Colour in the Ancient Mediterranean World

As historicalscholarship increasingly attends not just to text, but to context, theconsideration of colour - as an aspect of the material, artistic, literary,linguistic and conceptual cultures of antiquity - provides a valuable path ofapproach to our evidence. This evidence demands, and responds to, manydifferent methodological approaches. The papers represented in this volume ofproceedings, based on an international conference held at Edinburgh Universityin 2001, thus reveal a multiplicity of different ways of seeing, studying anddefining colour in antiquity. They bring together researchers working ondifferent cultures and periods, but also different areas of colour research:the technological and archaeological study of painting and dyeing; the manifestationsand meanings of colour in visual art; and the inter-related fields of thesemiosis and symbolism of colour in literature, and the colour terms andcategorisation of ancient languages.