Posts

Posted on

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:

  1. What was significant about people using colors, including Yellow?
  2. When and where did people first start using Yellow, and how do we know?
  3. What did color use tell us about ancient people?
Continue reading “Y is for Yellow”
Posted on

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.

Continue reading “X is for Xylophone”
Posted on

W is for Wind

…The North wind is the wind of satisfaction,
the South wind overthrows the men it hits,
the East wind is the wind that brings rain,
and the West wind is mightier than the man living there.

Sumerian proverb, @1900 BCE.
Soldiers of the 1st Chinese Regiment flying kites, China,1902. Photo courtesy University of Brisol.

In our alphabetic journey through Ancient Inventions, we are now into the last four letters, so I feel a bit of wind at my back. Which is good, since Wind is today’s topic–specifically, wind power and how ancient people used it.

In yesterday’s post on Valves, I described how ancient civilizations developed plumbing in order to control water. It is in the DNA of Homo sapiens–all the hominids–control the environment. We have always wanted to mold the world as we wished. What separated primates and apes in particular from other animals is tool use, and what seemed to caused hominids evolution was tool upon tool upon tool use. Fire-arrows-wheels-axes-thread-carrying slings all reflect continuous adaptation. We change things in the world to suit our needs until we try to shape the world into a tool for ourselves. This was modest 10,000 years ago with stone towers and calendars; bigger by the time of the pyramids, 5000 years ago. As of 2025 CE, it may be an experiment gone too far, now that the environment is fighting back.

However, in 3500 BCE, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and even in the South Pacific, people understood there were significant forces of nature and wanted at least to use them to their advantage. Diverting water and controlling it with valves could irrigate the crops and grow a hungry population; sailing across water could lead to places with new goods or resources. Fire was the life-giver to humans, known early on to the oldest of hominids, and staying with us through our evolving species. Shaping the earth into houses or bowls for food was part of daily life. But the air they breathed–could they control it? The wind brought storms that wrecked the crops and disturbed the cattle–could they harness it?

Continue reading “W is for Wind”