The most important pigment in ancient times was processed not from a knotty root or the frothy juice of a grass, but by the release of a slimy secretion from the mucus glands behind the anus of murex sea snails – “under the bottom of the feeders,” writes historian Kelly Grovier. The common name of the dyestuff, Tyrian purple, comes from the habitat of the mollusks, which are said to have been introduced by the Phoenicians in the 16th century BC to the city -state of Tire in present-day Lebanon.
Because each snail produced little more than a drop of discharge — a clear, foul-smelling liquid — about 250,000 were needed to produce one ounce of dye, according to some accounts. Purple is labor-intensive, but so widely produced that shell piles discarded millennia ago are now geographical features of the region. The dye was also so expensive — worth more than three times its weight in gold, according to a Roman edict issued in 301 AD — that its use was reserved for priests, nobility and royalty. “Although purple may symbolize a higher order, it smacks of a lower order,” wrote Dr. Grovier in his book, “The Art of Color.”
Where all this purple comes from has long been a mystery. Only a few locations along the southern coast of the Levant and in Cyprus show evidence of early period dye production, and all on a small scale. But a new study by researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel suggest that during much of the Biblical Iron Age period, from about 1150 BC to 600 BC, a small promontory called Tel Shiqmona on Israel’s Carmel coast was not a residence, as usual, but a major factory dying purple.
“Tel Shiqmona filled this gap with continuous production, often in very large quantities,” said Golan Shalvi, a postdoctoral student in archeology at the University of Chicago and the paper’s lead author. “For most of the Iron Age, this is the only site where manufacturing can be demonstrated with certainty.”
Aaron Schmitt, an expert on Phoenician culture who teaches archeology at Heidelberg University in Germany and was not involved in the project, praised the study for shedding new light on the neglected ruins. “Finding a site that really specializes in this branch of the economy is very significant and special,” he said.
The research, published in the Journal of the Institute of Archeology of Tel Aviv, suggests that in the first half of the ninth century BC, the Israelites took over Tel Shiqmona and began cornering the lucrative purple-dye market by -converted a small dye installation. in a fortified manufacturing plant surrounded by a casemate wall. (This was roughly the same time that Ahab ruled the Kingdom of Israel.)
The new operation is almost a joint venture, run by Israelites and staffed by skilled Phoenician craftsmen who hold the secrets to making the dye, said Dr. Shalvi. It is not clear whether the locals continued the operation through coercion or cooperation.
In theory, the goods assembled at Tel Shiqmona, mainly purple-dyed wool or textiles, were distributed to the elite and temples throughout the area, including Israel, Phenicia, Philistia, Aram, Judea and Cyprus. said Dr. Shalvi whose dye probably created both argaman (purple) and techelet (azure) are mentioned dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible. Techelet was used for dyeing the tzitzit (tassels) on tallits (prayer shawls) used in Jewish religious rituals, and inspired the blue of the Israeli flag.
“The production of purple at Tel Shiqmona overlapped with the presence of the First Temple in Jerusalem,” said Dr. Shalvi, which refers to the house of worship that, according to Jewish tradition, was built by King Solomon on the site where God created Adam. “For most of that time, it was the only place known to make the dye. Therefore, it was the only candidate to provide the color for the scarlet and sapphire color of the garments and curtains of the temple tabernacle.”
It took courage
Tyrian purple was the only colorfast dye known to the ancients; the fabric tinted in color will lighten more with time and sunlight. Shades range from bluish-green to a purplish red, depending on how the dye is prepared and fixed on the fabrics. The most vibrant tone is the deep crimson of “clotted blood” tinged with black, reported the Roman historian Pliny.
In imperial Rome, sumptuary laws restricted the purchase and wearing of purple-dyed cloth to the emperor (purple silk was to be used only at his direction under penalty of death) and, to a lesser extent, senators and consuls, who were allowed to wear wide bands of purple around the edges of their togas.
The name and origin of Tyrian purple are Roman inventions. As early as 1900 BC, the Minoans of Crete were already preparing purple dye from marine snails, giving rise to an industry that then caught on and flourished throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The production center is believed to have moved to the port of Tyre, although Dr. Schmitt that this cannot be proven by primary sources, either textual or archaeological. In the harbor, snails are collected from shallow water and left to rot in large tanks before being distilled into purified dye. (Phoinike, the equivalent Greek name for the place, is related to phoinix, meaning “reddish purple,” which has led some scholars to speculate that Phenicia was “the land of purple.”)
Julius Pollux, a Greek scholar and grammarian from the second century AD, attributed the discovery of color to Tyrian Hercules, known to the Phoenicians as Melqart, tutelary god of Tyre. In his “Onomasticon,” a 10-volume thesaurus, 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. Tyrus was fascinated by the brilliance and told Hercules, his lover, that he wanted a dress of the same color. Hercules obeyed and the purple became a royal rage.
In the 17th century, painter Peter Paul Rubens recreated the thread in the oil painting “Hercules’ Dog Discovers Purple Dye.” Alas, he got the shell wrong, depicting a spiral nautilus snail instead of a prickly murex.
Shell game
The wheel is 30 miles north of Tel Shiqmona, where the purple pigment is created from the dried and boiled intestines of three species of predatory sea snails: the spiny dye-murex (Bolinus brandaris), the banded dye-murex ( Hexaplex trunculus) and the stone shell with a red mouth (Stramonita haemostoma). Each added a slightly different cast to the mix.
Tel Shiqmona has long puzzled archaeologists, who have wondered why what appears to be some sort of fortress was built far from agricultural lands on a rocky stretch of coast that offers no safe harbor for ships.
From 1963-77, the eight-hectare site was extensively excavated by Yosef Elgavish, an Israeli archaeologist. Working on behalf of the Haifa Museum, he unearthed weaving and spinning tools, large purple-stained tins and evidence of human habitation around 1500 BC Although some archaeological layers conceal Phoenician pottery, Dr. also found. Elgavish of a four-room house and olive presses, which he identified as typical of Israelite settlements in the 10th century BC.
“Dr. Elgavish had a hunch that Tel Shiqmona played a role in the production of the purple dye, but he did not know the amount of production or who ran 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 first expeditions were not researched or published,” said Dr. Shalvi. In 2016, he and Ayelet Gilboa, his doctoral advisor at the University of Haifa, began a project to save what they called “cultural and intellectual properties” hidden in forgotten finds.
Soon, Dr. realized. Shalvi that defining Tel Shiqmona as exclusively Israelite does not reflect the complexity of the region. He divided the site’s Iron Age chronology into four main phases: 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 the facility (740 BC to 700 BC), and an unfortified industrial compound under Assyrian domination that survived until the Babylonian takeover of the territory (700 BC to 600 BC)
Three years ago, after carefully examining the thousands of finds from the excavations by Dr. Elgavish, Dr. had an epiphany. Shalvi. “I discovered purple traces that no one else had observed,” he said. “Once my eyes were opened to the purple staining pattern, I noticed it everywhere.”
That afternoon he called Dr. Gilboa and told him about his revelation. “We discussed whether it might be a good idea for me to see a psychiatrist,” said Dr. Shalvi with a dry laugh. “Fortunately, chemical analysis showed that in every case the purple was real.”
