SKY BLUE, RED HEAVENS, AND ORANGE OVER ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA

Wayne Horowitz

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

If I look back in time, the paper below was born in the infancy of my academic career as part of my studies of Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography for my PhDthesis and subsequent books of this same name under the supervision of Professor Wilfred G. Lambert at Birmingham University in England (Horowitz 2011).1All assyriological abbreviations below are as in the CAD (Chicago Assyrian Dictionary), with exception of GSL (The Great Star List), for which see n. 24 below.These preliminary ideas then reached maturity as part of my work at Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem (BLMJ), when I was approached by the Ptil Tekhelet Association about the possibility of developing an exhibition about Biblicaltekheletdye for textiles and the color blue at the museum. These preliminary encounters eventually evolved into the 2018–2019 BLMJ exhibition entitled“Out of the Blue,” ????? ???? ??’, which featured a study of biblicaltekhelet(????).2See Meeri, Bloch and Kaplan 2018. The Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem was aided in this exhibition by the Ptil Tekhelet Association, which has pioneered the production of modern tekhelet dyes. For the story of the Ptil Tekhelet Association, see Sterman and Sterman 2012.The paper below presents an update of some of that research, as well as some further and more recent thoughts about colors in the sky, which I began to formulate long ago at the time of the writing of my PhD-thesis.3Thavapalan 2000 is a new monograph on the subject of color in Ancient Mesopotamia and now replaces Landsberger 1967 as the standard work. Many issues regarding color in the Ancient World were considered in a workshop held at the Excellence Cluster Topoi in Berlin in February 2016 whose proceedings are published in Thavapalan and Warburton 2019.

Blue, tekhelet and Blue Skies

Hebrewtekhelet, the color of the thread to be worn on the fringes of one’s garment commanded in Numbers 15: 37–38, is generally understood as blue in Jewish tradition. However, which shade of blue, and/or purple, remains uncertain.The Akkadian cognatetakiltuis translated in CAD T 70 as, “(a semi-precious blue-purple wool).” This identification is based on evidence in cuneiform tablets from the second half of the second millennium BC, and on into the time of the First Temple Period in Israel. This begs the question regarding thetekheletof the Bible: Is it blue, purple, a combination of the two (i.e. bluish purple or purplish blue), or sometimes purple and sometimes blue, and if blue – dark blue, light blue,or some other shade of blue?, or even – was biblicaltekheletand Akkadiantakiltualways regarded as the same color? My answer as an Assyriologist working on cuneiform sources remains a most unsatisfactory, “I really am not sure!, or even sure if we can ever be sure, at least on the basis of textual evidence alone.”4A previous version of my arguments regarding identification of Biblical tekhelet is available in Horowitz 2018. Thavapalan 2020, 224–238 examines many of the issues discussed below regarding Akkadian takiltu and argamannu, and their Sumerian equivalents.Despite this disclaimer, we will consider this problem below from the point-ofview of the cuneiform evidence, with the realization that even Akkadian and Sumerian speakers, and “foreigners” who learned the script over the centuries and millennia that cuneiform was in use, might have disagreed over all or some of my conclusions.

Individuals perceive colors differently, as do cultures and civilizations over time. A quick glance at a modern paint catalogue shows hundreds, if not thousands, of different colors, shades, and hues, ranging from delicate white to black magic, with ancient copper red and smoke blue among the myriad of other shades of paint in between. Likewise, English differentiates between red and light red (pink), as does Hebrew (adomfor red,veredfor pink), but does not have separate names for modern Hebrewkacholandtekhelet, which have come to signify in our times blue in general forkachol, and light-blue fortekhelet. In the cuneiform world, such difficulties are compounded by the small vocabulary available for color terminology. In Sumerian and Akkadian there are only four dedicated color terms: for black and white, the yellow/green range, and the red spectrum which includes everything from our brown to purple, the latter being a mix of red and blue:

Thus, in Sumerian and Akkadian, there is no dedicated word for what in standard English is called the color blue. In its place, the name of the stone lapis-lazuli is often used for blue color, this being Sumerianna4za.gìn = Akkadianuqn?. Clear examples ofna4za.gìn =uqn?used in this manner include references to the blue glazed lapis-lazuli colored brickwork of Babylon such as the bricks of the I?tar Gate and Esagil.5See e.g. CAD U 202 uqn? 2b, and the near countless color photographs and drawings of Babylon and its main architectural features such as the I?tar Gate now on display at the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin. The use of the name of the stone lapis for blue is a good example of what Warburton 2016, 3–5 terms “Material Culture.”

However even here, the situation is complicated by the use of the Sumerian-Akkadian term for stone na4=abnu(cognate to Hebrew ???,even), for glass –which Ancient Mesopotamians considered to be in a sense a man-made mineral.6For colored glass in Ancient Mesopotamian, see now Schmidt 2019 and Thavapalan 2020,199–221, with references to earlier bibliography, especially the classic collection of editions of the Mesopotamian glass-texts and related scholarship in Oppenheim, Brill and Barag 1970.

A good, albeit indirect parallel for the blue sky beingna4za.gìn =uqn?in color may be found in the list of the three heavens and earths in the Neo-Assyrian mystical tablet VAT 8917 from Assur:7VAT 8917, 30–38 (KAR 307), with full edition, discussion, and further bibliography available in Horowitz 2011, 3–9. The following translation is adopted from ibid., 3–4.

The Upper Heavens areluludānītu-stone, They belong to Anu. He (Marduk)settled the 300 Igigi-gods inside.

The Middle Heavens aresaggilmud-stone. They belong to the Igigi. Bel sat on the high dais inside, in the lapis lazuli (na4za.gìn =uqn?) sanctuary (bára =parakku). He made a lamp? of electrum (na4elme?u) shine inside.

The Lower Heavens are jasper (na4a?p?). They belong to the stars. He drew the constellations of the gods on them.

Here, the imagery is that of the three levels of heaven conceived as floors made of stone with open space in between, just as there is open space between the earth’s surface and the sky. Thus the floor of the Upper Heavens serves as the ceiling of the Middle Heavens, and the floor of the Middle Heavens as the ceiling of the Lower Heavens of the stars. The floor of the Middle Heavens issaggilmudstone, which is said to have the same appearance as lapis-lazuli in the seriesAbnu-?ikin?u, which describes the appearance of various stones and minerals:8Edition of the series: Schuster-Brandes 2008, 17–47.

Hence in VAT 8917, the Middle Heavens has a lapis-colored floor above which rests the heavenly throneroom of the Babylonian King of the Gods, Marduk,which itself has a lapis lazuli sanctuary.9For this meaning of paramahhu in this context, see Horowitz 2011, 12.Thus, the imagery here matches that of the heavenly throne-room of the God of Israel in the Bible, with its blue sapphire(????,sapir) brick floor of Exodus 24: 9–10 and Ezekiel 1: 26–28, and 10: 1.However, the above argument –saggilmudis the same color as lapis-lazuli = the color of the sky = blue = the color of biblical sapphire – rests on the assumption that Ancient Mesopotamians and Israelites thought that the sky was blue, more or less in the same way that thedefaultcolor of the modern sky is what we today call in English, “blue.” The devil is in the details, and the truth is that the sky is often not colored what we call blue. On very clear days sometimes the sky is blue, even dark blue, but on cloudy days the sky can be white or gray, while at other times, due to atmospheric conditions, the sky often seems to be anything from off white to yellow, or a very pale blue, something more like modern Hebrewtekheletthankachol. Moreover, at night the sky is basically black, and at sunrise and sunset the color of the sky is often tinged, yellow, orange, pink,red, purple, or even purply shades of blue. In the ancient world we find a similar range of sub-types of lapis-lazuli colored stone, glass, and dyed-wools, from what we might consider purple on one end of the color spectrum to brown on the other. Thus, as demonstrated long ago by Benno Landsberger, in his seminal study of colors in Sumerian and Akkadian (Landsberger 1967), the color of lapis-lazuli wool, or more accuratelysígza.gìn =uqn?-colored wool, ranges from ancient red to blue to green/yellow (turquoise) – as may be summarized by the following synopsis of the situation based on lexical lists:10CAD U 193 uqnatu, CAD T 70 takiltu, CAD S 381 sumtu, CAD AII 300 arqu, and CAD ? 77 sub ?almu for ?alimtu/?alittu. See also CAD AII 253 for na4za.gìn.sa5 = argamannu, “red purple wool,”which is cognate to biblical and modern Hebrew argaman, which modern Hebrew normally takes as basically the same color as modern Hebrew sagol, the standard term for the color purple. For dyed wools including those colored takiltu, see now Thavapalan 2020, 226–244, and ibid., passim for colored textiles of all types.

Yet, there is no dictionary entry for síg.za.gìn.kur =takiltu. Thus, the identification of síg.za.gìn.kur =takiltu-colored wool with a presumed blue range,excluding purple, can only be established on the basis of contrast with síg.za.gìn.sa5=argamannu-colored wool (a presumed purple range excluding blue), but there is no clear indication síg.za.gìn.kur must always be blue (dark or light, or sometimes one or the other), as opposed to síg.za.gìn.ge6=?alimtu, which must be dark.12The single example of the contrast SíG.SA5.KUR and (SíG).GE6.KUR in SAA 16 82: rev. 5–10 does not resolve this issue.However, even here síg.za.gìn.ge6=?alimtucould be either dark blue or dark purple, and all this begs the question of where Ancient Mesopotamians might have drawn boundaries between “blue,” “reddish blue,” “purple-blue,” and“purple.” Thus to sum up, the Sumerian-Akkadian cuneiform evidence shows us that we have dyed wools in different hues of what the ancients considered lapis-color, a range that includes what we call blue, both light and dark, but also extends to purple and green, and maybe even beyond to some shades of brown and orange.

Ancient Mesopotamians certainly thought of one or more of these as the color of the sky, which in my opinion was normally thought to be the same color as the blue bricks of Babylon, in the same way that our modern default color for the sky is “blue.” However, without any means of consulting with Ancient Mesopotamian eye-witnesses, we will most likely never be able to solve all the questions that we may have regarding what a Sumerian-Akkadian paint catalogue might have presented as various shades and hues of “sky-blue.”

Red Heavens and Orange

The Ancient Mesopotamian red-spectrum, ranging from orange → red → brown→ purple, is found in cuneiform sources both in and above the sky. In the list of the three heavens on the mystical tablet VAT 8917 quoted above, the highest heaven, the heaven of the heaven-god Anu, is said to be made ofluludānītustone:13In the first millennium, this highest heaven is often called “The Heaven of Anu” (?am? ?a dAnu,?am? dAnu). See Horowitz 2011, 244–246.

We know from the seriesAbnu-?ikin?uthatluludānītu-stone is a red stone, with black and white patches:

This is not to suggest that the red floor of the Heaven of Anu was visible from earth above thesaggilmud/lapis-lazuli floor of the Middle Heavens. The authors and readers of VAT 8917 must have understood that one could not see into Marduk’s throneroom in the Middle Heavens, nor the level of the Heaven of Anu further above. Rather, I include this passage here because this is what brought me to the research the topic of observations of red skies and/or red astronomical phenomena in cuneiform.

In such passages, the red color of the sky at sunrise can presumably refer to any number of hues along the red spectrum as the sky brightens at dawn from deep purple, to purple, to red, to orange, to pink, and pinkish-yellow at day break.

We also find red in the sky in Ancient Mesopotamian mythology and literature as part of a long-standing motif of “sky-red” being tied to the spilling of divine blood. The earliest example known to me is inLugale168–186, where Asag attacks Ninurta. This causes the sky to become bathed in blood (line 178),15Sumerian version: an.e ú? bí.íb.tu5, bilingual version: an. ú?.a bí.íb.tu5 = ?amêe da-mi ur-tam-mi-ik.and the horizon then turns the color of wool dyed red (line 181).16Sumerian version: úr.an.na hé!.me.da.gim ?ú.a.?è, bilingual version: úr.an.na síg hé.me.da.gim si.a.?è = i-?id ?amêe ki-ma na-ba-?i ?a-rip.A parallel may be found inEnuma ElishIV 31–32. Here after testing Marduk’s powers in the previous lines by having him break apart and reconstitute a constellation, the gods send Marduk on his way to fight Tiamat imploring him, “Go cut Tiamat’s throat, and let the winds bear up her blood to give the news.” In his commentary on the lines in Lambert 2013, 475, Lambert explains: “Particular sky conditions were explained as ... Tiamat’s blood.” A more explicit example is found in the literary composition “The Slaying of Labbu” where the god Tishpak kills Labbu,17For the reading of the name Labbu and discussion, see Lambert 2013, 362.and Labbu’s blood then flows in the sky for three years, three months, a day and a [night] (Lambert 2013, 364–365, rev. 7–9).

All three literary passages would seem to provide etiological explanations for red color in the sky. The reference to the horizon inLugalemay point in the direction of red skies at the time of dawn and dusk. TheEnuma Elishpassage gives no indication as to the point in time, length of time, or place in the sky that Tiamat’s blood might have been observed, but does refer to winds bringing Tiamat’s blood, so making it visible to mankind.18Could this refer to windy dust storms bringing red skies such as those that I have occasionally seen over Jerusalem? Cf. the atmospheric phenomena akukūtu, anqullu, and q?, “net, web” as an atmospheric phenomena (CAD Q 288 4.c), and the following headline from the Jerusalem Post, 8 September 2015 edition: “Thickest dust storm in 15 years blankets country in orange haze.”

The last passage from “The Slaying of Labbu” gives a time frame; the blood of Labbu remains in the sky for more than three years, and as restored by Lambert, both day and night. This could refer to particularly red sunrises by day and sunsets by night for an extended period of time due to special atmospheric conditions, for example due to volcanic matter circulating in the upper atmosphere, or perhaps even to the presence of a long lasting very bright phenomena such as a supernova.19See, for instance, Stephenson and Green 2002 with further bibliography.TheLugaleandEnuma Elishpassages could also be explained by viewings of reddish flares of the Aurora Borealis of the type that have been recorded in the late-period in the astronomical diaries,20For Babylonian observations of Aurora Borealis, see Stephenson, Willis and Hallinan 2004. More recently this topic has been revisited in a series of articles by H. Hayakawa, Y. Mitsuma, and others.See e.g. Hayakawa et al. 2016.but an observation of the Aurora cannot lie behind the three year length of the phenomena referred to in “The Slaying of Labbu.”

Whether such observation based explanations can explain any of the above literary passages remains unproven, and probably unprovable, but even if the motif of blood in the sky is used in the above passages as a literary motif without any reference to a specific astronomical event in or outside of historical time,what is clear is that Ancient Mesopotamians were cognizant of reddish hues in the skies above their heads, and identified this red color with blood.21For an example of sāmtat mahi? in the context of bloody fingers, see CAD S 124 sāmtu B b.

Astronomical Red

To conclude our discussions we come to the color of the Moon, planets, and stars. Reddish appearances of the Moon are attested in numerous passages relating to both lunar eclipses and due to atmospheric phenomena causing what is often called in English “harvest moons.”22For red and other colors of eclipses, see Thavapalan 2020, 113–115, 130–132, 372.Elsewhere, the most common red object in the sky was the planet Mars, which still today is known as “The Red Planet.” This connection between the color of Mars in particular, and “sky-red”in general in the minds of Ancient Mesootamians, is made clear in a commentary on an omen of the same type that we found in SAA 8 266 and 309 above, which not only notes that Mars is red, but also offers an explanation for the termsāmta mahi?, “to beat/be beaten red:”

Many similar attestations of Mars as the red star are to be found in Kurtik (2007,414–416) under the listingmulSA5(Red-star), confirming that Mars, for Ancient Mesopotamia, was the red starpar excellence,23For Mars as the red planet in Ancient Mesopotamia, see also Koch-Westenholz 1995, 128–129.although other planets and stars are described as red as well.24See the just cited Kurtik reference, BPO 2 19, Horowitz 2014, 101, and also CAD S 129 sāmu a)9’. Also note Mars as a white star (mulBABBAR) in line 168 of the composition commonly known as The Great Star List (GSL). We give in this article the line numbers for GSL in the now outdated transcription and translation in Koch-Westenholz 1995, 187–205. Updated discussion of The Great Star List will be found in Horowitz forthcoming. An edition of The Great Star List and related works by J. Fincke and W. Horowitz is in progress.This then brings us to our last question. What shade of red is the red of Mars, or perhaps to paraphrase, what color is Ancient Sumerian-Akkadian astronomical red, what we could call, “Mesopotamian starred,” in a modern color inventory? The answer to this question may be found in one of the secondary Akkadian equations of Sumerian SA5, which is not only translated into Akkadian as red (sāmu), but in a number of astronomical contexts equated with a colormakr?; this also being the color of moles on human skin, a shade of wool, wooden furniture, and a forest berry.25Thavapalan 2000, 289–291, CAD MI 138–139, Ahw 590 with the comment: Arabic makira, “rot sein.” See also Weidner 1915, 10.

The association between Mars, “star-red,” andmakr?is made clear in GSL 85–86 which gives the following two entries in its list of names for Mars (?albātānu).

The fact that Mars is both the red-star, and themakr?-colored star seems to indicate thatmakr?is not simply a synonym of Sumerian-Akkadian “red,” but rather a particular shade of red. But again, which shade of red is Sumerian-Akkadian “star-red?” The answer to this question may be found in two more sources: 1) the star-list of the lexical series Urgud (the commentary to the series Urra =hubullu), and 2) an unpublished commentary quoted by CAD MI138–139 d) 1’, at the very end of the CAD’s discussion ofmakr?as a name for Mars.27CAD here gives the unpublished commentary in Weidner 1914, 498 as its authority for this citation. Note also the following passage from the series ?umma s?n ina tāmartī?u: :mulSA5 ?UB-tim IZI : ddil-bat : MU d?al-bat-a-nu . [ ..., “The red-star = a fall of fire, Venus, that is to say Mars . [ ...].”Cf. Ach I?tar 8: 16 and the parallels quoted in CAD MII 103 miqtu, in the lex. section. These too are to be edited by Fincke and Horowitz.

Hence,makr?would seem to be the shade of fire-red, i.e. orange-red.

Two final pieces of evidence regarding Marduk and his stars. 1) In the list of stars associated with Marduk in each month of the year, astronomical Marduk in Month V (Abu) is identified as bothdmakr?andd?albātānu.30S 777: 6, duplicates, and parallels. See Weidner 1915, 24, also to be re-edited in the forthcoming GSL volume by Fincke and Horowitz noted above.Month V is also the Month of the fire-god Girra in Babylonian tradition (Horowitz 2014, 68–72).2) Another identification of Marduk with Mars, rather than the more usual Mercury or Jupiter,31The identification most likely involves the similar reddish color of both Mars and Marduk’s star Nēberu, (usually Mercury or Jupiter). See e.g. Horowitz 2014, 20–25 with further bibliography.is found in a litany that was recited on the 5th day of the New Year’s Festival at Babylon which praises Marduk as both Mars and Girra:mulANdGIBIL6ez-zu..., (Marduk) Mars, fierce fire-god ... (Linssen 2004, 220 and 308). We propose that the above passages provide the key for identifying the colormakr?as the color of flames of fire, i.e. red-orange, which is precisely the color of Mars in the night sky.

The Color Orange in Ancient Mesopotamia

This research led me to some final thoughts about what was colored orange in Ancient Mesopotamia besides fire. One can rule out the citrus fruit of the same name, because oranges, tangerines, and the like were not readily available in what is now Iraq in the era when cuneiform was in use. One commodity that matches our red-orange color (also orange-yellow) that was available was ochre, a word in English which derives from Greek ?χρα. Is it possible that somehow Akkadianmakr?is to be connected with Greek ?χρα, perhaps by way of an unattested byformwakr??32For red ochre in the Ancient Near East, see Moorey 1999, 139, 287, and 328 including the following short passage near the beginning of p. 328: “... Yellow. This was yellow ochre (?goethite),which turns red on burning.” I would like to thank Peter Zilberg for helping me with this matter. He is not to be held responsible for the results of this line of inquiry.This is a matter relating to earth rather than the heavens, and so I leave it for others to ponder and solve. What is clear is that much more research is needed to fine tune our modern palette of colors with those perceived by Ancient Mesopotamians in the sky. We hope that our investigations into blue and orange present an invitation to others to join in this endeavor.

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