Red, white, black and green are the Pan-Arab colours, drawn from a single medieval poem and revived during the early 20th century as a symbol of Arab unity.
Trace it back far enough and the whole colour scheme comes from a single poem. Safi al-Din al-Hilli, writing in the 14th century, described Arab dynasties through four colours: white for the deeds of the people, black for the battles fought, green for the land, and red for the swords stained in the fighting. It's a striking piece of imagery for something that would, six hundred years later, end up on official government buildings and passports across an entire region.
The colours sat mostly dormant as a literary reference until 1916, when the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule needed a unifying banner. Whoever chose the flag reached straight back for al-Hilli's four colours, arranged as horizontal black, green and white stripes with a red triangle at the hoist. It was a deliberate act of connecting a modern independence movement to centuries of Arab literary tradition, not an accident of what dye happened to be available.
What happened next is the interesting part. As Arab nations gained independence through the 20th century, one after another reached for some arrangement of the same four colours, but almost none of them copied the 1916 flag directly. Egypt's flag stacks red, white and black horizontally with a golden eagle in the centre. Jordan keeps the original triangle-and-stripes layout almost unchanged, a direct descendant of the 1916 Arab Revolt flag itself. The United Arab Emirates arranges all four colours into a layout unlike either. Sudan uses the same four colours but a completely different symbolism attached to them.
So the four colours function less like a single shared design and more like a shared vocabulary, every country writes its own sentence with the same four words. That's actually a useful thing to know if you're trying to place one of these flags on a map: the presence of the colours tells you the region, but you have to look at the actual layout to have any chance of narrowing down which specific country you're looking at.
These four colours in some combination point strongly toward the Middle East and North Africa. Since the same palette is shared so widely, the exact proportions and which colour dominates become the useful clue, not just the colours themselves.
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