Not unlike the “discovery” of America (I say it was by those prehistoric folk who crossed the landbridge from Asia to become known as Native Americans – but I digress), the brilliant blue of the Ancient Egyptians has been discovered (rediscovered?) many times. Vitruvius takes credit for writing down the recipe for this wonderous blue, though I imagine that somewhere among the millions of hieroglyphs in Egypt, the formula was well recorded. The Romans hated it, so the color fell out of favor (except it seems in Pompeii), and the recipe lost. Of course, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the recipe for concrete was lost, too.
This left the medieval Europeans without both concrete and a brilliant blue. They had to grind expensive lapis lazuli to create the robes on those paintings of the Virgin Mary. In about 1844, that blue was “discovered” in paintings in the ruins of Pompeii. In the U.S. around 1930, scientist, George Washington Carver, he of the peanut and crop rotation techniques, “discovered” Egyptian blue and set about trying to find an Egyptian purple. Recently, it has been “discovered” that Raphael, the great painter of the Renaissance, “discovered” Egyptian Blue, and scientists have “discovered” that it can be used for forensic dusting powder and security strips used in printed money. Let’s get all this discovery sorted out.
Here is what we know for sure. Egyptian blue comes from Ancient Egypt. To the Ancient Egyptians, blue, as the color of the sky, meant it was heavenly, associated with the gods and the universe. It was also the color of the Nile, which was their source of life. Blue was precious. Around 2600 B.C. the ancients found that a combination of sand (which contains calcium silicate), copper, and natron if heated properly would produce this startling blue. It was then ground into little bits to be mixed with binders of various types to produce the blue used to color many objects and to paint the walls of their temples and tombs (see the Tomb of Horemheb below).
Blue is the rarest occuring color in nature, but it was one that meant a lot to the Ancient Egyptians as they associated it with Amun-Ra, a principle god. The affection that the Egyptians had for blue meant that they had to find a economical way to produce the color. Grinding up lapis lazuli, turquoise and azurite was expensive. Hence some experimentation that created a way to make the color artificially. It is claimed to be the oldest known artificial color.
Vitruvius, the 1st century B.C. Roman writer, famous for his work De architectura, was fascinated by how the color was made and wrote down the recipe for it. His works were lost in the chaos of the fall of Rome and only found again at the beginning of the Renaissance, but no one seems to have paid attention to the recipe for blue. In case you want to know what the process is, here is a video from the SciShow on youtube.com. I’d say, don’t try this at home.
However, despite the interest of Vitruvius, the Romans overall seemed to have had a different attitude about blue. It was seen as a color of dishonor, sometimes even associated with death. The Romans favored reds, yellows, oranges, and so on, though with the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii, blue was found to have been still used. However, during the Roman era the demand for this blue color dropped significantly, leading to the functional loss of how to make it.
Come the Middle Ages and what were people to do when it seemed that the most fitting color for the Virgin Mary’s robes was brilliant blue? They were left often to grind up that expensive lapis lazuli, something that has had a detrimental effect on a number of paintings from those times. It seems that when times were financially tough, many of these paintings were striped of this valuable blue, leaving posterity with blank spaces where the Virgin’s robes had been.
Recently it came to light that in the Renaissance, the great painter Raphael (seen here his self-portrait, 1506) used Egyptian blue in his painting, The Triump of Galatea, 1514. It is used in the sky and the sea and even in the whites of the eyes of some of the figures in the painting. Raphael created the painting for a loggia in the Villa Farnesina, which was owned by Pope Julius’ treasurer. It seems that none of the other paintings Raphael did used this Egyptian Blue. (See thehistoryblog.com.)
In the 19th century, a chemist named Humphrey Davy found pieces of it in the Baths of Titus in Rome, and later when the ruins of Pompeii were found, it was seen that this blue had been used there as well.
Here the story shifts to America, where another scientist, this one involved with agriculture and the properties of plants, recreated Egyptian blue. Dr George Washington Carver was famous for experimenting in biology and chemistry. In 1930, he found a formula for recreating the blue seen in the artifacts from King Tutankhamen’s tomb. That tomb had just been found (1922) by archeologist, Howard Carter and Tut-mania had taken hold of the world.
From there we come to our current interest in this particular blue, which has certain properties of fluorescence that make it work nicely for forensic dusting powders, security strips in paper money, biomedical analysis, telecomunications, and lasers. Philip McCouat has an article on the modern usages for this color, “Egyptian Blue: The Colour of Technology,” artinsociety.com, which shows how this ancient creation fits into our modern world. So when we look at our money, or see an old episode of C.S.I., we can remember those ancient people who dwelled on the Nile and thank them for their expertise.
Sources used for this essay are linked above. One special source used is the book, Blue, History of a Color by Michel Pastoureau, the French historian who is a foremost scholar in the history of color. The works of art are all in public domain.
The Wines of the Pharaohs.
Well, it is certain that this fellow had all the wine he wanted. This is one of the many statues of Amenhotep III who reigned in Ancient Egypt’s golden age during the 18th Dynasty/New Kingdom. (Cute, isn’t he?) But he is not the first of the Pharaohs to have wine. Oh no, that started almost 2000 years before Amenhotep III with a man who really was known as King Scorpion. He reigned around 3320 B.C. His burial at Abydos has 700 wine vessels, all labeled with the types of wine they once held.
It is said that he got his wine from the Levant (modern Jordan, Israel, Lebanon). It wasn’t until around 2600 B.C. that the Ancient Egyptians began to grow their own grapes and make wine.
They cultivated grapes in the Nile Delta near Medjen, where the first mention of wine making in Egypt is found. The word for wine, symbolized by this hieroglyph, is irep, which sounds a bit like what happens when you drink too much.
It is known that the wines were mixed with spices, like mint and coriander, with sometimes a fig added for flavor. Wine jars have been found with labels that were made by pressing images into wet clay. These labels sometimes indicated the purposes for the wine, such as wine for taxes (interesting way to pay your bill), for merrymaking, and for offerings. This video shows a collection of statues from across the ages in Ancient Egypt in which figures hold offerings of wine in small jugs or jars youtube.com
One of the types of offerings was for the beginning of a pharaoh’s reign when a wine would be made to celebrate the new pharaoh. Similarly a wine would be made at the end of the pharaoh’s reign and called the funerary wine of that pharaoh. One of the Amarna period’s most enigmatic figures is a pharaoh named Smenkhkare, who may have been a brother to King Tut. One thing that marked his actual existence was the discovery of wine jars labeled “The Wine of the House of Smenkhkare” done in the first year of his reign and later that same year, “The Funerary Wine of Smenkhkare,” meaning that such a king did reign though only for a short time. Then, of course, came Tutankhamen.
Speaking of King Tutankhamen, one of the reasons Howard Carter stayed for years in the vacinity where he ultimately found the tomb of the boy king was that Carter had found remains of the funerary feast 0f Tutankhamen in that area in 1908. Carter did not find the actual tomb until 1922.
The funerary rites in Ancient Egypt involved final ceremonies of purification and offerings of food and wines to the departed pharaoh, after which the participants had a feast before sealing the pharaoh into his tomb for his eternal rest. It was the remains of items bearing the king’s name that were left behind in the sands after that feast, which Carter found 3300 years later. For more on funerals in Ancient Egypt, see this article from the Australian Museum australian.museum.
All this talk of pharaohs might lead you to think they were the only ones drinking wine. Well, rather like today other people drank wine, too, but generally they were rather well off like Nebamun. He was a wealthy official who also wanted his grand life to be remembered, hence some of the most elaborate paintings of Ancient Egyptian life left to us today. In the banquet scene above, we see guests being served drink while many of the beautiful ladies sniff the blue lotus, which supposedly enhanced feelings of well being and sensuality. Probably was a good party.
The common people, though their normal drink was beer, got to have some wine on the occasion of certain festivals, like that of Hathor, the goddess of beauty, love, and fertility, who was often represented in her daytime form as a cow. However, she had another side, represented by the lioness. It was that form that once went on a rampage of killing, which only stopped when the god Ra tricked her into drinking a large quantity of wine, the red color of which she mistook for blood. So to commemorate Ra’s saving humanity, on the Ancient Egyptian New Year (the 20th day of Thoth, the first month of the year), there was the Festival of Hathor, also known as the Festival of Drunkeness, which was all out party-hardy. Interesting how these ancient people seem so similar to us.
Well, wine is still with us and fortunately humankind has expanded its types and varieties a great deal. To get to know more about wine, it is necessary to experience the taste of it. One great way to do that is to join a wine club. Cellars Wine Club offers a variety of clubs that work with every level of taste and budget. There is a “no bad bottle” return policy, and free shipping. The Premium Case Club is a particularly attractive club as it contains 12 bottles, tasting notes on each wine, and your preference (all reds, all whites, or a mix of both) for $99.00. You can go to the Cellars page here under Of Art and Wine Pages or click here cellarswineclub.com.
Marjorie Vernelle is an artist, writer, college professor, and traveler. For more see the Pages at ofartandwine.com or her author page at amazon.com and her art at Vernelle Art Boutique vernellestudio.com.
©marjorie vernelle 2020
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Coming Soon: Beyond Black, the Paintings of Norman Lewis, plus Wines of New York State.
Norman Lewis was a rarity, an African American abstract expressionist painter. Though he exhibited his paintings with the best of his white colleagues, during his lifetime his work was not fully appreciated. That was remedied in 2015 by a comprehensive retrospective held at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Come take a look at his paintings and find out about America’s third largest wine producing area, New York State.
