Y is for Yellow

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?

What You and the Monitor See

I hate to break it to you, but yellow is not one of our main colors. I’m not sure if kindergarten teachers knew this when we all learned that R-Y-B were primary colors. Humans can’t see yellow. Humans have trichromacy–that means we can see three main colors. Those colors are red, green, and blue–Short, Medium, and Long wavelengths on the light spectrum that hit our receptors. Our eyes look at green and blue to see yellow. That’s how your TV screen and computer monitor see it, too.

Trichromacy was an evolutionary advantage for our primate ancestors, the Great Apes and the earliest hominids, Australopithecus. They were omnivores and being able to separate red berries from green leaves allowed them to forage better. Good bifocal vision and an upright posture came next, allowing us to hunt while still gathering, keeping us in the fruit and vegetable game. What we’re not good at is seeing in the dark, which many non-trichromatic animals do. Cats can’t distinguish colors as well as we can, but they can see far better in low light. Maybe it explains why humans have always been afraid of the dark.

While we can’t see yellow directly, we can distinguish it as a color, along with orange, indigo, and violet; we can, in fact, distinguish minute variations in color. Our RGB-distinguishing cones and rods break colors down in plenty of detail–sun yellow, lemon yellow, buttercup, saffron, gold, and yellow ocher, for instance. I always thought ocher was a smeary brownish-yellow, and I was right. Yellow ocher came from the ochre rock. There was yellow to our ancestors, right there in the dirt.

Chubby Horses, Black Bulls, Hand Prints, and Yellow…Accents

In the beginning, there was black. Most likely coming from charcoal left from the fire. Next, came red, probably red ochre, from the hematite rocks heavily laden with ferric oxide. Those two colors are common to cave paintings that date back as early as 30,000 years ago, in Chauvet Cave in France, once recognized as the oldest human art. Among the galloping horses, there are human hands outlined in red. Such human hand prints are echoed in cave paintings around the globe, an action apparently fundamental to our species. Before writing, we can communicate. This is the work of my hands.

Technology is telling researchers that symbolic painting goes back further than was thought. Other caves in Spain and France now date back 40 or 50,000 years, Australia and India, also 30,000 years. In Kenya, perhaps 300,000 years ago, settlements gathered red ochre rocks with regular grinding marks. Hominids may have been making pigments before becoming Homo sapiens, grinding red rock into powder. There aren’t nearby paintings, so why the powder? Body paint would communicate to tribe mates far away. It was “pretty” and it was easily seen. Researchers are revising how far back in time hominids could think and act symbolically.

After black and red paint came white–likely ash. Last, but not least, came yellow ochre, from that cousin rock to the hematite. Armed with four colors, the Neolithic artists across Europe, at caves like Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain, spread scenes of hunting and birth, revelry and death, across the walls.

Yellow was used for accent more than outline, but, as a man once said, it does tie the room together. Those four colors–black, white, red, and yellow–then show up in cave paintings older than 10,000 years in Argentina, Texas, South Africa, India, and Australia. The urge to document their lives with the materials at hand seemed universal.

No Deep Blue Sea, Unless You’re on an Island Near Egypt

Fast forward 35,000 years or so. People have settled in cities across Mesopotamia, Egypt, and parts of Greece, including the nearby islands. The Minoans dominate the Aegean waterways with trade and culture. The Palace of Knossos @1700 BCE is the height of Greek sophistication of the time, covered with charming frescoes. Other artwork at nearby Thera island, i.e. Santorini, echoes the intermingling of ideas–similar looks and colors.

The artwork is full of bulls, leaping as if off the caves of France and on to the walls in Crete. Women with floating hair cavort. The colors are vibrant, even now. When the Santorini volcano blew in 1650, it destroyed the palace, but it also helped preserve some of the colors–both in Knossos and Thera.

The red and yellow are obvious in Thera’s “Saffron gatherers,” suggested perhaps to be gathering yellow flowers for trade to Crete and the Minoans. But there is a new color appearing among the rest. Some of it appears black, but also the floating hair, the dolphins, and the armbands are a brand new hue: blue.

Artificial Blue and Arsenic Alchemy

The blue was unique to the eastern Mediterranean–the islands had it but the mainland did not. It came from the south. The Egyptians were expert at creating minerals. They created a blue mixture with silica, lime, copper and an alkali, and they named it ḫsbḏ-ỉrjt (khesbedj irtiu), artificial lapis-lazuli. Lapis came from India but was prohibitively expensive, so the Egyptians replicated it. They painted with it. They traded it. The archaeologists named it Egyptian blue.

The Egyptians painted with yellow, too, often with ochre. They used another source for yellow as well, a mineral called orpimite. This is a mineral also common worldwide, in the class known as arsenic. The Egyptians used arsenic in their medicines as well. For paint, it was used sparingly.

But it was not omitted entirely. Yellow–more specifically, gold–was an important symbolic color for Egypt. Yellow belonged to the sun, and the sun was Ra, the main god. So yellow belonged to the deities. Gold was shiny, valued for its look as well as for its malleability. Gold belonged to royalty, who were also gods.

Fundamental Colors, Fundamental Humors

The Egyptians and the Aegean islands used blue. The Greeks did not. The Greeks rarely mentioned blue, almost as if they didn’t acknowledge it. (Yes, they had a word, but didn’t use it.) Homer was famous for repeating certain phrases, “rosy-fingered dawn” and “wine-dark sea.” He never mentions a blue sea.

It’s further solidified in the crowning idea of Hippocrates and other Greek doctors, who created the notions of the four humors. The humors, which neatly align with the four elements and four seasons, reflected four types of people and reflected four specific personalities.

People were said to have too much of one of humor–black bile, yellow bile, red blood, or white phlegm. The bile might come from the liver (black) or spleen (yellow). The accompanying personality types were melancholy, short-tempered, social, or reserved, matching the four colors. Today, you might see color tables that include red, black, yellow, and blue, the latter for phlegmatic, but to Hippocrates, phlegm was white. (Well, it is…)

These same four colors started on the caves. Now they were outlining Greek gods, Poseidon, Hera, or Hades, whose red and orange hair floated on the from walls of palaces, like the one in nearby Macedonia, where Alexander was born. The Greeks called it chloros, or greenish-yellow. They had neither a true blue nor a true yellow. The Romans got closer to the paint, and the word. Helvus in Latin was a light brown, but it’s the closest we can come to starting the journey towards the English word yellow.

The Glory of Greece, the Brilliance of Rome–and Pompeii

The Romans also thought the blue paint, whether Egyptian or lapis-lazuli, tended to be too dear. There was one more source of dark, dark blue. It came from Tyre–Phoenicia/Lebanon–and belonged to a very rare sea snail. Squeezing the dye out of the tens of thousands of snails took substantial effort and cost. The result was called Tyrian purple. Only the highest of Romans, royals or magistrates, could wear the purple.

They did paint with gold, green, black, and a lot of red. Many of their best frescoes can still be seen in another city that helped to preserve it with a volcano. The frescoes of Pompeii seem exquisitely preserved two thousand years later.

Somewhere between 300,000 and 30,000 years ago, people scraped pigment off stones, added water, picked bits of burnt sticks out of the fire, and took to the walls. The pictures became increasingly sophisticated, but the ideas were the same. Here I am. Here is my family. Here are the animals, who leap in the water and over the hills. Here is my hand. Here are the colors I see, all the colors of the gods.