In popular science articles they write that several thousand years ago people did not see blue. We decided to check what evidence this is.

"Sensation: There was no blue before ” - such texts can be read on the Internet. Millennia ago, people perceived the colors differently - for example, Have not seen Blue, this Confirm Monuments of literature of antiquity write in them.

In fact, this sensation is already a century and a half. The first to the oddities of flowers in our ancestors was the scientist (and the future British Prime Minister) William Gladston in the 19th century drew attention. He noticed that in the Iliad, created Around the VIII century BC. e., and "Odyssey" colors are called Weird. The sea is “wine -color”, iron is purple, and honey is described by an adjective that could mean green, gray, and even yellow or brown.

Gladston wondered what colors generally appear in Homer, and calculated that white and black are most often mentioned, which rather mean the level of light or darkness, and not “color”. Red color is the third in frequency, it is mentioned about 15 times. Yellow and green - less than ten times. And the blue color - this is the color of the sea, as our contemporaries would say - never appears, despite the fact that the Odyssey is dedicated to travel by sea.

Gladston did The conclusion that all the Greeks were color blinds, that is, their color perception was disturbed at the level of the eyes of the eyes. But philologist Lazar Geiger in 1880 Studied Not only Greek, but also other ancient texts proved that with blue there were difficulties in other cultures. He found, for example, that in Latin there was no word “blue” at all: Romanesque languages that developed on the basis of Latin borrowed a word to designate a blue color from the languages of German tribes. A significant part of the words in different languages now mean “blue”, in an outdated meaning was used for green or black colors.

The historian, author of the book “Blue. Color History »Michelle Pasturo Turns The attention is that although the blue color is widely represented in nature, it has learned to reproduce it and use it very late. For example, the Romans did not use blue dyes. The clothes were painted in shades of red: this color is easier to achieve, having only natural dyes at hand. While the peoples of the East imported the Indigo dye from Asia and Africa, in Europe it remained unknown or simply too expensive. The same applies to medieval Europe: the blue color has long remained in it as prestigious, inconspicuous, and in public and religious life three colors dominated: black, white and red.

The point of view that the people of the past were long -distance, is now considered outdated. Modern scientists are more about the problems of perception and description of color associated with culture and language. Michelle Pasturo writes: “For a historian, color is primarily a social phenomenon. It is society that “produces” the color, gives it a definition and gives it meaning, produces codes and values for him. ” So, the Romans were treated not just indifferently, but negatively, Pasturo writes. Since they themselves almost did not use this dye in everyday life, blue has become a hostile color of barbarians for them. According to ancient Roman historians, they painted their bodies in front of the battle or in front of the orgies.

The answer may also lie in the peculiarities of speech. This is confirmed by a modern experiment conducted in 2006. Psychologist Jules Davidoff with colleagues Compared The perception of the color of the Anglophons and the people of Khimba from Namibia. In the language of this people there is no name for blue. Psychologists showed the subjects of the squares to the subjects: among the green there was one blue, and the participants in the experiment had to allocate it from the rest. Although before the experiment, scientists were convinced that all subjects had normal color vision, Himba representatives were difficult to find a blue square among green. But English -speaking subjects were faced with a different difficulty. In a similar experiment - only with shades of green - it was more difficult to highlight the “other” green squares from a number of squares than representatives of Khimba. The fact is that in this African language there are more words to designate green than in English.

The connection of color perception with the language was studied by other experts. In the Russian language, unlike English, blue and blue indicate different words, while in English it is one word - Blue, to which they only add clarification: light, dark, pale. In the course experiment 2007 it turned out that Russian -speaking subjects better coped with the definition of shades of blue. They managed to distinguish between colors faster when the shade of blue was asked to compare with a shade of blue: here the Russian -speaking “turned on” the understanding associated with the language. For English -speaking participants in the experiment, the results did not change, regardless of the shades that asked them to distinguish. “This is the first time that evidence of cross-linguistic differences in the perception of color was proposed,”- said The author of the experiment Jonathan Winaver.

The author of the book "Through the Mirror of the Language. Why in other languages the world looks different »Guy Doycher Spent An experiment on his own daughter. He admits that he began to work on this book about flowers just at the time when his daughter learned to speak. The doler, like all the parents of young children, pointed to objects and called them colors, but he never specifically mentioned the child, what color the sky, until once asked her about it. The girl at first just silently watched the sky, without answering anything. Then she said that the sky is white. And only later it still seemed blue to her.

So, modern science believes that the vision of ancient people did not differ from ours. But people of different countries and eras can really perceive colors differently due to cultural and linguistic differences.