Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey hits Spanish theaters on July 17, and this adaptation of the epic literary classic has already sparked several debates online—ranging from the skin color of Helen of Troy to the inaccuracy of the Achaean warriors’ uniforms, to the filming at various locations on Icelandic beaches—a decision that has led many internet users to question whether the Nordic chill can truly capture the exuberance of the Mediterranean.
Although early reviews suggest that the scenes shot in Iceland are limited to encounters with gods or nightmares, this controversy over Mediterranean light and color reopens a mystery that The Odyssey has raised for 3,000 years: Did the Greeks see the color blue? Setting aside the apocryphal historical myth that claims Homer was blind (a claim complicated by another, much better-supported myth that Homer is actually a collective name for several authors), the fact that this color is not mentioned in either *The Iliad* or *The Odyssey* is an omission that has fascinated people for 3,000 years and raises questions related to sight, language, the brain, and, of course, the sea.
A world of white, black, and flashes of red
Throughout its immortal pages, there are references to colors that seem confusing to us today. Honey is described as green, sheep as violet, and, in its most famous metaphor, it is repeated dozens of times that the Mediterranean Sea is “the color of wine” (oînops póntos). The first person to become obsessed with this omission was four-time British Prime Minister William Gladstone in 1858. Intrigued by Homer’s color palette, he set out to count every single color reference in his texts. The result was revealing: black and white absolutely dominated the work (with nearly 200 and 100 mentions, respectively), followed far behind by red (about 13 times) and green and yellow (fewer than 10). Blue simply did not exist. In fact, ancient Greek words such as kyanos—which today we might associate with the color cyan—were used at the time to describe darkness, such as Zeus’s bushy eyebrows, Hector’s hair, or the hue of dark metals. Gladstone concluded that the Greeks of that era had a poorly developed sense of color and “lived in a black-and-white world, with a few flashes of red and metallic glints.”
A few years later, the German philologist Lazarus Geiger decided to take it a step further and find out whether this “deficiency” affected only the Greeks. He conducted an in-depth analysis of ancient texts from around the world—the Quran, the Hebrew Bible, the Icelandic sagas, and the Vedic hymns of India—and found the pattern repeated itself. Amazed by the Indian texts, Geiger left a poetic observation: “…but there is one thing no one could learn from these ancient songs… and that is that the sky is blue.” Geiger discovered something fascinating: humanity has consistently named colors in the same evolutionary order. First, all cultures distinguish between light and darkness (white and black). Then comes red, the color of blood and wine. Later, yellow and green are named. And blue always comes last.
The commonly accepted theory is that, despite being the color by which astronauts distinguish Earth, blue is not as common on our planet as one might think. There are very few blue animals or plants, so primitive societies had no need to name it. The only exception was the ancient Egyptians, who were the only culture in antiquity capable of producing blue dyes and, therefore, the only ones who had a word for it. As linguist Guy Deutscher aptly summarizes: “The more technologically advanced societies become, the more the range of color names expands.”
Is there no color without words?
Fernando Pessoa wrote poetically that “to see is to have seen.” Although from a physiological standpoint—or so it is believed—our ancestors’ eyes functioned just like ours, their brains did not distinguish between the shade of the sky and that of the sea, because they lacked a linguistic term for it. In our own century, researcher Jules Davidoff traveled to Namibia to study the Himba tribe, whose language lacks a word for blue but has multiple terms for green. In an experiment, he showed them a screen with eleven green squares and one blue one; the Himba were unable to distinguish the blue with the naked eye. However, they could detect variations in green so subtle that they would be invisible to us. The brain learns to differentiate and identify what language teaches it to name.
This has fascinating implications, as demonstrated by the experiment that linguist Guy Deutscher conducted with his own daughter, Alma. He taught her all the colors and their names, including blue, but did not allow anyone to tell her what color the sky was. When asked about the color of what was above their heads, the girl was perplexed and, after hesitating for a long time, replied, “white.” Only months later, influenced by postcards and culture, did she begin to call it blue.
According to Deutscher, this demonstrates something fundamental about the human mind: “There was no pressing need to give the color of the sky a name. It is not an object.” Referring to how people in ancient times related to this hue, Deutscher summed up the essence of this omission: “They understood it with their minds, but not with their souls.”
