The Torch
Winter Edition
Dyeing in Antiquity
BY NORA RAABFIRST VICE PRESIDENT
Imagine you are in a shopping center . What do you see ? Color ! Our lives are colorful . The people of the past too lived in color . At times this can be hard to imagine , because the ruins they have left behind are weathered stone . But their statues and their buildings and even their clothes had color . But how did they get such color without the chemicals we use today ? Trade — for the Greeks and later Romans , trade with other civilizations was one way they colored the world around them . Among the goods traded between empires were indigo , plants and insects containing anthraquinone ( for red pigments ) and mollusks to produce the famous Tyrian purple .
Tyrian Purple originated from the Phoenicians in the city of Tyre , giving this color and the dye that makes it its name . The pigment and dye are produced from the soft bodies of snails in the Muricidae ( Murex ) family . The process of extracting the dye is tedious and for about every 12,000 snails , a single gram is produced . Different species within the Murex family create varying shades , from burgundy to cool purples . The sheer number of snails necessary to produce wearable cloth makes the dye one of the most exclusive colors of antiquity .
In Crete , Greece , the occurrence of Murex shells in archeological sites shows that the snails were traded beyond the Levant because these snails do not naturally live in that part of the Mediterranean . In Rome , the dye was for the exclusive use of nobility and religious figures . Through history , the technique of the Phoenicians for extracting and using the dye was adopted by the ancient Greeks and later Romans but these methods were lost following the fall of Constantinople in 1453 ( shout out Mehmed II , my Ottoman GOAT !). Discoveries made in the last twenty years , however , have brought the techniques back from the dead . YAYAY textiles !!!!!!
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