4. The Ancient Greeks Saw The Sky As Bronze-Colored
They got it half-right here. There was no strict equivalent of the word "blue" in ancient Greece, and Homer did indeed refer to a bronze sky, but does this necessarily mean that all of the ancient Greeks lived in a tripped-out world of crazy color associations? Maybe, maybe not. Many blue things we see today are manmade things dyed or printed blue. It's cheap and easy to do now, but for thousands of years people couldn't really sort an easy, reliable way to do it. Until the early years of the 1800s, the best source for blue dye was lapis lazuli, a rock only found in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, thus leaving many of history's great civilizations dependent solely on trades and imports if they wanted to color anything blue. A notable exception would be the Romans, who bought so much lapis-based pigment off the Egyptians (who had purchased lapis from the Afghanis) that it became rather more commonplace than it was in other civilizations. So if the Greeks weren't swimming in lapis lazuli, what blue things does that leave? The sky (which can also be a variety of other colors, depending on time of day and weather), the sea, and maybe some birds and a handful of flowers. In other words: there were certainly other colors in the world of an ancient Greek that were far more common than blue. Yes, there is some speculation that because they so rarely saw it, the ancient Greek brain may have never really "properly" processed the color blue, and so the image they saw of a blue sky was a different one than we see today. There is some sound neurological evidence for it, but we can't exactly go back and give Homer an MRI so this theory will have to remain untested (at least until we develop time travel). However, other things come into play here. Bear in mind that the Greeks back then sorted color based on saturation (how much of a color) rather than hue (which color in particular). Thus while the language distinguishes between dark and light blue (
kyaneos and
glaukos, respectively), those words also refer to dark green, violet, black, or brown (kyaneos), or light green, gray, or yellow (glaukos). To say that they lacked a word to describe a blue thing is misleading; it's just that they had a totally different paradigm of color-sorting than we do. And finally, back to my point about the Greeks not having a lot of blue in their environment: I neglected to mention this earlier (and the elves and Stephen Fry seemed to overlook this entirely), but over time, exposure to the elements will turn bronze a lovely shade of teal that much more closely resembles what we think of as "sky-colored" (pictured above).