Breaking news from the world of archaeology!
Researchers have discovered a lump of ancient purple dye at the site of a Roman bathhouse in Carlisle, a town in the northwest of England. Such a discovery may seem a little odd, especially with the amount of excitement that is surrounding it; but it was a very important (and ridiculously expensive) item in the ancient world, and this is the first of its kind found in the UK!
The dye is made from the glands of a small marine snail and to obtain just 2g would require the harvesting of some 12,000 snails. It was a time intensive enterprise and the end product was more valuable than gold. The result was an amazingly striking purple colour that could be used in paint or to dye clothing - most famously the royal purple worn by many kings and emperors of the ancient world.
What the history books rarely prepare you for is an unexpected consequence of the dying process. In terms of the senses, the visual spectacle of the purple is not the only form of input. As Pliny the Elder describes (The Natural History, 9.60):
Why it is that such a high value has been set upon the produce of this shell-fish, seeing that while in the dye the smell of it is offensive[?]
What people do not often appreciate is that the smell of the snails never really disappears, with an odour which combines the smell of the ocean with slightly rotting fish. It is not very pleasant and would have stayed on the clothing for a very long time.
The Purple People
The name of this specific dye is known to historians as Tyrian purple because the town of Tyre, in modern Lebanon, is mentioned in our sources as being the best producers of it. Although archaeological evidence suggests that it was first manufactured in other places, such as Crete.
Tyre was in the land of Canaan, a region that is associated with a large collection of different people that our ancient sources liked to group together as a single ethnic group. This is a little misleading, but the name they were given by the Greeks - the Phoenicians - has stuck. However, ‘Phoenician’ was not a term someone from the region would have used to define their ethnicity - perhaps unsurprisingly, given that would have been a foreign word to them. The name also influenced that given to the people of Carthage, a city which was founded by Phoenician settlers, who are known as Punic people (hence the ‘Punic Wars’).
Both of these names derive from the Greek word phoinix, which means ‘purple’ (it can also mean a type of tree and, of course, a legendary bird). So Phoenicia was the land of purple.
The purple dye found in Carlisle is an extraordinary discovery and is quickly being linked with a possible visit from the emperor Septimius Severus in the 3rd century CE. While the lead archaeologists are rightly cautious - there is not yet enough evidence to be sure - it is an interesting idea; not least because the bathhouse is dedicated to the emperor’s wife and the design of the building echoes those in north Africa, where Septimius Severus was from.
A few months ago, just out of interest, I actually put a bit of time into researching Tyrian purple. From what I read, it seems like dyeing things purple became such a status symbol that people started paying absolutely ludicrous amounts for it, far exceeding its actual cost to make. It’s scary to think how much someone might have actually paid for this lump of dye.