Free Republic

For the first time, archaeologists discovered an industrial purple-dye factory that remained in business for 500 years between 1100 and 600 BCE in Israel, highlighting a famous and mysterious color in textile history.The color purple had long symbolized political and spiritual authority and wealth. However, until now, little evidence has surfaced of a physical location where extraction and processing took place.A team from the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University and the University of Chicago recently uncovered the first site in "the entire world" at the fishing village of Tel Shiqmona on Israel's Carmel coast. And the number...

Forty-nine times the Bible mentions a perfect, pure blue, a color so magnificent and transcendent that it was all but impossible to describe. Yet, for most of the last 2,000 years, nobody has known exactly what “biblical blue” — called tekhelet in Hebrew — actually looked like or how it could be re-created. At the time of the Second Temple, which towered above Jerusalem until it was destroyed by the Romans, a blue dye of the same name was used to color the fabric used in the clothing of the high priests. Jewish men are still commanded to use a...

Newsweek reports that two wool textile fragments discovered in Israel’s Cave of Skulls in 2016 had been dyed bright red with dye made from Kermes vermilio, a species of scale insect. The fabric has been dated to 3,800 years ago, making it the oldest known use of scale insects for dyeing textiles.“Identifying the dye in the ancient textile was achieved using High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC)—a device commonly employed in biology and chemistry laboratories to separate and identify substances in minute quantities,” said Na’ama Sukenik of the Israel Antiquities Authority.A large quantity of the insects would be needed to produce a...

A press release published Monday detailed the discovery of a "mysterious" 4000-year-old monolith in Cyprus.The Erimi Archaeological Team at the University of Siena described the large monolith as having a "circular motif of cups in the center," which "tells the story of a distant era of an artisan community in Cyprus." It stands roughly 7.55 feet tall and is part of a sprawling Bronze Age community complex, according to Ancient Origins.The site has also revealed dyeing vats, warehouses and workshops, suggesting it was the site of a significant textile industry. The monolith was uncovered inside a room in the western...

As part of a DFG-funded project, a German-Tunisian team co-directed by LMU archaeologist Stefan Ritter has surveyed the ancient city of Meninx on the island of Jerba and reconstructed its trading links in antiquity. The port of Meninx was unusually situated and well protected. Incoming ships first had to negotiate a deep and broad submarine channel in the otherwise shallow bay, before approaching the city itself via another channel that ran parallel to the coast for much of its length. They then had to traverse a wide stretch of shallow water to reach the city's wooden and stone quays, which...

A rare dye made from snails for the robes of the Roman elite almost 2,000 years ago has been unearthed at a cricket club. The chunk of Tyrian purple, roughly the size of a ping pong ball, was dug up at Carlisle Cricket Club as part of ongoing yearly excavations. A Roman bathhouse was discovered at the site in 2017 and in the last three years 2,000 items including pottery, weapons, coins and semi-precious stones have been found. Lead archaeologist Frank Giecco said the find was of "international significance" and the first time the precious pigment had been discovered in...

According to a statement released by PLOS, a purple dye workshop dated to the sixteenth-century B.C. has been discovered on the Greek island of Aegina by Lydia Berger of Paris Lodron University and her colleagues. The researchers identified the workshop through the purple pigment preserved on ceramics that may have served as dye containers; grinding stones; a waste pit; and the crushed shells of marine snails. Most of these shells came from the banded dye-murex species of Mediterranean snail. The bones of young mammals, including piglets and lambs, were also recovered at the site. The animals are thought to have...

<p>An Israeli researcher says she has identified a nearly 2,000-year old textile that may contain a mysterious blue dye described in the Bible, one of the few remnants of the ancient color ever found.</p> <p>Naama Sukenik of Israel's Antiquities Authority said Tuesday that recent examination of a small woolen textile discovered in the 1950s found that the textile was colored with a dye from the Murex trunculus, a snail researchers believe was the source of the Biblical blue.</p>

The secret of imperial purple has been rediscovered. A British amateur chemist has worked out how the ancient Romans dyed the togas of emperors this deep colour thanks to a bacterium found in cockles from the supermarket Tesco. The hue had special significance as the colour of imperial power. Cleopatra also had the sails on her ship dyed the same colour. The recipe for the dye had been kept a craft secret, even in ancient Egypt and Rome. There are few references to the dying process in the historical literature. Green to purple Modern chemistry can make every shade of...