As historical scholarship increasingly attends not just to text, but to context, the consideration of colour - as an aspect of the material, artistic, literary, linguistic and conceptual cultures of antiquity - provides a valuable path of approach to our evidence. This evidence demands, and responds to, many different methodological approaches. The papers represented in this volume of proceedings, based on an international conference held at Edinburgh University in 2001, thus reveal a multiplicity of different ways of seeing, studying and defining colour in antiquity. They bring together researchers working on different cultures and periods, but also different areas of colour research: the technological and archaeological study of painting and dyeing; the manifestations and meanings of colour in visual art; and the inter-related fields of the semiosis and symbolism of colour in literature, and the colour terms and categorisation of ancient languages.