- tion, that of new words invented to fill the gaps, as the concept of the various parti- thong of the color spectrum were ‘translated’ using new words 10 match words used po ether languages (rather than adopting or adapting the words themselves, as had eon the custom of the Bronze Age). What is of interest 10 us here is that, strangely, tmany parts of the modern linguistic partition of the color specinuth can be traced back to the precious materials and the words related to them which were traded in tne Bronze Age Neat Fast before and around the time that writing was invented. On the other hand, however, we will also see that considerable confusion emerged crn the colors deawn from the objects were rendered abstract and applied to de- vetbe other real world phenomena, and this is a particular problem in the green- yellow-red part of the spectrum. Tt is highly significant that although the most important languages of the first rillennium BCE (Chinese and Classical Greek) used what appears to be an abstract concept of color, they did not move far beyond the limited range of colors known se the Bronze Age. This was thus an age of abstraction and conceptual consolidation vaste than an age of linguistic expansion, ‘Thus what Berlin and Kay (in the original Formulation) termed a Stage V language with abstract color terms (black, white, red, green, yellow and blue) is probably the hallmark of the Classical Mediterranean, creer ae dhe Bronze Age languages were all still anchored more in the ‘materials than the colors, but had the colors without the abstraction. Thus, rather than trying to llismiss the material role of some Egyptian and Akkadian color words, we dismissEARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY 7 their ‘abstract’ character as being marginal but retain the meanings ~ stressing that the use of color was emerging along with the vocabulary. “Thus, in terms of color terminology, the Bronze Age was a crossroads between the world of the Paleolithic where colors were only gradually appeating and our ‘nord dominated by abstract and relatively cleat color categories. To follow and un- Yerstand how this happened, we will have to ‘consider linguistic expression, witing systems, teade routes and prices ~ quite side from abstraction, burial customs and conceptions of the divine. ‘The ‘Libyan desert glass mentioned above offers a glimpse into the conceptual world of the ancients. Our method is involuntarily revealed through the modern identification, identifying the material (‘glass’) and associating it with a geographical origin (Libyan desert), with color only subsequently assigned and not elementary (0 the thing itself, since for us the color is an attibute ‘which can be defined with a dif- ferent word, For the Bronze Age ancients, howevess it is possible that all these meanings ~ materials, colors, origins ~ were all bound up in a single word, such as gud (foreign’ is indicated by the Jeanword, stone by the material which has blue as “gr siesie attsibute). Thus, the languages of the Bronze Age abound with loan- weeds where the Classical Greek philosophers identified the ethnic origins and adopted a word to translate the item — yet even My Classical Greek still retained at feast one of the Ancient, Near Basten Toanwords. One classical example of this phenomenon is the English ‘peach’, German Pfirsich, which are derived from an ab- Previation of the Latin for ‘Persian apple’, ‘whereby an item (a) imported from China yas (b) associated with a more familia item ‘and (C) assigned ani ethnic designation sedated with the foreigners from whom the object Wo" acquired. The Bronze Age peoples’ usually used the: foreign words rather than adopting a9 ethnic approach as reo e Classical Mediterranean. And the Bronze Age peoples clung closer to the ac~ tual materials, and thus valuable imported precious materials were used to describe the pure colors of the world — thereby creating the basistfor abstract color terminol- as we know it. T thus propose that many of the ‘color words chosen by the ancient bureau- ceatic poets actually designated the materials and not abstract colors. as we under: Stand them — but through exchange, their usage Jed to the emergence of abstract color terms. Viewed from our own standpoint ‘where color categories are used ceuberantly to describe everything from hair rand eyes to automobiles — itis difficult to grasp just why people in the world’s lest civilizations used rare precious mateti= wregG deseribe the world in which they had lived for thousands of years before these ae tedals became available. Yet the reality is that the Coptic expression for ‘sky- blue’ van sme, oughly auan empe) can be transcribed into Ancient Egyptian, as -jum m pat, and produced in hieroglyphs as *&¢=5e, ‘the color of the. sky’ (the vir ation of the Coptic) ~ but is unknown in Brome ‘Age Ancient Egyptian! To reach this stage, one not only had to begin t0 BrasP “plue’, but also to have an ab- stract understanding of ‘color. "The Egyptians had lived for thousands of years in the Nile before they saw any lapis lazuli, gold of turquoise ~ and yet they needed these precious materials to de- velop a linguistic means of describing the phenomenon, and it was only after the development of this facility that they Gud then simplify the process and sefer di-78 DAVID A. WARBURTON rectly to the phenomenon to get an abstract color (which was still related to a real world thing, if a common one). Thus the question of color terminology must be related to expression rather than perception ~ yet the expression itself enhanced the capacity for perception. And the entire process can be followed as it unfolded in the last six thousand years. Bizarre as such an approach might be, it is compatible with the evidence that in the Nile Valley, silver and gold were as unknown as lapis lazuli and jade much before the fourth millennium BCE — although people had been there for millennia already. ‘THE SOURCES AND DEVELOPMENTS “The earliest human use of ocher goes back to the Palaeolithic, when red and yellow ocher were used to decorate bodies, bones and the walls of caves. Black soot was also used from very early times. Green and blue are completely absent in the Palaco- lithic, appearing in the Neolithic in the form of jade and lapis lazuli, and similarly colored stones. White and yellow appear at the end of the Neolithic in the form of silver and gold, from the fifth millennium onwards. “The earliest texts date back to before 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia, but it is un- known whether the language used was an early form of Sumerian ot a different lan- guage. In fact, it is even debatable whether it was what we understand as language, but it certainly represents a stage of human thought where words expressed catego ties relatig to people, time, and animals (among other things). It is thus possible that these texts were not recording a language, but conveying information in written form using different types of syntax (physical position as well as word-order) to en- code meanings. One could argue that spoken language my not have been much fur- ther along at this point. Nevertheless, although these were economic documents, certain words that adumbrate Sumerian colors appear in these texts, and thus we can ‘confirm that at least a vague concept of color as a means of categorization existed. ‘A millennium later, scribes were clearly capable of writing the Sumerian language, ut the documents ate still more economic than poetic. Only towards the end of the third millennium do the Mesopotamians start composing real literature, in Sumerian and Akkadian. Sometime around 3000 BCE, the Egyptians adopted the concept of writing from the Mesopotamians. In contrast to the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians began writing names and administrative titles in a rather monumental form with alacrity and thus the preserved documentation is quite different from Mesopotamia. After the beginning of the second half of the third millennium BCE, the Egyptian scribes began a tradition of writing religious texts-which would continue for the next three millennia, ‘This developed further when St. Mark appeared in Alexandria and the New ‘Testament was translated into Coptic (which was the final stage of the Egyp- tian language, related to ancient Egyptian and not to Arabic, which replaced Coptic after the Islamic Conquest in the mid-seventh century CE). “Thus, in one sense, one could argue for a tormentingly long era of develop- ment — of argue that the cognitive developments of a millennia and a half in Meso- potamia outweigh everything that had come before. Regardless, there is not much ‘evidence of ‘narrative’ or ‘abstraction’ in the Paleolithic or Neolithic, and thus thereBARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY 19 ay have been a revolution in thought during the eatly part of the Bronze Age, and the materials in the wealthy temples and palaces of the Near Fast may have played a part in the process. ‘During the third millennium BCE, increasing quantities of silver, gold, lapis lazuli, catnelian, ivory, and other materials were imported into Egypt and Mesopo- tumig, The materials were used to make representative jewelry, statues, weapons, tanls and furniture, ete. During the second half of the third millennium, these mate- uals come to play an important role in the texts, and this role increases during the second millennium BCE. ‘These materials were associated with the gods and the princes insofar as the statues of the gods were made of such materials and the kings hot only wore jewelry made of these articles, but were also accustomed to having forniture incorporating such materials. Scribes would use the words for the precious materials to refer to colors in their poetic texts, while the administrative records would refer to the real materials. ‘Although words for the concept of ‘color’ were developing dusing the third and second millennia BCE, it was only during the first millennium CE that colors began to become abstract. This process of abstraction is extremely complicated be- coat it involved several intertwining tendencies. It is easiest to follow in the Greek world, ‘The Mycenaean texts abound with terms designating colors as attributes or Treating, materials as being distinguished by what we would call color. Above we weled some of the thee dozen different color-words in Mycenaean Grock which Blskolmer has identified. Some of them are the antecedents of later abstract color words in Greek (such as ¢-n#-to-ro = Epu$pds), and some of them related to materials. Striking for the Aegean and Near Eastern Bronze ‘Age languages is a range of words for ted and blue, Over time, the color words are reduced radically in language, with categories collapsing as the abstract concept overcomes the calegone! associated Gtk snaterials, Significantly, the colors of the Mycenaean paintings are similar to the Egyptian in presenting different shades of red and blue, with' relatively clear-cut cat- egories. This contrast significantly with the fine nuances that appeat in the colors tied in the paintings of the classical era which do aot correspond t0 particular Words in the same fashion, since the range of color words declines considerably, while the diversity of hues used in art explodes. “Thus, one notices a moment from the last first millennium onwards when lan- ages tended for a seduction in the number of color words. ‘This reduction is re- flected in both philosophical discussions and abstraction: Thus, the actual umber of specific words for hues is reduced to around seven, with words for black, white and yellow accompanied by at least one word for red, green, and blue.(but in most cases supplemented by an additional word for (at least) one of these @s in contem- porary Russian with two blues, contemporary Hungarian with two reds, contempo- tary French with two browns, and contemporary Chinese with two greens). ‘This process involves making a division in the spectrum of what English terms a specific eAtor, whereby English may represent long term developments in the Proves of elaboration (orange, gray, pink, etc. added in) but only one blue, red, green, etc.0 DAvip A. WARBURTON ‘THE EARLIEST WORDS ‘The Oldest Stage (Prehistory to Early History) Isolating prehistoric color words is excruciatingly difficult simply because one can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a word with a color meaning before the invention of writing, In my view, I can legitimately project a word back to prehistory if I can postulate that a possible basis for that projection exists. However, I am skeptical about assuming that in Prehistoric times and societies the concept of color existed or that any color words were used independent of particular circumstances or materials. Dark to Black As far as T can tell, at the moment the oldest definitely documented color word is ‘one meaning ‘dark’, preserved in Sumerian KUKKU which is the same as the Egyp- tian &kw (227), both documented in the third millennium, and probably older. ‘This is self-evidently the same word being used in two different language fami Sumerian not being related to any known languages, and Egyptian being Afro- Asianic with significant Semitic influences. We have no idea of how old the word is, nor whether a similar word was used in the'time of the earliest texts. The origins of thé Sumerian KUKKU may have originally etymologically had a meaning related to ‘night, antl probably gave rise to Sumerian Gls, GIG2, associated with night and darkness and meaning ‘black’; by contrast, the Egyptian Ak.» simply meant ‘dark’ or ‘blackness’ with the Egyptian word for ‘black’ being Am (als), and the Egyptian word for ‘night’ being the unrelated grh (SIT). It follows that the original designa- tion for ‘darkness’ or ‘night’ — before there were any written languages — must have been related to Akv, KUKKU, and that over time this gave rise to a word for ‘black” in Sumerian and a word for ‘darkness’ in Egyptian. Although this word is the oldest documented, it need not be older (and I suspect that it is in fact younger) than the following word. Ocher to Red? Our next early color word is rather complicated. It could go back to the Neolithic or even the Palaeolithic, but it might be more recent. In contrast to KUKKU, we have no idea of just when the word at the root of English ‘red’ (German rof, Danish red, Italian rosso, and probably French rogge, etc.) appeared. | argue that in Akkadian, it is ruitu, and in Egyptian rvd.w (8%), both meaning a kind of ‘ted’. In Arabic, it is ward, meaning, ‘tose’; in Sanskcit it is orddhi, tneaning ‘growth’, related to Proto-Indo- European *verd (related to German merden). Somehow, this concept of a color term in the red range became mixed with the idea of ‘growth’ — but not related. to the word for ‘green’ (whence English ‘growth’). In Sanskrit, we also have rudhira for red (related to ‘blood’) which may take us back to the origins when ocher and menstrual cycles were different facets of nature which attracted attention. In any case, I argue that this might be the oldest real color word in human history.EARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY 81 Jade to Green? “The word in question appears for the first time in Akkadian ‘green-yellow’, wargu, and Egyptian ‘green’ #°d (hb. The Akkadian and the Egyptian are the same: the Egyptian ’-aleph was originally an /2/ and the /q/, the /g/, and the /j/ (which is the equivalent of the Egyptian sound transliterated as d) are interchangeable. ‘This obviously reflects the evolution of a loanword which was already ancient when it cmrered the vocabulary of the ancient Near East. Since the third millennium BCE, this Egyptian word is both graphically and Siguratively associated with a very rare and precious ‘greenstone’. There was a piece of jade in the tomb of Tutankhamun, but this is much later than the earliest use of #”d with reference to Sones 10 Egypt. Yet somehow the concept of a rare and precious stone arrived with the word long before the actual jade. Yet jade was used in Neolithic Europe, literally millennia be- fore the invention of writing in the Near East — and greenstones were highly prized in the Neolithic Near East, where memories of a small greenstone aXe BAY have given tise to the Sumerian word GINz reflecting the Semitic weight the sheqel, used as the oldest measure of value in human history. Tt is thus legitimate {0 propos’ that the word behind ‘green’ might well be one of the oldest color terms fh human histo- ty, and that that word was possibly related to the Neolithic axes of Alpine jade. sThe Second Stage (Bronze Age Neat East, Third ~ Second Millennia BCE) ‘Lapis Lasgo Dark Ble In Bgyptian (bod) and Akkadian (aga), the word for lapis lazuli is used to designate sole chat is specifically linked to the material lapis lazuli. Lapis lazuli was highly prized in the ancient Near East, being shore’ expensive than silver, if slightly less than gold. ' Carnelian to Red ‘The Akkadian word for carnelian (mtv) resembles the word for red (stim) s0 close- ty thatthe Chicago Assyrian Dietionary (15: 127) refers to carnelian a ‘the red stone par ottence’, and we ean assume that the root of the verb ‘to be red? and the adjective “ced? lies in the stone. Silver to White In Egyptian bd 70, the word for ‘white’ is that for silver. As in Sumerian BABBAR and Akkadian pejum the Egyptian ‘white’ also means ‘bright’ ‘shining’ old to Yellow 1a Fayptian, the only available word for ‘yellow is nha, m™, gold. “The Ancient Greek sword ypua6s is itself derived from the Akkadian funds, via Mycenaean, ku-r-so, roth of which were also used a color terms in the Bronze Age, such as an Akkadian text referring to the color of the moon during an eclipse.82 DAVID A. WARBURTON Turquoise (and Amethyst?) to Light Blue (and/or Violet?) ‘There are colors in Egyptian, Sumerian and Akkadian that represent blues that aré different from the deep blue of the most perfect lapis lazuli. We have noted that for Egyptian, Schenkel advocates using two loanwords for lapis lazuli as color terms, and agrees that turquoise was likewise used as a color term. It could be argued that this is a lighter blue. The same seems to be the case with the Akkadian haimanum, which is a stone for which some have proposed that it is derived from the Egyptian word for amethyst. Obviously, amethyst would be closer to violet than to light bluc and thus it is possible that we actually have a purple or violet (as opposed to an in- digo) here — but the actual stone has not yet been recognized. ‘The Complication of Artificial Materials Glass and faience were referred to as “(artificial) lapis lazul?’ in Egyptian and Akkadi- an, with two results. One was that Akkadian texts refer to ‘red lapis lazuli’, which is not a nonsensical *red-blue, but rather ‘red glass’. The other was that when Egyptian cobalt blue glass arrived in the Mycenaean world, the Mycenaean word for it was ha- ano, derived from the Akkadian ugnd for lapis lazuli (probably derived from Hittite or Ugaritic), so that Mycenaean Greck Ay-nu-no meant ‘glass paste’ and not lapis laz- uli ~ and it was associated with blue. ‘Thus the origin of the Greek xudveos for ‘dark blue’ was the anicient loanword used in Akkadian to designate lapis lazuli. ‘Thus, we see the results of the wanderings, but have no idea whence it came, aside from somewhere across the Iranian plateau or beyond. ‘The word travelled with the actual product, and was then transferred to a cheaper imitation, and then to a color. Art and Language ‘The Egyptian texts use a word for black, Am, the origins and nature of which are virtually inexplicable, as is the standard Egyptian word for red, dir: ‘The word dum is clearly used to designate ‘black’, but seems somehow to be related to a piece of crocodile skin, with which it is written (2). The word dir indisputably means ‘ted’, but is written with a flamingo (%). Neither of these conventions (crocodile, flamin- g0) corresponds to the color black or red as the Egyptians used them in artwork. And the real key to understanding the Egyptian abstract colors lies in a remark by Wolf who observes that the Egyptian statues of jackals were a deep, pure black — which bore no resemblance to the living jackals. ‘This means that the Egyptians un. derstood a pure abstract deep black as being represented by their word £m, and that this black took priority over the observation and reproduction of nature. One of the truly surprising discoveries of recent archaeological in Egypt has been the discovery that the Egyptian painters were deliberately trying to create a purer white, using hun- tite, It is clear that the purer white was the object. A close examination of paintings and jewelry will reveal that the Egyptians consistently distinguished between a ‘light blue’ and a ‘dark blue’, corresponding to the difference between lapis lazuli and tur quoise — but again, reduced to a purer version, ‘The reality is thus that ~ at least as understood by the artists — these words are evidently abstract, and that they were conceived as an ideal. One wonders whether they were ‘translated’ from Akkadian or Sumerian, and that this translation processEARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY 83 contributed to the refinement. It was certainly cognitive rather than perceptive, since it meant ‘idealizing’ the material colors. ‘The Fourth Stage (from First Millennium BCE in Aegean and China) ‘The final stage of the development is that with which we are familiar: the world of purely abstract colors which are understood as an independent category. The An- cient Egyptian had a word for ‘color’, jwn (written with the sign for ‘hair’, -w), which is probably related to the Arabic (dawn, 413) for ‘color’. However, the Ancient Egyp- tian word actually meant ‘character’ as much as a ‘vein of mineral or ore’ and thus the meaning of ‘color’ was secondary. Needless to say, I take the origin of the term as being directly related to the Egyptian understanding of color. In contrast to the earliest terminology, the early Greek and Chinese terms for colors do not seem to be linked to any materials in a conscious fashion, at least not in the sense of having been inherited from an era where the words and precious materials were related. Although the ancient Greek xpéua also meant ‘pigment’ and ‘skin-color’, it certainly meant ‘abstract color’ (as does the modern Greek) in a fash- ion which one could hardly claim for similar terms in Sumerian, Akkadian or Egyp- tian, which are translated loosely as meaning ‘color’. Oddly, the modern Chinese word for color (ydnsé, 68) is an abstract form, a compound of two ancient words, both meaning abstract ‘color’, but more specifically associated with the ‘color of the countenance’ (with yén being more closely linked to the face and sé more abstract color). In this sénse ancient and modern Chinese terms comes quite close to being same ,as the Gréck: meaning both the pigments and dyes with which colors are™ made, as well as skin color and abstract,color."* ‘Thete! are‘some significant developments in later/Egyptian which are worth mentioning. ‘The most important are visible in Coptic, the form of Egyptian used in the Christian era. One of the most important is that the meaning of the word Ad ‘silver’ for ‘white’ is marginalized, with 2x7 (roughly hai) meaning mostly ‘silver? (and seldom ‘white’) replaced with oysaay (oughly wbash), derived from wbp (&5 © ) originally meaning ‘to shine, be bright. This development is extremely im- portant for the history of color terminology since a word for ‘white’ already existed in other languages (such as Greek Aeuxds which the Coptic writers knew, aside from Chinese béi which they probably did not) before the Coptic abandoned ‘silver’ and took a word for ‘shining’ and adopted it to mean ‘white’. In this case, rather than adopting the Greck word itself (which was common practice in Coptic), the Coptic writers were literally ‘translating’ the Greek (which has a meaning of ‘being bright’ as well as white’), and introducing this meaning intg their ancient language with what we would call an abstract color word. 14 Tt s strikingly odd that in both ancient Egyptian and old Chinese, the basic terms for ‘color’ were also associated with ‘sex’: cf. Erman and Grapow (1971) I: 52, 17; Schuessler (2007) 451, 551.84 DAVID A. WARBURTON Another feature of Coptic is the appearance of what appears to be yet another word for ‘red’. The new word mpouy (roughly ssh) is used in parallel with the tra: ditional Bronze Age color term dir. This earlier color term is referred to in an Egyp- tian text as, literally, the ‘color red? jum dint \2° , cited Wb. V: 488, 2), and is preserved in the Coptic ‘repay (roughly sorsh). In this sense, according to their ‘own testimony, the Egyptians ~ in both Ancient Egyptian and Coptic ~ had a per- fectly adequate word for ‘ted’, and yet in the Christian era consciously supplemented this with another. However, despite Schenkel’s insistence that this word meant per- haps ‘light red’, the newly introduced Coptic word mpoa — which thus accompanies dir in. Coptic — may mean ‘ted’ ot ‘yellow’ or perhaps even both (with Cram 183b citing references which he links to épu9pés and Eav96¢).'9 ‘Trying to make sense of this apparent anomaly, Schenkel has proposed that the new word was used merely as a specification for ‘light red’. Altogether, the philological work leaves us in no doubt ~ but quite confused. Quite aside from the meaning, the origins of this word mpoay are unfathoma ble. I would hesitatingly venture to suggest that the origin might be a metathesis of the Ancient Egyptian min (<'s88'Y), Conceptually, this Bronze Age word — perhaps meaning ‘afiernoon’, ‘evening’, ‘evening light’ ot ‘twilight’ — may have hint- ed at the shifting hue of the evening sun which moves through yellow and red. In this sense, the word mir. may testify t6 a consciousness of the paradox (mentioned at the outset) that in Bronze Age Fgyptian texts the sun is described as being both ‘golden’ and ‘ted’. ‘The Coptic would thus have retained this ambiguity, but strengthened it by introducing a word for it with a color meaning, of which Sches kel is persuaded that it is a color term, which he identifies with ‘light red’. Yet the Coptic usage might persuade us that it also designated ‘yellow’. Although Crum con- firms that the Coptic version of Ancient Egyptian nb.» ‘gold’ (=), noys (roughly noub) is used as an adjective, there is hardly a hint that this takes us any further than the Greek xpvcoiic, which maintained its vague color meaning in parallel with the Greek Eav$ée with which the Coptic writers were familiar, ‘Thus, we have some words with different meanings, and several parallel words with similar meanings. We can appreciate the appearance of a category of color which was abstract, but the route was not straight. ‘THE EMERGENCE OF CATEGORIES THROUGH TRADE AND POETRY At the outset, I mentioned the case of the l’gyptian poets of the late second millen- nium BCE who referred to the ‘sun rising golden’ in ‘a field of turquoise” more than a millennium before the appearance of a Coptic phrase referring to ‘the color of the sky’. The concept of color as a distinct category probably did not exist in the fourth millennium BCE as the terms for ‘color’ in the third and early second millennia BCE are still embedded in materials. Along with Egyptian fsbd and wd, Akkadian 15 Schenkel (2007) 224, 226; Crum (1939) 183b.EARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY 85 ngni, simu and wargu were probably all loanwords in these languages, arriving with the materials — or even as mere words unaccompanied by the materials. ‘The trade in lapis lazuli began sometime around the seventh millennium BCE, with the earliest pieces reaching clients in modern day Pakistan. The only relevant Old World source of lapis lazuli in antiquity was in north-eastern Afghanistan (or other deposits farther off in Tajikistan), whence it was initially exported to the In- dus, reaching Mesopotamia and Egypt by the mid-fourth millennium BCE. As far as “Ican tell, the first trading did not pass through the Persian Gulf, but by the third millennium, lapis lazuli was passing through the Gulf (presumably from the Indus Valley), but the importance of the overland route reappeared after the collapse of the Indus civilization so that lapis was again arriving in Mesopotamia from Iran. In Fany case, in Mesopotamia, the price of lapis lazuli was higher than that of silver (which was ‘money’, with that literal meaning in both Egyptian and Akkadian — as well as the significance of ‘white’ in Egyptian and Sumerian). This material lapis laz~ uli is probably the first material which was used by man and subsequently became a color word, which had a meaning — blue — going beyond experiences of color at that time, and exporting them beyond the space to which lapis lazuli was confined (basi- _ cally the Ancient Near East, with very little in the Mediterranean or the Indus). | Above, I argued that next word was that behind the Egyptian 2°d and Akkadi- an warga, which were etymologically the same, with the focus of the Egyptian word on ‘green’ and the Akkadian signifying both ‘green’ and ‘yellow’. As noted above, | the Egyptian is occasionally given a ‘determinative’ or ‘classifier’ denoting a green stone rather than an abstract color. Aside from rare items such as those of Tutan-~ ‘khamup, jade itself is virtually unknown in the Ancient Near East, but the Neolithic axes of Atpine jadeite were among the most highly appreciated possessions of Neo- lithic Europeans — and they were imitated throughout the world, mostly in common ‘stones with a greenish tint, but also including in jade in China. The small imitation greenstone axes will be found in Neolithic collections from Greece and the Near East, as well as Europe. ‘All of the real Alpine jade comes from a single source on the southern flanks of the Alps. Pétrequin suggests that the earliest of these European Neolithic axes were made and circulating in the middle of the sixth millennium — or only shortly thereafter (ca. 5300 BCE) at the very latest.'6 Klassen confirms that they were a rap- id export success, reaching as far north as Denmark in the sixth millennium BCE."7 Pétrequin notes that by the second half of the fourth millennium, ‘the cycle of pro- duction and circulation’ of these large axes was ‘finished’,'® and’ Klassen concludes that in Europe the jade axes were replaced with copper. 16 Pétrequin et al. (2012) 695. 17 Klassen (2004) 346-347. Significantly, the earliest Chinese jades date to virtually the same time, ca, 5000 BCE. It is, of course, assumed that they were local jades and not imports — but it can hardly be mere coincidence that the phenomenon appears at the same time at both ends of Eurasia 18 Pétrequin et al. (2012) 701.86 DAVID A. WARBURTON Thus ‘Tutankhamun’s second millennium BCE jade arrived long after the end of Pétrequin’s ‘cycle of production and circulation’ of the large Neolithic axes. Yet it would seem that a memory of this early trade may have left its trace in the Hurope- an, Egyptian and Mesopotamian vocabulary, and thus long before the pieces pre- served today. Whether actual jade reached the Neolithic Near East is hardly evident Important is that the idea of greenstones did arrive, and thus a word might well have been transported with the greenstones, in the same ways that xgni, bshd and ffir reached Egypt and Mesopotamia, In the case of xaveos, the material lapis lazuli was, not as abundant as the use of the word (since very little lapis lazuli reached the Ac- gean in the Bronze Age), and thus the Alpine jade may not have reached Higypt and Mesopotamia, but the word itself may have. I argue that Egyptian #’d and Akkadian argu were ultimately related to jade, and thus that the ultimate word behind these Egyptian and Akkadian loanwords is the ancestor of that English word ‘green’ (German griin, Danish gron, etc.), also 1 ed to ‘growth’. I postulate that through metathesis, the order of the consonants is inverted in Northern Indo-European, with /g/ before /1/ rather than /r/ followed by /q/. Whether the word travelled via the Indo-Europeans to the Near Hast is nei- ther probable nor necessary, for the word may have arrived with the Huropean Neo- lithic phenonienon, long before the Indo-Europeans encountered the axes in Hu- rope. I thus suggest that surgi and w°d, grow and grin are detived from some word used in, Neolithic Northern Europe associated with Alpine jade axes. ‘The Indo- Europeans probably took the designation they encountered, and retained their ver- sion of the word while destroying the custom of treating jade axes as heirlooms of great value, Thus we have a single word which projects color meanings through time and space.” ‘The situation is quite different with gold. In Bronze Age Egyptian and Akkadi- an, gold was used with color connotations, but the Ancient Near East did not have a separate concept of ‘yellow’ and thus this is hardly surprising. In Greek, howev. words for ‘yellow’ are known since the Mycenaean, and yet gold was also used as a color word in such Ancient Greek compounds as xpuodxtw and xpuoaAis. Alt- hough the Greek and Akkadian words for gold are related, the Egyptian is not — and thus here it is common usage, rather than common vocabulary that holds sway. And this leads to a very curious question. The link between the modern Eng, lish words for ‘gold’ and ‘yellow’ is hardly self-evident, but Danish gu/d and gu! are virtually the same while German Gold and gelb secure the English connections back to Old English geolve, the origin of our ‘yellow’. The use of gold itself can be traced back to the sixth millennium in the Balkans, and thus before the advent of the Indo- Europeans. Given the widespread use of the word ‘gold’ to represent the color ‘yel- low’, one could suspect that the Indo-Europeans encountered a local word for gold Given that I assume that the word behind ‘green’ is a Pre-Indo-European term, I dispute the idea of a PIE etymology.EARLY COLOR TERMINOLC 87 when they reached the Balkans — and that they adopted this, possibly acquiring it already with the figurative color meaning. ‘Amusingly the Persian and Sanskrit likewise testify to the link between the col- or ‘yellow’ and the material ‘gold’, but the Persian gard (23), ‘yellow, golden’ and Sanskrit hari, ‘greenish-yellow’ do not seem to be related to the north European which allegedly contributed the common ancestor of the word ‘yellow’. Yet the San- sktit is close to Latin aureus — which might take us back to a common root in the word at the origin of the Akkadian furisum. This in turn would mean that the north- western half of the Indo-European family probably adopted a word which may ac- tually antedate the Indo-Europeans again while the southern half adopted what was either a Semitic word, or one belonging to a still older substrate. This word for the material was then used for color, surviving into our own times. ‘The Greek xudveos for ‘dark blue’ tells a very different story. The word was it- self in origin a loanword derived from the Akkadian ugnd for lapis lazuli, with the ‘Mycenaean £u-wa-no probably derived from Hittite or Ugaritic. In Mycenaean Greek, kx-wa-no meant ‘glass paste’ (which was cobalt blue in color and imported from Egypt). The word still exists in English as the ‘cyan’ familiar from ink-jet printers. Yet the Greek word xudve0s failed to became a salient color term in its home lan- guage, originally being more vaguely ‘dark’, and ultimately replaced in the ‘blue range’ by ume and yaAdtos, the first of which is simply the (modernized) Greek transliteration of, English ‘blue’ and the second a neologism. Ironically, yAauxds had the same fate, having had a vague meaning in antiquity and having lost ground since. Similarly, mpdowo has (ironically) replaced xAwpés (which is assumed to be ‘green’, ~ but probably never was, at least as we understand the BCT ‘green’).. If I have understood this evidence correctly, it would mean that the exchanges Jed to changes in the meanings of words and colors, but also that the Indo- ''Buropean languages were incorporating loanwords into theit vocabulary at a rela- tively early date. This is one part of the story of materials and words. Another part unfolds itself when we turn back to ‘green’. Significantly, the focus of the Egyptian word is in ‘green’ while the Akkadian has the implications of ‘green’ and ‘yellow’ (which seems to correspond to the Sumerian SIG). This latter is clearly a develop- ment under the influence of the vegetation cycles. One has the impression that the original green jade created an idea of ‘green’ through the word and the material, as both we and the Egyptians understood it. Then, however, the figurative meaning of the word was transferred to flourishing vegetation, and then also secondarily to the ripe — brown or yellow — vegetation. Ironically, ‘tipe’ and ‘fresh’ can come together with ‘green’ and ‘yellow’ and ‘red’, so that a figurative meaning is separate from the color meaning. This probably explains why the Akkadian seems to identify things which are either ‘yellow’ or ‘green’. The Akkadian is thus not greenish-yellow, as with Greek xAwpéc, which might well designate an indistinct green-yellow segment of the spectrum rather than a green or a yellow as alternatives. I would argue that the Egyptian and the northern European languages have maintained the actual meaning of a ‘green’ hue associated with a stone — and that the Akkadian made a confusing abstraction out of this. It would be fair to propose that the confusion of the Akkadian wargu actually contributed to the confusion of the Greek xupés.88 Davin A. WARBURTON ‘The Chinese words for red (Adngsé, #L€) and (light) green (ti, #) are actually written with a radical which is part of the word for silk (sé, $f), while the debatable color word pethaps meaning ‘dark green’ (gmg, 11) is arguably partially written with the sign/word for jade’ (yi, TE). Qing underwent the opposite destiny of xudveos: instead of disappearing as an inadequately precise color term, it has crystallized into a vague green-blue in China and Japan (where it is transliterated as aa). Important is that these terms are much younger than the Near Eastern and Aegean terms, reflect- ing a different world. ‘The Chinese terms did not emerge out of a world where mate- tials were the origins of colors so much as into a world in which color categorie: had already been brought into existence (in the Near Fast and the Aegean). ‘Thus the Chinese vocabulary resembles the Greek more than the Egyptian — but without the foreign influences being visible. In this sense, the Chinese vocabulary corte- sponds to an advanced stage in the development of color terminology. Thus, for the Near Hast and the Aegean, we have a peculiar situation where various raw materials of high value — gold, silver, jade, lapis lazuli, carnclian, tur- quoise, amethyst — gradually appeared in the texts to denote colors. This was practi- cal and uninspired (a ‘silver’ vessel is a silver vessel, and distinguishing a limestone sel from a silver vessel not difficult), practical and factual (a textile dyed crimson with murex-dye had that color) — but also practical and comparative when a texti described as being lapis lazuli. It was thus in this context that color categories as hues tpok on their own existence — and began the long route to modern color ter minologie: HUEs AND Focus I am persuaded that although color authorities stress a range of details, ordinary humans are more inclined to recognize and distinguish hues than to consciously perceive saturation or luminosity, but it is possible that the ancients took account of these issues through their lexical designations. In the case of ‘turquoise’ and ‘apis lazuli’ for ‘light blue’ and ‘dark blue’, the distinction may be one of saturation and luminosity. With reds and dir, épuSpéc and mopdiptos, the difference will probably have been between dull, dark (rvd.n, épvSpéc) and bright, deep (dir, mopqiptos), which may be understood as hues, saturation or luminosity. In Egyptian, ‘blood’ was described as being dir, but not és (—INW, which must have a slight nuance of dif- ference invisible to us, as it otherwise appears to be almost synonymous with di7) — possibly because the basic meaning of /ms might have been ‘red ink” and the scribes may thus have been uncomfortable with the idea of ‘writing in blood’. Yet this is an indication of an nuance which escapes us. By contrast, the color of men in Egyptian art is usually described in art history discussions as being ‘brown’, or ‘dark red’ — but this color is never associated with any of the conventional words for ‘red’. ‘Thus I have proposed that the Egyptian word rud.w (=[8%, which means ‘firm’, ‘strong’, as well as being used to describe quartzite and sandstone — in contrast to other stones, such as ‘black’ granite) is the Egyptian term used to describe a dull or dark red dif- fering strongly from the bright red of ar. Another important aspect of this issue is the understanding of the color km ‘black’. This word is definitely different from £4 ‘dark’, which is the same in Su-EARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY 89 merian and Egyptian, However, this does not mean that it had another meaning or that we can define it. We know that the Egyptians distinguished the ‘ted land’ (the deserts and mountains) from the ‘black land’ (the arable land of the Valley and Del- ta). Recently, Schenkel has cogently pointed out that the soil was really closer to brown. Yet, indeed, following the same reasoning, Schenkel could have pointed out that the desert was also closer to what we call brown than to what we call ‘ted’. In effect, following his own logic, Schenkel would have to have conceded that what we appeat to have would be two rather vague terms for brown, one with a focus in ‘dark’ and one with a focus in ‘bright’. I have dealt with part of this by arguing that there were two words for red, one the ‘bright red” of drm, and the other the ‘dull red’ of rdw. Yet it must be conceded that the Egyptians seemed to have used the word dinw for the rocks and sands, which were effectively red-yellow. THE SYSTEMS One of the most curious features of early colors is the system by which colors are associated with the elements and the cardinal directions. There are many different variations — with the greatest variety among the colors from the Americas. In prin- ciple, this system is based on abstraction, as the associations are potentially almost endless. Whether the concept arose among the Greeks and was translated into Chi- nese where the concept was systematized is probably impossible to establish. What is clear is that the Hindu system is not compellingly earlier than the Greek, and that the Buddhist and Chinese systems reflect mutual influences. Egyptian | Israelite | Greck | Chinese Hindu | Buddhist | Maya Bak earth | water, north west White | east ‘water | meta, west ‘water, east | north Red [west [fre fre | fire,south | fire Tire, west | east Green ‘wood, east ais, north Yalow air earth, center | earth ‘ath, south | south Bine water ‘void, center Violet aie Purple ‘water ‘Table 1. Systems of elements associated with colors ‘The Greeks divided the world into elements associated with colors: earth (black), water (white), air (yellow) and fire (red); the Chinese had five elements: wood (green), fire (ced), earth (yellow), metal (white), water (black). ‘The Chinese linked green to the east, red to the south, yellow to the center, white to the west, and black90 DAVID A. WARBURTON to the north. The Hindus used the elements in a fashion corresponding to the Greeks, which may be traced back to the Israelites. ‘As far as I can tell, the earliest known case of the system was found in the tomb of Tutankhamun (ca. 1320 BCE), where Guasch-Jané has demonstrated that red wine was placed to the west of the sarcophagus and white wine to the east.” ‘This is probably merely a hint at the beginnings — but there may be more to come, since the directions are the same as those of Buddhism. ‘The Israelite system men- tioned by Josephus may be older than the Greek, but is not documented until after the emergence of the Greek system.2! The Greek and Chinese systems must have arisen in parallel, presumably based on the Egyptian and Mesopotamian, with the Chinese probably also influenced by Buddhism. ‘The most recent, Maya, system is typical of the American systems in not being particularly systematic in details in relation to the other systems. On the other hand, however, the conceptual link to the eastern systems lies in the idea of linking colors into a system of organizing the categories of the world. Being Pre- Columbian, the Maya system is probably influenced by the East Asian traditions and had an influence on the other, later, North American systems. GRAMMAR, ETYMOLOGIES, SEMANTICS AND THEORY What I am arguing here is that concrete nouns (linguistically encoded names for materials,which may well have been both precious and imports) lie at the origins of color terminology which is today mostly understood as being expressed through adjectives modifying nouns (that is, a ‘green stone” ot a ‘yellow,coin’) ot verbs (that , is, ‘that stone is green’ or ‘this coin is yellow’). ea In the linguistic context, it is striking that the ‘green’, grven, griin group are all northern European dialects, whereas the oldest documented Indo-European lan- guages do not have central words with the meaning ‘green’ related to this word. Blakolmer remarks that the absence of ‘green’ in the Mycenaean sources reflects a ‘special chromatic disinterest’ Hittite bablawang, replicates the ‘green’/ yellow’ di- chotomy of Akkadian, and was thus probably a translation of such. Ancient Greek Qwpés seems to replicate this same confusion. Sanskrit harita and hanjdta are among. the many Sanskeit words meaning ‘green’ and ‘yellow’ respectively but appear to be quite similar, and indicate the confusion. Regardless, like hablawany and x)wpés they are not related to the projected PIE roots. ‘This case is particularly relevant since the distribution of the sixth to fourth millennia BCE jadeite axes in northern Europe probably antedates the Indo- European migration, meaning that the wandering Europeans will have come across people using these articles. In this sense, the word at the origin of green would be 2 Guasch-Jané et al. (2006) 1079. 21 Josephus, BJ V. 212-214. 2 Houston et al. (2009) 27-28. 23 Blakolmer (2000) 232.EARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY 1 older than Indo-European and adopted by the migrants. Etymologically, the word ‘green’ and its variations (grven, grin, gron) have been used to argue a hypothetical PIE root where *ghr... link ‘green’ and ‘grow’. I have argued here that — as with lapis lazuli, carnelian, silver and gold — the word color word ‘green’ was derived from the precious material, in this case the Neolithic axes. I argue that the recogni- tion of the color of the material contributed to the development of the ‘concept’ of color as a category, and that this was the point of departure for the concepts of col- ors whereby Akkadian sarqu came to mean both ‘green’ and ‘yellow’ due to the changes of the vegetation cycle which probably contributed to the concept of _ growth coming into the meaning of the color word. Thus, I view the concrete mate- “tial as the origin of the color concept, and the figurative abstract meanings (such as ‘growth’) as the result of the development of color concepts. Thus, I would argue that this word ‘green’ was around before the Indo- | Europeans and that they adopted it — and that the alleged PIE roots relating to ‘growth’ are not of Indo-European origin and reflect the end of the process (as adopted by the Hittites) rather than etymological origins. Concretely, I argue that ocher, gold, silver, lapis lazuli, jade, turquoise, amethyst, and carnelian played the decisive role, contributing to the emergence of abstract color terminology, through the.adoption and evolution of words which can be traced back etymologically to objects or categories of objects. This is a question of etymologies. ‘The usual means of providing etymologies is to assume an internal evolution in 4 language. However, in the case of English, the etymological origins are allegedly words meaning ‘tp shine’ or ‘to grow’ which themselves postdate the links between ™ _ * vegetation cycles already visible in Akkadian before the first millennium BCE. The ‘fact that half of the words'are conceded to be ultimately Joanwords anyway indicates it is fallacious to assume independent evolution, as can be seen in my summary f Shields’s account of the origins of English color terms: +92 DAviD A, WARBURTON Origin OE Sanskesit Old ‘Teutonic White aneit to shine Black ‘lace — 7 to shine _ = _ Gay fag ti«dC | . to grow _ - Red Green a to grow Yellow eee to shine Blue loanword “Brown not color term Orange naranj loanword | Purple loanword Pink Lo loanword ‘Table 2: My summiary of Shields’s system. “Thus the etymology and the semantic meaning are closely related. Working etymo- logically, with the hypothesis developed here, many of the color words can be traced back to the precious materials; semantically, it was precisely these colors which were selected out. Linguistically, this point is of extreme importance since the north- western Indo-European languages are replete with variations which are related whereas Hittite and Mycenaean do not reflect these etymologies. Since these lan- guages are potentially older, it follows that the etymological route is a dead-end. “Thus, I argue that the proposed PIE, etymologies are spurious since what later be- came color words in Indo-European will probably have been words that the Indo- Europeans encountered as materials with which they came into contact when meet- ing older civilizations. In this sense, the concepts of ‘bright’ and ‘sparking? were re- lated to the materials, but these materials also had colors. In the course of time, the central civilizations gradually crystallized out a system of colors which became a separate category. ‘THE PARTITION OF THE SPECTRUM Significantly, it would also appear that the colors selected (based on the materials) played a central role in the partitioning of the spectrum in linguistic terms. In. this sense, the colors of the rainbow ~ ted, yellow, green and blue ~ are demarcated by carnelian, gold, jade, turquoise and lapis lazuli. ‘This is a matter of semantics, since these are the colors provided by nature, but it was the precious materials which 24 Warburton (2007a) 243.BARLY COLOR TERMINOLOGY 93 make it possible for us to distinguish them. If they referred to it at all, the Egyptians referred to the ‘rainbow’ as being the ‘(archer’s) bow of the sky’ pd? 2.5 — with no reference to color, but rather the form. ‘To summarize the potential significance of this approach to the origins of color terminology, one must take account not only of the Berlin and Kay model, but also the methodology of approaching the alleged PIE etymologies. I assume that Berlin and Kay is familiar enough that it should suffice to point out that some of the Egyp- tian terms are not salient (including white) and that the word for ‘black’ is not de- rived from the word for ‘dark’ — quite aside from the fact that there is an abundance of multiple terms for red and blue before the expansion of the color system. It should be relatively clear that the precise colors proposed by Berlin and Kay as lying at the early stages of the development of color terminology — viz. ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘ted’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’, ‘blue’ — are the same that I identify. However, where they allow a confusion of ‘light’ and ‘white’ and ‘dark’ and ‘black’, along with the composite color term ‘grue’ (‘green’ and ‘blue’), I suggest that these earliest terms actually designated (more or less) ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘red’, ‘blue’, ‘green’ and ‘yellow’ — and that these hues were distinguished from other colors. This argument is based not merely on the etymologies, but also on the fact that some of these terms sur- vived into modern languages. “There are obviously some aspects of the eatly history of color terminology that emain obscure and several rather controversial propositions in this account. On the whole, however, I suggest that this is the closest we can come to understanding how color terminology originated and developed. One of the most important aspects of this work is demonstrating that the evolution of color terminology did not move through a sequence such ab that designated by Berlin and Kay where vague color terms were gradually supplemented by more precise abstract ones in a linear fashion: + instead, one must stress that, early on, colors do not seem to have been an isolated category but only gradually came to represent a means of classification. This devel- opment towards abstraction took place through a process whereby very precise col- ors related to materials were gradually transformed into abstract concepts. Precious materials were used to demarcate the rainbow colors, and through exchange — with actual materials, concepts, loanwords and ‘translations’ ~ these divisions led to the emergence of the abstract colors, allowing us today to demarcate the rainbow with abstract color terms. Curiously, therefore, the origins of the individual color terms lay in the materials with the semantics of color drawing on the (forgotten) lexical etymologies. What is important is therefore that the materials chosen represented the fore- runners of Berlin and Kay’s BCTs: ‘silver=white’, ‘camelian=bright red’, ‘ocher=dark red’, ‘jade=green’, ‘gold=yellow’, ‘lapis lazuli=dark blue’, ‘ame- thyst=violet’, and ‘turquoise=light blue’ — that is, these are the colors that were re- fined millennia ago in the Bronze Age, and these are the fundamental colors of the rainbow — violet, blue, green, yellow and red. Yet a term for red did not cover the entire spectrum we understand as red, but rather, like blue and green, there were specific words for what we understand as different shades of red. Aside from the older ‘black’, recent millennia, have brought ‘brown’, ‘pink’, ‘orange’, ‘gray’, ete. Most of the latter words have only appeared recently, ‘orange’ as a color word actu-94 DAVID A. WARBURTON ally dating to only five centuries ago. Thus the concept of ‘color’ as a distinct cate- gory had to emerge from the Bronze Age in order for us to continue the elaboration of the linguistic partitioning of the spectrum. ‘The fundamental developments did not take place in Classical Antiquity, but rather before and after. And they were not developed by primitive peoples, but rather by the scribes of the Near East ~ and from there the concept of color spread and was transformed.Essays in Global Color History Interpreting the Ancient Spectrum Edited by Rachael'B.'Goldman 'ORGIAS )RESS 2016Gorgias Studies in Classical and Late Antiquity 19 Gorgias Studies in Classical and Late Antiquity contains monographs and edited volumes on the Greco-Roman world and its transition into Late Antiquity, encompassing political and social structures, knowledge and educational ideals, art, architecture and literature,Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, U ‘www gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2016 by Gorgias Press LIC All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. 2016 \% 4 ISBN 978-1-4632-0582-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goldman, Rachael, editor. Title: Essays in global color history : interpreting the ancient spectrum / edited by Rachael B. Goldman. Description: Piscataway, NJ : Gorgias Press, 2016. | Series: Gorgias studies in classical and late antiquity ; 19 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016027599 | ISBN 9781463205829 Subjects: LCSH: Colors--Social aspects. | Symbolism of colors--History--To 1500. Classification: LCC QC495.8 .E87 2016 | DDC 535.6093--dc23 LC record available at https: //1ccn.1loc.gov/2016027599 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YYFor our students