When was the color blue invented?

Answer 1

In some senses the colour blue was invented by the Egyptians when they discovered a means of manufacturing a blue dye. The earliest evidence of this is around 2500 BCE. Before this languages seem not have a word for blue, and people may have found it hard to distinguish it from other colours.

In 1858 William Gladstone wrote that Homer, the ancient Greek, does not use the colour blue in any of his poems. In fact, Gladstone noticed peculiar and inconsistent uses of colour in all ancient Greek literature. Gladstone concluded the ancient greeks were colour-blind.

10 years later a German, Lazarus Geiger, realised that ancient texts from Iceland to Chinese to the original Hebrew Bible, do not have a word for blue. His analysis of ancient writings suggested that colour words first appear in languages in rather predictable order: Black & white first, then red, yellow, green and finally blue. There are some variations on this, but blue is always last.

This is perhaps because the colour blue is very rare in nature, and before modern dyes people would not have interacted with blue objects very often.

The modern Japanese word for green, "midori", used to be considered a shade of "ao", which includes both blues and greens. Today midori and ao correspond roughly to the West's green and blue, although the boundary is a bit different.

There are still many languages in the world without a word for blue. Some peoples who speak these languages, such as the Himba in Namibia, find it almost impossible to pick the "odd one out" if a blue square is placed next to various ones. It's not that that they don't see blue, but they don't notice it. Since they don't categorise the colours differently, their brains don't perceive them as different. If blue is a description of how something is perceived, the colour may not exist for them.

Answer 2

The color blue has existed since ancient times, with evidence of it being used in art and decoration dating back thousands of years. However, the process of creating synthetic blue pigments that were more readily available and affordable to use in art and textiles began in the early modern period, around the 18th century.