When translating Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, 19th-century classicists were puzzled by the ancient poet’s unusual colour metaphors, especially his description of the sea as “wine-dark” (oinops pontos). While some believed the association was an indication of how people of the time were all colourblind, some researchers were more interested in what colours different languages and cultures decide to name.
The colour hierarchy
By the 1960s, linguists began to suspect that colour vocabularies across different cultures unfold in a predictable sequence, not randomly. In a seminal 1969 study, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay tested speakers of diverse languages by asking them to name hundreds of colour swatches. The results were striking: languages with two colour terms consistently had words for “dark” and “light”; those with three included “red”; with four added “green” or “yellow”; with five they added the other; and with six they consistently introduced “blue” after yellow. The pattern extended beyond six: later additions often include brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray, in that order.
This isn’t just theoretical, it’s reflected in real-world observations. Russian children learning to speak distinguish two basic blues before six or seven, reflecting how even within languages, category boundaries can shift with culture and development . And researchers have revisited Homer’s sea, noting that “wine-dark” reflects a world before “blue” was part of the standard palette, Homer’s Greeks might have focused more on lightness and saturation than hue when describing colour.
Further support for the hierarchy comes from computer simulations: artificial agents in simulated “communities” developed colour terms in the same sequence, first red, then green and yellow, and finally blue and other shades. This suggests that the order reflects something inherent in human perception and communication: more salient or important distinctions (e.g., red vs. dark/light) are labelled first, while subtler hues come later.
Taken together, these insights show that Homer’s “wine-dark sea” emerges not from colour-blindness, but from a stage in the evolution of colour naming, where brightness (wine-like darkness) took precedence over hue. His choice of metaphor captures a world before “blue” had firm footing in language, and reminds us that how we describe colours is deeply shaped by the structure of our vocabulary and perception.
How ancient people perceived colour
In his 1704 work Opticks, Isaac Newton revealed that white light could be separated into a spectrum of colours, what we now recognise as the rainbow. This discovery overturned the long-standing Aristotelian belief that colour existed along a simple continuum from white to black. Instead, Newton introduced a new way of understanding colour: as an abstract, quantifiable property.
According to Mark Bradley, Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham, ancient societies viewed colour quite differently. Rather than seeing colours as independent, abstract qualities, they understood them as inseparable from the objects they described. For instance, an ancient Greek would not call a table “brown” in the modern sense but would describe it as “wood-coloured.” In this perspective, colour was rooted in material and context, an experiential feature rather than a detached category.
Evolutionary communication
What Berlin and Kay’s research proved, above all, is that the way we communicate colours follows a similar pattern despite geographical, cultural and linguistic differences. This revelation highlights how communication is a human trait, and as so it has evolved just like any other aspect of our biology.
