Investigating the Invisible Color that Ancient People Couldn’t See

originally posted by: Wrapscalllionn
a reply to: toms54

my people, the muscogee creek, have the word " lane" for both green and yellow, oklane for light blue, holatte for blue, and okholatte for purple. We dont make a distinction between green and yellow.

"We dont make a distinction between green and yellow." You can still see them as different colors though, right? Or are they shades of the same color?

Very interesting topic, nice find and thank you for sharing.
As far as the Net is concerned at least for my quick search the oldest Indigo dyed cloth ever found is from Peru so predating the oldest Egyptian find's.
www.livescience.com...

To see if there was a shift in our genetic make up would require extensive samples of intact ancient DNA which we probably don't have enough of.

In the bible Sapphire and other blue gem's colors may be used in place of Blue and of course the ancient Celt's whom lived in a warrior cast system of tribal people's especially among the Britain's would paint themselves in Blue Woad a dye with antiseptic property's which could also help to prevent infections in battle - a lot more intelligent than they were claimed to be those naked crazy Celtic warrior's.
woad-inc.co.uk...

I suspect if you do a search into ancient history the reference to Like Sapphire or like Lapis Lazuli are probably quite common so you may want to substitute that for the word Blue which may have been a later written word used to distinguise these similar color's we today simply refer to as blue.

Certainly if people could not see the color then we would have to ask why they seemed to value gem's of that color and why Lapis Lazuli mostly mined in the Hindu Kush region's now known as Afghanistan was so prized that it was found as far away as Egypt and even ancient Britain from as long ago as the neolithic period.

Of course there ARE color's to which we ARE blind, ultra violet for example.

And of course it is likely that as in the case of many that are supposedly Color blind - except those few whom suffer total color blindness whom see the world as a monochrome that most of the rest of us with slight color blindness see it more in a phase shifted way so that our personal spectrum would look a tiny bit different to your's since we still see color's just some are harder to distinguish.

For example the color test card when I went to join the Navy and found out that I was color blind was to me a trident with three upward pointing spikes but to you it would appear as a 4.

Just maybe our eye's are evolving to see color more than our ancestor's.

Or

There has been a whole history of Mandela type affects and reality shift's long before modern people claim to have experienced them, perhaps this could mean our ancestors were actually living in a different reality to us?.

More likely they simply took the color for granted and used Sapphire and Lapis Lazuli comparison's to describe it,
"My fair Maiden with Eye's like Lapis Lazuli and Hair like Fine Wrought Gold" for example.

a reply to: toms54

Maybe people had some colorblindness way back then.

My dad can't tell the difference between red and green

originally posted by: trollz
I could see the different green square. Could anyone else?

I could- but I think it'd have been easier if it was not on a computer monitor.

Nice thread!

Out here, our Chickasaw language(Muskogean based) has one word for Green and blue "Okchamali", which always bugged me; Did they never need to distinguish between the two.. ever??

While the descriptions aren't right- what about Greek art? Mosaics have blue in them, as well as green, faces are the right colors for the most part... Greek mosaics

Something doesn't quite add up. If they can *use* the colors- how come they couldn't describe the colors?

originally posted by: Madrusa
a reply to: toms54

It is the mystery of Kek

Hungarian kék “blue” Manchu kuku “blue-gray” Sumerian kukku ( ku10-ku10; kukku5 “(to be) dark”

Maybe Kek is really blue (like the Indian gods.) We just don't know it yet. We must wait for Kek to reveal himself.

a reply to: Butterfinger

I have wondered about that. Holatte seems to be a late addition to muscogee creek, maybe when those who went oklahoma created the words.

a reply to: toms54

I bet he is Chartreuse

a reply to: LABTECH767

I looked at your link and I want to post a comment about it in Ancient Origins later today. Thank you.

originally posted by: JAGStorm
a reply to: toms54

Maybe people had some colorblindness way back then.

My dad can't tell the difference between red and green

They say I have red-green colorblindness but I can see red and I can see green. Green and grey are a little harder for me. Those pastel colored VW Beetles used to drive me crazy.

originally posted by: wylekat
While the descriptions aren't right- what about Greek art? Mosaics have blue in them, as well as green, faces are the right colors for the most part... Greek mosaics

Something doesn't quite add up. If they can *use* the colors- how come they couldn't describe the colors?

Good question. How about those Minoan murals?

a reply to: toms54

Without words to describe them, how would you describe them?

Cultures that have no word for zero...how do they describe zero?

a reply to: Wrapscalllionn

From what Ive been told, the Chickasaw and Choctaw languages were formed well before De Soto recorded his experiences, 2 centuries before the removal.

Some others I'm noticing with my limited knowledge
"Oka" means Water
"Okti" is Snow
The Ok brings it to relation with water, some root word in ancient Muskogean?

a reply to: toms54

This is interesting. I wonder if they saw the sky as shades of grey. Is there evidence for indigo paints in ancient caves? If so, it might render the argument invalid. Or are there descriptions of rainbows without blue?

Perhaps humans eyesight was improved through an evolving process which allowed a deeper color perception?

The Old Testament mentions a blue color a few times. It is referred to in the Ancient Hebrew language as Tekhelet and is mentioned regarding the curtains of the Tabernacle and a few other things...

Unfortunately, like so much of humanity's past, the exact material has been lost to history.

a reply to: toms54

Very fascinating thread! One thing to consider is gender. Typically more men are color blind than women and it was the men that were educated.

This could explain why there's limited words for blue in male dominated cultures.

Black then white are all I see
In my infancy.
Red and yellow then came to be,
Reaching out to me,
Lets me see.

Tool- Lateralus

Released May 15,2001

Some pretty curious lyrics if you ask me.
m.youtube.com...

a reply to: toms54

Blue was invented by NASA during the moon mission in the 1960's as were most other colors.

Just look at an old movie - Black and white, some grey.

The first blue dyes were Indigo, I believe. It goes way back

Archaeologists recently uncovered several scraps of indigo-dyed fabric at the Huaca Prieta ceremonial mound in northern Peru. Believed to be about 6,200 years old...,

Source: Smithsonian

Perhaps they saw it as a different color?