Humans first gave a name to the color blue about 4500 years ago. The first ones to do so were the Egyptians who knew how to produce blue dye.

Problematic interpretation

The standard interpretation for this is that blue was seen as a special shade of green. But if this was the case, then the sky and the sea should have been described as green in ancient texts. However, the Greek poet Homer describes the sea as wine dark. He also describes oxen in the fields as red and the sky as bronze in color.

A redder sun and a bronze sky

But if the sky was bronze, it makes perfect sense that the light reflected off of the sea was wine dark. Brown cattle would also appear red. A bronze sky would make things appear red and purple in color, and blue would be difficult to distinguish from green.

It could be argued that the repeated references to the sky as bronze were in fact references to oxidized bronze. But oxides are rarely referred to by the same name as their metals. Rust is not the same color as steel, and patina is not the same as bronze. A more straight forward explanation for Homer’s color pallet is that the sun gave off a redder light in our distant past.

The golden age

This would mean that there really was a golden age before our age, and that we should take this literally. The golden age was golden in the sense that everything was bathed in a golden light. This literal interpretation may have been standard in ancient times. Which would explain why Homer stayed true to the original story even if he recorded it in a time when the sky was as it is today. He saw nothing strange about the color pallet. He simply took it for granted that this was how people saw things during the golden age, when the events recorded by Homer took place.

Shades rather than colors

Further evidence for this can be found in the fact that ancient languages deal with colors in terms of shades. Colors appear later, with blue being relatively recent. This indicates that the world was a place full of shades rather than colors.

As it happens, this is what we get when we go into a room lit by a red lamp. Everything in the room turns into shades of red and purple. If the sun was redder in the past, people wouldn’t have seen colors but shades.

Roman illustration of Odysseus on a wine dark sea

By Giorcesderivative work: Habib M’henni – File:GiorcesBardo54.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10353941