Per Mesut - for younger readers

You can see from their vivid wall paintings and their wonderful jewellery that the Egyptians loved bright colours. The temples, tombs and other monuments that we may visit today might appear rather dull but if you look inside, up under the roof or in sheltered corners where the walls have been protected from the wind and the sand you will see the remains of painted surfaces and colourful relief carvings. The massive pylons of temples such as Karnak and Luxor are decorated with scenes of Pharaoh defeating his enemies in battle, though it is difficult to make out the details since the original colours have disappeared.

You have to imagine these scenes as they were intended to be, brightly coloured against a plain white background, looking more like we would expect of a cartoon story book. We can visualise what the colours must have looked like when they were first painted by comparing these scenes with others from tombs that have not suffered from the same effects of nature.

Egyptian painters used mainly mineral pigments, which tend not to decay over time like colours made from plant sources. Various yellow, red and brown colours were obtained from ochres, forms of iron oxide, which were common throughout Egypt. A more lemony yellow came from orpiment, a naturally occurring sulphite of arsenic.

White was made from limestone or gypsum (calcium carbonate or calcium sulphate), or from a mineral known as huntite (a magnesium calcium carbonate).

A painting from the tomb of Horemheb in the Valley of the Kings, where the bright colours are still well preserved. Photo: RP.

Black was carbon-based, using the charcoal from burnt plant materials or bone, or the soot scraped from an oven or a cooking pot. Green was more of a problem. Even though there were several compounds of copper, such as malachite (copper carbonate), which gave a green colour, these tended to oxidise to a brownish tone. Blue was the most elusive colour.

There is some evidence that a cobalt pigment was used for colouring pottery during the Amarna Period, but this was unusual. Most blue colouring had to be artificially made by a method similar to the manufacture of glass or glazes. This blue pigment, known as ‘Egyptian Blue’, was a copper calcium silicate or frit. Depending on how the frit was ground, it provided a range of blues. The finest powdered frit gave a pale sky-blue colour while coarser grains gave a deeper shade. When mixed with one of the yellow pigments, Egyptian Blue produced a variety of greens.

The Egyptian painter’s palette of colours was pretty much the same as the colours preferred for jewellery.

Instead of using clear gem stones, such as rubies or emeralds, the Egyptian jeweller worked with the deep, mainly opaque, colours of semi-precious stones like carnelian and jasper (red), turquoise (light blue), amethyst (purple) and malachite (green), which were easier to find and much easier to cut and polish. Gold, of course, represented the colour yellow. One stone that was not found in Egypt but which was very popular was lapis lazuli, a rich blue mineral, s o m e t i m e s flecked with gold-coloured metallic particles.

This stone was imported into Egypt from as far away as Afghanistan. It must have reached the Nile Valley after a series of exchanges along the trade routes stretching through Palestine, Canaan and Syria, across the Euphrates River and northwards beyond the Caspian Sea. We will probably never know how the Egyptians came to hear about this mineral, but they were using it for small trinkets and beads as early as 3500 BC.

Because lapis was in such demand but in very short supply, the Egyptians experimented in making an artificial substitute. This was probably how they came to make Egyptian Blue for the first time. The result of these experiments was a type of opaque glass, which, by use of the right minerals, could also be made in colours imitating other stones, notably carnelian and turquoise. The blue stripes on the nemes headdress of Tutankhamun’s golden mask are mostly inlaid blue glass. The glass was of the same chemical composition as the glaze used on the material which we commonly call Egyptian faience. This was most often coloured blue, in tones from a watery greenish tinge, through shades of turquoise, to a brilliant electric blue. Faience was used to make things like amulets, cosmetic containers, shabtis, tiles and inlay for furniture, floors and walls.

Colours are often associated, in language, with particular ideas. In English we say that someone who is feeling miserable or sad is suffering from ‘the blues’, or that a person experiencing a period of success is going through a ‘purple patch’. Though the ancient Egyptians do not seem to have thought of colour in quite the same way as we do today, we can still identify similar sayings in their language. Green was the colour of new growth, of youth and freshness, and of good fortune, which is very different from the English association of green with envy or jealousy.

To say someone was a ‘green’ man was to say that he was lucky. Gods of agriculture or the afterlife, especially Osiris and Ptah, were often shown with green skin, symbolising rebirth.

We talk about black and white as being opposites but the Egyptians talked of black and red because black was the colour of the fertile Nile soil and red described the inhospitable barren desert. If you were angry you would be called ‘red of face’ and a red-haired person was thought to be a follower of Seth, the god of chaos and storm.

Some Egyptian words for colours have far wider meanings than you might think. The word for white also means ‘light’, ‘bright’ and ‘clear’. The verb which could be translated as to ‘make someone white’ means to instruct, inspect or enlighten. There is no word as such for the colour yellow, only the names of the various minerals that produce a yellow pigment. The word for orpiment is qnit which, in hieroglyphs, looks remarkably similar to the word for ‘brave’ or ‘courageous’, the very opposite of our association of yellow with cowardice.

Further reading: you can find out about painting techniques and materials in many books on Egyptian art. For more scientific details you could try: Colour and Painting in Ancient Egypt edited by W.V. Davies.

Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries by A. Lucas & J.R. Harris.

Hilary Wilson