In 'The Value of Colour', an interdisciplinary group of scholars come together to examine economically relevant questions concerning a narrow slice of social and cognitive history: namely, colours. Traditionally, the study of colours has been approached from a cultural or linguistic perspective. The essays collected in this volume highlight the fact that in earliest human history, colours appear in contexts of prestige (value) and commerce. Acquisition, production, labour, circulation and consumption are among the issues discussed by individual authors to show how colourful materials acquired meaning in the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds. Spanning the Palaeolithic to the early Imperial Rome, the contributions also demonstrate the many questions asked and approaches used by historians in the growing field of Colour Studies.
Author(s): Shiyanthi Thavapalan, David Alan Warburton (eds.)
Series: Berlin Studies of the Ancient World, 70
Publisher: Edition Topoi
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 338
City: Berlin
Preface 7
David A. Warburton / Value of Colour: Introduction 9
Wolfgang Schenkel / Colours as Viewed by the Ancient Egyptians and the Explanation of this View as Seen by Academics Studying Colour 35
Theodora Moutsiou / Colour in the Palaeolithic 55
Daniella E. Bar-Yosef Mayer / The Colour of Ornaments in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic of the Levant: Their Symbolic Meaning and Economic Value 69
Gonca Dardeniz / Significance of Colour in the Second Millennium BC: The Perception and Use of Glass at the Centre and Periphery of the Hittites 99
Anna K. Hodgkinson / Manufacturing Colourful Glass Objects in New Kingdom Egypt: A Spatial and Statistical Analysis 125
Shiyanthi Thavapalan / Stones from the Mountain, Stones from the Kiln: Colour in the Glass Texts from Ancient Mesopotamia 177
Louise Quillien / The Economic Role of Coloured Textiles in Babylonia (1st Millennium BC) 201
Ingrid Blom-Böer (with David A. Warburton) / The Composition of the Colour Palette and the Socio-Economic Role of Pigments Used in Egyptian Painting 231
Fritz Blakolmer / The Language of Colour and Material: Were Architectural Façades in the Aegean Bronze Age Brightly Painted? 255
Lydia Pelletier-Michaud / Colour me Greek: Poetic Value, Economy of Language and the Chromatic Vocabulary in Roman Elegy 283
Cecilie Brøns / Ancient Colours: Perspectives and Methodological Challenges 311
