The invention of blue

Sculpture of the Greek philosopher Socrates found in the Garden of the Academy of Athens

The records of ancient civilizations, such as the Greek, do not mention the colour blue. It is possible that they never saw this particular colour.

Sounds weird right?

Currently, blue is an easy colour to identify because there is a word to classify it and we know that the sky or the sea are of that hue. In Homero's Odyssey he described the sea as having a "dark wine" colour, and to speak of the sky he spoke its "bronze" colour.

Our brain is like a pattern recording machine built to quickly identify things that are useful to us, discarding the rest of what we perceive as meaningless noise. This notion of concepts and language that limit cognitive perception is called linguistic relativism, a term used to describe the ways in which different cultures may have difficulty remembering or retaining information about objects or concepts for which they lack identification of idiom.

Just as the Inuits have many words to refer to the colour white or snow, the Greeks were unable to perceive the blue colour of the sky and the sea as we do.

As an extra fact, the only ancient culture that developed a word for this colour before the rest were the Egyptians, as it was the only civilization that could produce a blue dye.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

My Modern Met. 2021. The History of the Color Blue: From Ancient Egypt to the Latest Scientific Discoveries. 

Gottesman, S., 2021. A Brief History of Blue.

Loria, K., 2021. No one could see the colour blue until modern times.