by Henni Racik
A dictionary defines purple as “any of a group of colors with a hue between that of violet and red” and as a “symbol of royalty or high office.” Historically, the color purple has been associated with royalty and power, but the secret of its power lies in the glands of tiny shellfish creatures.
The earliest archaeological evidence for the origins of purple dyes points to the Minoan civilization in Crete, about 1900 B.C. The ancient land of Canaan (its corresponding Greek name was Phoenicia, which means “land of the purple”) was the center of the ancient purple dye industry.
“Tyrian Purple,” the purple dye of the ancients mentioned in texts dating back to about 1600 B.C., was produced from the mucus of the hypobranchial gland of various species of marine mollusks, notably Murex. It took some 12,000 shellfish to extract 1.5 grams of the pure dye. Legend credits its discovery to Herakles, or rather to his dog, whose mouth was stained purple from chewing on snails along the Levantine coast. King Phoenix received a purple-dyed robe from Herakles and decreed the rulers of Phoenicia should wear this color as a royal symbol.
Although originating in Tyre (hence the name), man's first dye chemical industry spread throughout the world.
Rome, Egypt, and Persia all used purple as the imperial standard. Purple dyes were rare and expensive; only the rich had access to them. The purple colorants used came from different sources, most from the dye extraction from fish or insects.
The imperial purple of Rome was based on mollusk from which purpura comes. Emperor Aurelian refused to let his wife buy a purpura-dyed silk garment, as it cost its weight in gold!
Insect and snail animal-based colors were mentioned in the Bible for use in textile furnishings of the Tabernacle and for the sacred vestments for the High Priest Aaron, and they also were used in King Solomon's and King Herod's temples in Jerusalem.
With the decline of the Roman Empire, the use of “Tyrian Purple” also declined, and large-scale production ceased with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A.D. It was replaced by cheaper dyes such as lichen purple and madder.
Pope Paul II in 1464 introduced the so-called “Cardinal's Purple,” which was really scarlet extracted from the Kermes insect. This became the first luxury dye of the Middle Ages.
Dyes were exported extensively from Central and South America during Spain's exploration of North and South America. Among these were Cochineal from Mexico and Peru.
The chemical birth of the synthetic dye industry can be traced to the discovery of an aniline-based purple dye, mauveine, by William H. Perkin in 1856, who accomplished this while searching for a cure for malaria. Perkin was an English chemist who changed the world of his time by making this purple color available to the masses. It became quite fashionable to wear clothing dyed with “mauve,” and Mr. Perkin became a very wealthy man.
In 1909 Paul Friedlander determined the major chemical composition of Murex dye as 6,6'-dibromoindigo.
Today, genuine “Tyrian Purple” remains the domain of the rich and famous. However, synthetic dyes and pigments that meet various purple color requirements have removed the mystique of the color purple.
- Tyrian Purple was first produced by the Ancient Phoenicians in the city of Tyre.
- Currently Tyre is the fourth largest city in Lebenon, and a popular tourist destination.
- Tyrian Purple is produced by a fresh mucous secretion of a small sea snale called murex. The exact species is spiny dye-murex.
- Tyrian Purple was, and still is, very expensive. In Ancient Rome, to buy Tyrian Purple cost its weight in silver.
- Approximately 60,000 murex animals were required to make one pound of Tyrian Purple.
- Finlay in her book Color: A Natural History of the Palette describes a hill in the Phoenician port city of Sidon (also in Lebenon), called Murex Hill, composed of billions of discarded murex shells. The hill is more than meters in diameter and 50 meters high.
- Some broken murex shells can still be found, but Murex Hill is mostly covered with earth, various buildings and a cemetery.
- The Ancient Roman naturalist Pliny describes the steps in process of manufacturing Tyrian Purple:
- Murex were caught in baskets lowered into the sea at the end of long ropes. Frogs or mussels were used as bait.
- The murex were pulled from their shells, and the vein containing the pigment was extracted.
- The pigment was mixed with salt and repeatedly heated in vats to separate water from the pigment. The whole process took about ten days.
- Due to the large number of decaying murex bodies, the process generated considerable stench.
- One of the trade secrets of the Phoenicians was to mix the purple dye obtained from murex with the more reddish dye obtained from the Buccinum shellfish. Here is the approximate color of the resulting Tyrian Purple dye:
- Murex were caught in baskets lowered into the sea at the end of long ropes. Frogs or mussels were used as bait.
- Tyrian Purple actually looks more like maroon than purple. Some languages translate its color as scarlet.
- Purple was the official royal color in the Ancient Roman Empire.
- Here is the Byzantine Emperor Justinian dressed in Tyrian purple.
- The use of Tyrian Purple as a royal color in Ancient Rome was already present with Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, his wife. They had furnature draped with purple covers.
- Some of the emperors like Valentian, Theodosius, and Arcadias in the fifth century, only allowed the emperor to wear purple. Death was the penalty for violators.
- The third century emperors Septimus Severus allowed women to wear purple, but only men of high status like generals could wear it.
- In the fourth century, Diocletian encouraged everyone to wear purple, the more the better.
- Today, murex can still be found off the coast of Tyre, but it is rare.
- Shellfish similar to murex can be found in other parts of the world. In central america, they are called caracola; in Japan they are called murasaki.
- In Mexico, the caracola are "milked" to obtain their dye. It is used to dye cloth for indigenous clothing.
- In the 1800s, processes chemists invented synthetic purple dyes that were much cheaper than murex, so Tyrian Purple is no longer available.
- References:
- Tyrian Purple actually looks more like maroon than purple. Some languages translate its color as scarlet.