Symbolisms of colors in ancient Egypt

The symbolism and use of color in ancient Egypt provided a template for later connotations concerning nature and design. Color itself bestowed individuality to symbol and image.

Artisans began to observe the natural occurrence of colors in their surroundings and pulverized various oxides and other materials to develop the hues they desired.

Egyptians were clothed in white, contrasting starkly with the colorful garments of foreigners. White is also the color of joy and celebration.

The crown of Upper Egypt was white. Red was the symbol of chaos, called "typhonic" after the Greek god Typhoon, whom Greek identified with Seth.

Black used to represented ebony, emmer wheat, cattle, hair, eyes, Nubians. In tombs black color was used to represent mascara. The color also symbolized the underworld, the dead, Osiris, fertility, the heart, Anubis and the Ibis.

The coloring always related to characteristics of the persons represented. In classical Egyptian art male bodies were painted in strong brown colors, while women received a lighter, yellowish shade of color.

Men received an orange color only when age and frailty were to be represented.
Symbolisms of colors in ancient Egypt

Color symbolism in ancient culture and society

Color is an informative yet frequently overlooked subject of anthropological inquiry. Cultures frequently attach particular importance to specific colors and this selection may be due to a multiplicity of factors such as subsistence processes, the natural world, biological processes, the rarity of a dye used to produce a color, or the raw material of which the object is made.

The most powerfully effective color symbols in art have always been those taken directly from nature and especially from natural phenomena already standing for universal ideas.

Blood and bile, vegetable, fore and the sky, for example have an obvious elemental symbolisms associated with fire and passion, sensation, fertility and spiritually.

In primitive art the most important source of color symbolisms was that of the phases of the moon: white, blood red, and black or blue.

The ancient Hebrews experienced color primarily through nature; color suggested to them elements of the physical world. Blue was the color of the sky, green the color of grass and plants, red the color do blood, white the color of wool and snow.

In ancient Egypt, the use of color on the sarcophagi and papyri doubtless also had a symbolic significance, though no consistent meaning seems to have been attached to a particular color, Th headless goddesses perched on mounds in the concluding scene of the papyrus of Djehutymesyu are black.

In ancient culture the blue, purple and scarlet suggested wealth and royalty. Colored textiles were produced from natural dyes that were rare and expensive.
Color symbolism in ancient culture and society

Color categories

One of the most intriguing examples of folk categories is the colors that different language languages recognize.

We all know that there is a very wide range of colors in nature. If you ever tried to decide what color to paint your house and have pored over dozens of color charts at the paint store, you know how many variations of the same color there can be.

We can look at ten different shades of green, and even though we can see that there are different, we still call them all “green”, thus lumping them into the same category.

An interesting experiment is to take finely graded color samples (such as those in a custom-mixed paint color chart) ranging from green to blue, including perhaps 20 to 30 shades.

If you look at both extremes, you can easily say that one is green and the other one is blue.

The hard part is drawing the line between one shade and another, saying that one belongs to the category “green” and the other to the category “blue”.

In fact sometimes we get around this problem by inventing another category, “blue green”.

In our language the category “blue-green” is really not a separate category but merely a convenient label for the transition between two categories.

We know this because we do not have a separate word for it. This indicates to us that, while blue and green are significant, the transition form one to the other is less so.

But in the other language there could easily be a word that designates “blue-green” as a separate category.

Certainly there is no reason why this could not be done – after all, isn’t green a transition between blue and yellow?
Color categories

Color categories

One of the most intriguing examples of folk categories is the colors that different language languages recognize.

We all know that there is a very wide range of colors in nature. If you ever tried to decide what color to paint your house and have pored over dozens of color charts at the paint store, you know how many variations of the same color there can be.

We can look at ten different shades of green, and even though we can see that there are different, we still call them all “green”, thus lumping them into the same category.

An interesting experiment is to take finely graded color samples (such as those in a custom-mixed paint color chart) ranging from green to blue, including perhaps 20 to 30 shades.

If you look at both extremes, you can easily say that one is green and the other one is blue.

The hard part is drawing the line between one shade and another, saying that one belongs to the category “green” and the other to the category “blue”.

In fact sometimes we get around this problem by inventing another category, “blue green”.

In our language the category “blue-green” is really not a separate category but merely a convenient label for the transition between two categories.

We know this because we do not have a separate word for it. This indicates to us that, while blue and green are significant, the transition form one to the other is less so.

But in the other language there could easily be a word that designates “blue-green” as a separate category.

Certainly there is no reason why this could not be done – after all, isn’t green a transition between blue and yellow?
Color categories