Economic Aspects of Colours in Antiquity

Present in every strata of human activity – from fashion, art and literature to religion, ritual and earliest science – colour was clearly a significant material and conceptual element of life in the ancient world. This appears to us entirely normal and yet the concept must have some kind of origin. Today, we take the ubiquity of colours for granted and try to understand its history in terms of our modern semantic and physical categories. While this approach is useful in comprehending some aspects of the development of colours, it founders as we go further back. In the Bronze Age, many striking colourful substances, such as textiles, glass, stones and paint, are present in the material record, but the verbal categories of contemporary languages do not yet clearly demarcate these domains as we would recognize them. How did our modern conceptual categories emerge? In this workshop, we aim to explore the social and cultural “meanings” of colour by concentrating on the economic sphere. What was the value of colourful stones and why was coloured glass allowed to substitute them? How and why were glass and faience produced? What was the difference between artificially manufactured colours and the raw materials (dyes, pigments and mineral ores) that served to produce them? These are questions that are fundamental to understanding not only human values, but also cognitive history. In this sense, taking a slice of the story of colour opens up a window into the history of the human mind. It is these issues of this kind that we will address in this workshop, via presentations of material and discussions of concepts.

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