Did Humans Gain The Desire To Color Their Clothing?

There is a question in the textile world that always seems to have two answers. “Did humans realize that plants and bugs could excrete dye first, or did humans gain the desire to color their textiles first?” The answer to the question is often debated. With archeologists finding new things everyday, our answers are often re evaluated. Its hard to make a concrete decision when our growth on the knowledge of history is always changing. It can be assumed that dying textiles started in different periods around the world. We have found trances of the color blue in the highest class of mummies. In the cloth they were buried with traces of a blue stripe were found on mummies who have assumed to have ruled. From the Mohenjo-daro settlement in the Indus Valley we have discovered traces of red and blue that date back to around 2600 BC. While discussing …show more content…
Blue is not known to be an “earth color” meaning you can’t find it in the soil. Only in rare cases of mining deep into the earth can we hope to extract some clue. The first sign of natural blue came about 6,000 years ago from Lapis Lazuli. This precious stone was mined in Afghanistan, and was known to be powdered down to use for eyeshadow for Cleopatra. Blue was known to be a sacred color and was expensive and extremely valuable until its mass production. We can associate this with the fact that the color blue is connected to royalty all around the world. Blue falls in between green and indigo in the visible color spectrum. The color pigment went through many trials but all of them failed. Many colorists were trying to obtain blue from purple by cutting the pigment and adding different acids. When artists tried to transform indigo into a form of blue, it always went straight to black. Azurite, which is a pigment gathered from the same plant as indigo, turned green-white when mixed with water. This ruled out the option of using this as a blue toned