Color and Caste.

Glen writes:

One of the more obvious symbols of social tripartition is colour, emphasized by the fact that both ancient India and Iran expressed the concept of caste with the word for colour (varna). A survey of the social significance of different colours is fairly clear cut, at least for the first two functions. Indo-Iranian, Hittite, Celtic and Latin ritual all assign white to priests and red to the warrior. The third function would appear to have been marked by a darker colour such as black or blue. [...]

As I've elaborated, the colour signifance would be primarily associated with the realms and the colours found within them: Overworld (yellow, bright blue), Middleworld (green) and Underworld (red). These also happened to be the colours of the three seasons: winter, spring/summer, fall. Since the priests were associated with the Overworld, the herder-cultivators with the Middleworld and the warriors with the Underworld, the colour symbolism was then transfered to these three social functions as well.

PIE is imputed at best to have four color-terms, and these need to be understood in terms different from ours.

Bright/light/shiney: white.

Dark/unreflective: black.

Row: red-yellow.

Grue: blue-green.

With garments, unless you have dyes, you have a very limited choice of colors. The priest likely wore white wool or white linen -- 'white' here probably being on the dingy side. Natural dyes tend to give you browns and blacks. One ancient recipe for red dye is to to boil European ivy sap in urine.

Mark.