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The modern English word purple comes from the Old English purpul, which derives from Latin purpura, which, in turn, derives from the Greek πορφύρα (porphura), the name of the Tyrian purple dye manufactured in classical antiquity from a mucus secreted by the spiny dye-murex snail.
Tyrian purple is a pigment made from the mucus of several species of Murex snail. Production of Tyrian purple for use as a fabric dye began as early as 1200 BC by the Phoenicians, and was continued by the Greeks and Romans until 1453 AD, with the fall of Constantinople.
The most famous violet-purple dye in the ancient world was Tyrian purple, made from a type of sea snail called the murex, found around the Mediterranean. In western Polynesia, residents of the islands made a violet dye similar to Tyrian purple from the sea urchin.
Tyrian purple may have been discovered as early as during the Minoan civilization. Alexander the Great, when giving imperial audiences as the emperor of Macedonia; the emperor of the Seleucid Empire; and the kings of Ptolemaic Egypt all wore Tyrian purple. The imperial robes of Roman emperors were of Tyrian purple trimmed in metallic gold thread.
The colour purple, which had been a mark of aristocracy and prestige since ancient times, was especially expensive and difficult to produce. Its extraction was variable and complicated, and so Perkin and his brother realised that they had discovered a possible substitute whose production could be commercially successful.
Color of chemicals. The color of chemicals is a physical property of chemicals that in most cases comes from the excitation of electrons due to an absorption of energy performed by the chemical. What is seen by the eye is not the color absorbed, but the complementary color from the removal of the absorbed wavelengths.
Dioscorea alata – also called purple yam, ube (/ ˈ uː b ɛ,-b eɪ /), or greater yam, among many other names – is a species of yam (a tuber). The tubers are usually a vivid violet - purple to bright lavender in color (hence the common name), but some range in color from cream to plain white.
The trees are prized for their beautiful heartwood which, when cut, quickly turns from a light brown to a rich purple color. Exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light darkens the wood to a brown color with a slight hue of the original purple. [4]
Commercial history. Craft work on tanzanite. In July 1967, Manuel de Souza, a Goan tailor and part-time gold prospector living in Arusha, found transparent fragments of blue and blue-purple gem crystals on a ridge near Mererani, some 40 km (25 mi) southeast of Arusha.
Amethyst is a purple variety of quartz (SiO 2 ) and owes its violet color to irradiation , impurities of iron ( Fe 3+ ) and in some cases other transition metals , and the presence of other trace elements, which result in complex crystal lattice substitutions.