When Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 CE, it preserved an extraordinary room whose walls were almost entirely painted blue.
The room, apparently a private sacrarium or shrine inside a wealthy Roman home, was decorated using Egyptian blue, the ancient world’s earliest known synthetic blue pigment. Modern analysis confirmed the pigment as Egyptian blue and estimated that between 2.7 and 4.9 kilograms were required to cover the room.
Using ancient Roman price information, researchers calculated that the pigment alone may have cost 93–168 denarii—approximately 50–90 percent of the annual salary of a Roman foot soldier. The researchers conclude that such lavish use of blue reflected wealth and social status; one of the study’s authors described blue as having become a Roman “status symbol.”
Egyptian blue was a mineral pigment and not the dye used for Techeiles, so this discovery does not identify the biblical color or its source. It does, however, provide striking archaeological evidence that in the Roman world of the first century CE, an intense blue color could carry considerable economic, social, and religious significance.
