Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Ancient Colors

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

When people from prehistory created the first works of art on the walls of caves, they used the colors that they found around them. Almost all of the early cave art is drawn in black or dark red. As time progressed, humans figured out how to create more colors and they began using them in more and different ways. However, some colors were very difficult to create and those who could do it became fabulously rich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When people from prehistory created the first works of art on the walls of caves, they use colors that they found around them. Almost all of the early cave art is drawn in black or dark red. As time progressed, humans figured out how to create more colors, and they began to use them in more and different ways. However, some colors were very difficult to create, and those who could do it became fabulously rich. Learn more about colors in the ancient world

and how early humans developed dyes and paints on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Audible.com. My audiobook recommendation today is Stepping Stones,

a journey through the Ice Age Caves of the Dordonia by Christine Desemaine-Tugan. The cave art of Francis Dordonia region is world-famous for the mythology and the beauty of its remarkable drawings and paintings. These ancient images of lively bison, horses, and mammoths, as well as symbols of all kinds, are fascinating touchstones in the development of human culture. Focusing on five fascinating sites, including the famed Font du Gome, and others that still remain open to the public. This audiobook reveals striking similarities between art forms of the Paleolithic and works of modern artists and gives us a unique pathway

towards understanding the culture of the Dordonia Paleolithic peoples and how it still touches our lives today. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks by going to audibletrial.com slash everything everywhere or by clicking on the link in the show notes. The first artwork created by human beings might have been someone who took a burning stick from a fire and scratched out an image on a rock. The black soot from the stick was the first proto-writing instrument and the first form of art. If you've ever doodled something with a charred stick on a rock, you might have realized that it isn't very permanent.

The first good rain will wash it all away. Eventually, in another sitting around the fire session, someone mixed some charcoal with some animal frat from their recent hunt and created something which was more permanent. When they drew with this substance, especially in the inside of a cave, it didn't wash away. It was kind of the world's very first pigment.

You can still see these charcoal drawings in cave paintings around the world. However, if you've ever seen images of cave paintings, you might have noticed that black isn't the color that's most often used. The reddish-brown color most cave paintings are done in is called ochre. Ochre comes in several different colors,

including shades of yellow, red, orange, and brown. Ochre is also known as the mineral hematite, which is really just a form of iron oxide, or in common parlance, rust. Ochre is found all over the world, and as such we can find ochre paintings almost everywhere there were humans. We found these paintings in the Amazon,

in Australia, in Europe, Africa, and in Asia. The other primitive color which early humans used was white. This would be found in substances like chalk or other forms of calcium carbonate. Reddish-brown, black, and white is a pretty simple color palette. As humanity developed agriculture, a division of labor developed, which allowed for specialization. This allowed for the development of armies, priesthoods, kings, and of course, artists. People began discovering more colors in nature.

These colors were harder to find than just burnt wood and hematite. A much deeper red was discovered in the form of vermilion, or cinnabar. Cinebar is chemically known as mercury sulfide, and it's really toxic. If you ever hear anything about an ancient mercury mine, they weren't mining a liquid silvery metal. What they were mining was Cinebar. The oldest known use of Cinebar goes back almost 9,000 years to ancient Turkey. A proper blue was first developed, as far as we can tell, in ancient Egypt. They developed what is known as Egyptian blue, which is chemically known as calcium copper silicate.

Egyptian blue is more of a light blue, and it's not really a deep blue. There were other blues that were developed. The most popular was probably indigo, which comes from the plant by the same name. It was used by Greeks and Romans, and it's actually still used today. Indigo is basically the color of blue jeans, and it's a much deeper blue than Egyptian blue. The use of indigo made Egyptian blue fall into disuse for centuries, until it was later discovered during the Renaissance in use and paintings. A similar type of blue was also developed in the Americas called Maya Blue.

Azurite was another blue that was used by Egyptians. It's a very deep blue copper mineral, but it's much harder to find than a pigment like indigo. Yellow usually came from the plant saffron. It plays double duty, both as a spice as well as a pigment or a dye. You might have noticed that there are a couple basic colors that I haven't listed yet. One of the colors there wasn't really a simple source of was green. You might think that this is really odd, given how much green exists in the world in the form of plants and chlorophyll. Egyptians used to crush malachite to create a green, and the Greeks also created a substance called verdigris,

which is created by putting copper plates and hot vinegar in a sealed pot. However, neither of these was really a dark green. Green was often created by just mixing together yellow and blue. There was one other color, which was really rare. It was so rare and expensive that it was really the genesis of this entire episode. Purple. Eggplants notwithstanding, there isn't a whole lot of purple in nature. The Chinese had a color known as Han purple, but it wasn't really purple.

It was just a really dark shade of blue. It was a form of deep azurite, which was similar to what the Egyptians used. The ones who created a true purple dye were the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians were creating purple dye at least 30. 500 years ago. In fact, some people think the word Phoenician actually means purple. The secret to purple dye was the mucus of predatory sea snails of the Murex family. Different species of snails could produce different shades of purple. These snails are only found in the eastern Mediterranean sea, and the primary place of production was the Phoenician city of Tyre, which today is in the

nation of Lebanon. The name of this purple was Tyre Purple, but it also went by royal purple, imperial purple, and Phoenician purple. Its association with royalty came from the simple fact that the dye was so expensive to produce that only royalty could afford it. Purple dye was said to be worth its weight in silver. In ancient Rome, magistrates would wear a toga pretexta, which was a white robe with a purple stripe. A conquering general on the day of his triumph would get to wear a toga Picta, which was a solid

purple toga with a gold stripe. Eventually, laws were enacted which prevented anyone but the end. emperor to wear purple. The color purple even became synonymous with the emperor. To don the purple meant to rise to the position of emperor. A child of an emperor was said to be born into the purple. Perhaps it was appropriate that an artist named Prince had purple as his favorite color. The creation of a purple dye was a closely guarded secret because of how expensive the process was. Thousands of snails had to be harvested. Then they had to be removed from their shell one by one and a tiny glance.

removed. The juice of the gland was then placed in a vat and left in sunlight where it would change colors over time. To get purple, the process had to be stopped precisely, or otherwise it would just turn into red, which wasn't quite as valuable. Overall, the ancient world was far more colorful than most people realize. The ruins we see today are the same color as the stones that the buildings were made from. The Parthenon in Athens is white, and the temples in Egypt are a sandstone beige. However, in their haydance, all of these buildings were brightly colored. Mostly, they were just simple basic colors

like red, blue, yellow, white, and black, and maybe with some gold leaf thrown in. If you look closely in some of the temples, you can still actually see traces of the original paint. I remember visiting the Coambo Temple in Egypt. I looked up at the ceiling, and I could see traces of color where it had been painted. The underside of the ceiling was the most protected part of the building from the elements,

and it was the last place where the original color remained. Moreover, all of those white marble Roman and Greek statues you might have seen in a museum were almost always painted. When they were discovered or rediscovered during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, all of the paint had been removed by time in the elements, so everyone just thought that they were supposed to be white. However, they found some statues with the original paint, and on many statues they could find extremely tiny flexive paint in the crevices of the statue.

Today, we really don't think much about the origin of colors. We have every possible color we can think of in the forms of paints and dyes. However, thousands of years ago, dyes and pigments were a really big deal, given how difficult they were to produce. Since humans first made a drawing of their hands on the wall of a cave, color has been an important part of humanity. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even opportunities for a show producer credit. If you know someone you think would enjoy the show, please share it with them.

Also remember, if you leave a five-star review, I'll read your review on the show. Buddy the elf, what's your favorite color?