This is an excellent resource. Thank you. Explains very clearly the pre-history of color systems.

Two other refs....

Kuehni, Rolf G., and Andreas Schwarz. Color ordered: a survey of color systems from antiquity to the present. Oxford University Press, 2008.

And Handprint.com

The guy that runs handprint probably knows more about color than any man alive.

Wow, Handprint.com is incredible.

I needed to spend some time clicking around to figure out what was where, but then just spent half an hour learning about which hue is actually the warmest (there is no universally accepted answer, but a common theme is scarlet).

Maybe it's just that I've subconsciously absorbed the scientific method, but I find it unbelievable that Aristotle had a theory based on a trivially false model where colors are all formed by mixing black and white. In Ramon y Cajal's Advice for a Young Investigator, he claims that Bacon's scientific method was just descriptive of an inherent human process. That felt true to me at the time. Did we really just make guesses and call them truth until the 1600s?

On the other hand, white light does contain all of the visible spectrums. Maybe Aristotle had seen prismatic diffraction and considered it beyond his powers.

>Did we really just make guesses and call them truth until the 1600s?

It does seem that way! There may be a Dunning-Krueger selection bias at work here - people who admitted ignorance were not remembered, while people who confidently asserted things were treated as authorities. Religious institution surely bears some blame in Western culture - notions such as "skepticism" and "seeing for yourself" were culturally suppressed for nearly 2000 years.