Arts and Music Archives – THE PAGE TURNS

April 29, 2025April 30, 2025

Y is for Yellow

Horse painted at Lascaux caves, @ 20,000 ya. Photo courtesy of the French Ministry of Culture.

I have to confess this up front: nobody calls it yellow. All the anthropologists and archaeologists call it ochre, which can be red or yellow. They spell it ochre, too, and that confuses the dictionaries. Also, humans don’t see yellow. Technically, I shouldn’t be writing this post, but I’m a rebel! I’m going to do it anyway. Because our ancient ancestors used color, and we should talk about how and why.

In today’s post on the color Yellow, we’ll talk about what yellow in particular and color in general meant to ancient cultures. We’ll see how the Greeks created an entire system that mirrored cave paintings in France. We’ll address who had access to what color and how that played a part in where and when. Humans could see rainbows, but they could not universally reproduce them.

I have just two posts (and a summary) left, and while I am starting to flag, I’m excited about this post and how close the finish line appears. So today’s questions include:

What was significant about people using colors, including Yellow?
When and where did people first start using Yellow, and how do we know?
What did color use tell us about ancient people?

April 28, 2025April 29, 2025

X is for Xylophone

Ethiopian Lithophones with Stand, Monastery of Na’akuto La’ab. Photo by A. Davey.

The Xylophone is a very simple instrument, perhaps one of the first Fisher-Price toys you had as a kid. Bang a stick on different colored bits of metal to make different sounds. The xylophone is also one of the most ancient of inventions, replicated in different ways over time and across cultures, with different names. Same principle. Hit something with a stick and make music. The music produced isn’t always simple; in 2019, music professor Lee Hinkle of the University of Maryland performed a 21-scene solo opera on the xylophone.

Today, the sounds are made with metal or plastic, but for centuries they were made on wood and on stone. Ancient xylophones may have appeared first in the Far East, especially the Southeast, an area passed over by archaeologists. People made them throughout Africa, where they still play them today. Sometimes the wood or rocks were chosen and arranged together. In other places, the rocks that made music were part of the where people lived, at least to the imaginative. If the music is made from rocks, those instruments have a special name: lithophones. Some of those lithophones may just be 12,000 years old.

April 25, 2025April 25, 2025

U is for Umbrella

Oil paper umbrella, Chinese-design, shown in cave paintings from India, @200 BCE-600CE. From wikimedia.

Combine the histories and myths of Daedalus, Da Vinci, Archimedes, and St. Joseph into a single person. Now give that guy a wife, one who has learned some practical science from her husband. She invents the umbrella. Sort of.

The umbrella, a device used as a sun shade or rain cover, dates back to almost 3000 BCE. Since the ancient cultures that we know most cluster around the Mediterranean, the primary use of umbrella-like instruments was as fans or canopies to protect mainly the royals, and later the wealthy and aristocratic. Thus, the umbrella in the most ancient sense, was a status symbol.

But the other form of umbrella we modern people know is the collapsible kind–that is, those of us who experience rain in the north (or extreme south). Collapsible umbrellas, invented somewhere between 600 BCE and 50 CE in China, were also more symbolic than functional, at least according to art left behind. The Chinese led the world in innovative designs of the umbrella. Europeans came to know the designs; they just didn’t use them. At least, not until umbrellas were re-invented as a status symbol, eventually to make their way into popular and practical use by schmoes like you and me.

In focusing on the history of the umbrella in ancient times, let’s consider: