How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Beautiful Purple Dye from Snail Glands
Much has been written about the loss of color in the twenty-first century. Our environments offered practically every color known to man not so very long ago — and in certain eras, granted, it got to be a bit much. But now, everything seems to have retreated to a narrow palette of grays and browns, not to mention stark black and white. We should consider the possibility that this time of “color loss” is a kind of ascetic repentance after a long feast. That analogy holds on more than one level: technology and industrialization made food abundant and thus inexpensive, and it did the very same thing with colors.
There was a time when colors didn’t come cheap. People had plenty of black, reds, and browns in their lives, but producing the pigments for hues not often seen in nature entailed going to the ends of the earth (or in the case of ultramarine blue, the bottom of the sea). We all know that, for a long time starting around the day of Julius Caesar, purple was the color of royalty. The choice wasn’t an accident: Caesar’s “Tyrian purple” of choice was extravagantly expensive, owing to the fact that it could be extracted only from the glands of a particular Mediterranean sea snail. You can learn more about this process from the Business Insider video above.
“Thousands of snails were required to produce a single ounce of purple dye,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sonja Anderson, quoting Pliny the Elder. Though well understood for a few decades now, the world of ancient purple-dye production continues to yield scientific discoveries. “Archaeologists were excavating recently in the Bronze Age town of Kolonna, on the Greek island of Aegina, when they discovered two Mycenaean buildings,” Anderson writes. “As the researchers write in a study published in the journal PLOS ONE, the buildings date to the 16th century B.C.E., and the older one contained pigmented ceramics, grinding tools and heaps of broken mollusk shells: all indicative of a purple dye factory.”
Notably, these well-preserved 3,600-year-old ruins date from a time long before purple acquired its prestige. “There is no indication in the Bronze Age that purple was a symbol of power and that purple-colored textiles were only reserved for the elite or leaders, as in Roman or Byzantine times,” says archaeologist Lydia Berger, co-author of the study. And when the Byzantine Empire fell, the knowledge of Tyrian purple was lost with it, only to be recovered early in this century. These days, one does hear occasional rumors of a color comeback, and a rich purple leading the charge would bring with it a certain historical satisfaction. In any case, we all remember one cultural royal in particular who surely would have approved.
via Smithsonian
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.