This old factory helped Purple Reign

The most prized pigment of antiquity was processed not from a tangle of roots or the frothy extract of weeds, but by extracting a slimy secretion from the mucus glands behind the anus of Murex sea snails – “the underside of the bottom snails,” the historian Kelly Grovier wrote. The dye’s common name, Tyrian purple, is derived from the habitat of the molluscs, which the Phoenicians reportedly began harvesting in the city-state of Tire in modern-day Lebanon in the 16th century BC.

Because each snail yielded little more than a drop of the secretion – a clear, malodorous liquid – by some accounts it took about 250,000 to produce an ounce of dye. Purple was labor intensive, but produced so widely that piles of shells discarded millennia ago are now geographical features in the region. The dye was also expensive – according to a Roman edict from 301 AD. worth more than three times its weight in gold – that its use was reserved for priests, nobility and royalty. “While purple may have symbolized a higher order, it reeked of a lower order,” 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 paint production at the beginning of the period, and all were on a modest scale. But a new study Researchers from the University of Haifa in Israel suggest that during most of the Iron Age Biblical era, from about 1150 B.C., large purple-dying factories.

“Tel Shiqmona fills this gap with continuous production, usually in enormous 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, this is the only place where production can be demonstrated 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, praised the research for shedding new light on the neglected ruins. “Finding a site that really specializes in this economic branch is very important and special,” he said.

The research, published in the Journal of the Institute of Archeology of Tel Aviv, suggests that the Israelites took over Tel Shiqmona in the first half of the ninth century BC and cornered the lucrative purple dye market by converting the small dye plant. in a fortified factory surrounded by a casemate wall. (This was about the same time that Ahab was ruling the kingdom of Israel.)

The new operation was more or less a joint venture, run by the Israelites and staffed by skilled Phoenician workers who held the secrets of making the dye, said Dr. Shalvi. It is unclear whether the local population had continued the operation under duress or through cooperation.

In theory, the goods collected at Tel Shiqmona, mainly purple-dyed wool or textiles, were distributed to the elite and temples throughout the area, including Israel, Phoenicia, Philistia, Aram, Judea and Cyprus. Dr. Shalvi said the dye likely created both the argaman (purple) and tekhelet (azure blue) mentioned dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible. Tekhelet was used to dye tzitzit (tassels) on tallits (prayer shawls) used in Jewish religious rituals, and inspired the blue of the Israeli flag.

“The purple production at Tel Shiqmona overlaps with the existence of the First Temple in Jerusalem,” said Dr. Shalvi, referring 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 known place where the dye was made. Therefore, it is the only candidate that can provide the color for the scarlet and sapphire hues of the temple vestments and the curtains of the tabernacle.”

It took courage

Tyrian purple was the only colorfast dye known to the ancients; fabric tinted in color became brighter through weathering and sunlight. Shades ranged from blue-green to purplish red depending on how the dye was prepared and fixed in textiles. The most vivid tone was the deep crimson of “clotting blood” with a black tinge, the Roman historian Pliny reported.

In Imperial Rome, sumptuary laws restricted the purchase and wearing of purple-dyed cloth to the emperor (purple silk could only be used at his direction on pain of death) and, to a lesser extent, senators and consuls, who were allowed to do so. wear wide purple bands on the edges of their toga.

The name and origin of Tyrian purple were inventions of the Romans. As early as 1900 BC, the Minoans in Crete were already preparing a purple dye from sea snails, creating an industry that subsequently caught on and flourished in the eastern Mediterranean. It is believed that the production center moved to the port of Tyre, although Dr. Schmitt said this cannot be confirmed by primary sources, either textual or archaeological. In the harbour, the snails were collected from shallow waters and left to rot in large vats before being distilled into the purified dye. (Phoinike, the area’s corresponding Greek name, is cognate with Phoinix, meaning “reddish purple,” leading some scholars to speculate that Phoenicia was “the land of purple.”)

Julius Pollux, a Greek scholar and grammarian of the second century AD, attributed the discovery of the color to the Tyrian Hercules, known to the Phoenicians as Melqart, patron god of Tyre. In his ‘Onomasticon’, a ten-volume thesaurus, Pollux tells that a nymph named Tyrus was walking along the beach when her dog bit a sea snail, causing the dog’s mouth to turn an intense purple. Tire was captivated by the brilliance and told Hercules, her lover, that she wanted a robe of the same color. Hercules obeyed and purple became a royal rage.

In the 17th century, the artist Peter Paul Rubens recreated the yarn in the oil painting ‘Hercules’ Dog Discovers Purple Dye’. Unfortunately, he got the shell wrong, depicting a spiraling nautilus snail instead of a spiny murex.

Shell game

Tire is located 30 miles north of Tel Shiqmona, where the purple pigment was made from the dried and boiled intestines of three species of predatory sea snails: the spiny dye-murex (Bolinus brandaris), the striped dye-murex (Hexaplex trunculus) and the red-mouthed rock shell (Stramonita haemostoma). Each added a slightly different cast to the mix.

Tel Shiqmona had long puzzled archaeologists, who wondered why what appeared to be some kind of fortress was built far from agricultural lands on a rocky stretch of coastline that provided no safe harbor for ships.

From 1963 to 1977, the eight-hectare site was extensively excavated by Yosef Elgavish, an Israeli archaeologist. On behalf of the Haifa Museum, he has unearthed weaving and spinning equipment, large purple-colored ceramic vessels and evidence of human habitation from about 1500 BC. Although some archaeological layers harbored Phoenician pottery, Dr. Elgavish also found a four-room house with olive presses, which he identified as typical of the Israelites’ settlements in the 10th century BC.

“Dr. Elgavish suspected that Tel Shiqmona played a role in the production of the purple dye, but did not elaborate on the scale of production or who managed 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 have not been investigated or published,” said Dr. Shalvi. In 2016, he and Ayelet Gilboa, his doctoral advisor at the University of Haifa, started a project to rescue what they called the “cultural and intellectual assets” hidden in the forgotten finds.

Dr. Shalvi quickly realized that defining Tel Shiqmona as exclusively Israeli did not reflect the complexity of the region. He divided the site’s Iron Age chronology into four main episodes: a Phoenician village (1100 BC to 900 BC); a walled enclosure controlled by the Israelites (900 BCE to 740 BCE); a short-lived resettlement after the destruction of the kingdom and facility (740 BC to 700 BC), and an unfortified industrial complex under Assyrian rule that survived until the Babylonian takeover of the area (700 BC to 600 BC)

Three years ago, after discovering the thousands of finds from Dr. Elgavish carefully, Dr. Shalvi a revelation. “I discovered purple trails that no one else had noticed,” he said. “As soon as my eyes were opened to the purple color pattern, I noticed it everywhere.”

That afternoon he called Dr. Gilboa and told her about his revelation. “We discussed whether it might be a good idea for me to see a psychiatrist,” said Dr. Shalvi chuckles dryly. “Fortunately, chemical analysis showed that in all cases the purple was real.”