The most valuable pigment of antiquity was processed not from a root ball or from the frothy extract of a weed, but by extracting a slimy secretion from the mucous glands behind the anus of murex sea snails – “the bottom of the bottom feeders,” , wrote historian Kelly Grovier. The dye’s common name, Tyrian purple, comes from the habitat of the molluscs, which the Phoenicians supposedly began collecting in the 16th century BC. in the city-state of Tire in present-day Lebanon.
Because each snail yielded little more than a drop of discharge—a clear, odorless liquid—about 250,000 were required to produce an ounce of dye, according to some accounts. Purple was labor intensive, but it was produced so widely that piles of shells discarded millennia ago are now geographical features of the area. The dye was also so expensive – worth three times its weight in gold, according to a Roman edict issued in 301 AD. – whose use was intended for priests, nobles and kings. “Although purple may have symbolized an upper class, it smacked of a lower class,” writes Dr. Grovier in his book, The Art of Color.
Where all that purple came from has long been a mystery. Only a few sites along the southern coast of the Levant and in Cyprus show evidence of early period dye production, and all were on a moderate scale. But a new study by researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel shows that during most of the biblical Iron Age, from about 1150 B.C. by 600 BC, a small cape called Tel Shiqmona on the Carmel coast of Israel was not a settlement, as it once was. supposed, but a large factory that dyes purple.
“Tel Shiqmona fills this gap with continuous production, most often in massive quantities,” said Golan Shalvi, a postdoctoral student in archeology at the University of Chicago and lead author of the paper. “For most of the Iron Age, it is the only site where construction can be proven with certainty.”
Aaron Schmitt, an expert on Phoenician culture who teaches archeology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and who was not involved in the project, hailed the study for shedding new light on the neglected ruins. “Finding a site that really specializes in this financial industry is very important and special,” he said.
The research, published in the Journal of the Tel Aviv Institute of Archaeology, suggests that during the first half of the ninth century BCE, the Israelites occupied Tel Shiqmona and began to corner the lucrative purple dye market by converting the small dye facility. in a fortified manufacturing plant surrounded by a casemate wall. (This was about the same time that Ahab ruled the Kingdom of Israel.)
The new business was more or less a joint venture, run by the Israelites and staffed by skilled Phoenician workers who kept the secrets of making the dye, Dr. Salvi said. It is not clear whether the locals continued the operation through coercion or cooperation.
In theory, the goods gathered at Tel Shiqmona, mainly wool or purple-dyed cloth, were distributed to the elite and temples throughout the region, including Israel, Phenicia, Philistia, Aram, Judea, and Cyprus. Dr Shalvi said the dye likely created both argaman (purple) and techelet (blue) which are mentioned dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible. Techelet was used to dye tzitzit (tassels) on tallits (prayer shawls) used in Jewish religious ceremonies and inspired the blue of Israel’s flag.
“The purple structure at Tel Shiqmona overlaps with the existence of the First Temple in Jerusalem,” said Dr. Shalvi, referring to the house of worship which, according to Jewish tradition, was built by King Solomon on the spot where God created Adam. “For most of that time, it was the only place known for making the dye. Therefore, he is the only candidate to provide the color for the red and sapphire shades of the vestments and curtains of the temple.”
It took guts
Tyrian purple was the only pigment known to the ancients. The colored fabric became brighter with weathering and sunlight. Shades ranged from bluish-green to purplish red, depending on how the dye was prepared and fixed to the fabrics. The most vivid tone was the deep crimson of “coagulated blood” with black, the Roman historian Pliny reported.
In Imperial Rome, constitutional laws restricted the purchase and use of purple cloth to the emperor (purple silk was to be used only under his direction under penalty of death) and, to a lesser extent, to senators and consuls, who were permitted to wear broad stripes of purple at the edges of their togas.
The name and origin of the Tyrian purple were Roman inventions. As early as 1900 BC, the Minoans of Crete were already preparing a purple dye from sea snails, giving birth to an industry that subsequently caught on and flourished throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The production center is believed to have been moved to the port of Tyre, although Dr Schmitt said this could not be confirmed from primary sources, either textual or archaeological. At the port, the snails were collected from shallow water and left to rot in large tanks before being distilled into the purified dye. (Phoenica, the corresponding Greek name for the region, is related to phoinix, meaning “reddish purple,” leading some scholars to speculate that Phoenicia was “the land of the purple”.)
Julius Pollux, a Greek scholar and grammarian from the second century AD, attributed the discovery of color to Tyrius Heracles, known to the Phoenicians as Melqart, guardian deity of Tyre. In the “Onomasticon,” a 10-volume tome, Pollux recounts that a nymph named Tyrus was walking along the beach when her dog bit a sea snail, staining the dog’s mouth a deep purple. Tire was delighted by the glow and told Heracles, her lover, that he wanted a robe of the same color. Hercules complied and purple became a royal rage.
In the 17th century, the artist Peter Paul Rubens recreated the thread in the oil painting “The Dog of Hercules Discovering the Purple Dye”. Alas, he got the shell wrong, depicting a spiral nautilus snail instead of a prickly murex.
Shell game
Tire is located 30 miles north of Tel Shiqmona, where the purple dye was created from the dried and boiled intestines of three species of predatory marine snails: the spiny dye-murex (Bolinus brandaris), the banded dye-murex (Hexaplex trunculus) and the shell red-mouthed rockfish (Stramonita haemostoma). Each added a slightly different cast to the mix.
Tel Shiqmona had long puzzled archaeologists, who wondered why what looked like some sort of fortress had been erected far from farmland on a rocky coastline that offered no safe harbor for ships.
From 1963-77, the eight-acre site was extensively excavated by Yosef Elgavish, an Israeli archaeologist. Working on behalf of the Haifa Museum, he discovered weaving and spinning equipment, large purple-stained ceramic cisterns, and evidence of human habitation dating to around 1500 BC. Although some archaeological layers harbored Phoenician pottery, Dr. Elgavish also found a four-room house and oil presses, which he identified as typical of Israelite settlements of the 10th century BC.
“Dr. “Elgavish was convinced that Tel Shiqmona had some role in the production of the purple dye, but he did not delve into the quantity of production or who conducted the dyeing process,” said Dr. Shalvi.
For the next four decades, the site was almost completely ignored for academic research. “The results and findings of the early missions were not researched or published,” Dr. Salvi said. In 2016, he and Ayelet Gilboa, his doctoral advisor at the University of Haifa, began a project to rescue what they called the “cultural and spiritual goods” hidden in the forgotten finds.
Dr. Shalvi soon realized that defining Tel Shiqmona as exclusively Israeli did not reflect the complexity of the area. He divided the Iron Age chronology into four main episodes: a Phoenician village (1100 BC to 900 BC); a walled enclosure controlled by the Israelites (900 BC to 740 BC). an ephemeral resettlement after the destruction of the kingdom and settlement (740 BC to 700 BC) and an unfortified industrial association under Assyrian rule that survived until the Babylonian conquest of the territory (700 BC . to 600 BC)
Three years ago, after carefully examining the thousands of finds from Dr. Elgavis’ excavation, Dr. Salvi had an epiphany. “I discovered purple marks that no one else had noticed,” he said. “Once my eyes were opened to the purple staining pattern, I noticed it everywhere.”
That afternoon he called Dr. Gilboa and told her of his revelation. “We discussed whether it would be a good idea for me to see a psychiatrist,” Dr. Salvi said with a dry laugh. “Fortunately, chemical analysis showed that in each case the purple was real.”
