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The Roman mythographer Julius Pollux, writing in the 2nd century AD, asserted (Onomasticon I, 45–49) that the purple dye was first discovered by the philosopher Heracles of Tyre, or rather, by his dog, whose mouth was stained purple from chewing on snails along the coast at Tyre.
As early as the 15th century BC the citizens of Sidon and Tyre, two cities on the coast of Ancient Phoenicia (present day Lebanon), were producing purple dye from a sea snail called the spiny dye-murex. Clothing colored with the Tyrian dye was mentioned in both the Iliad of Homer and the Aeneid of Virgil.
In China, purple root/gromwell (Lithospermum purpurocaeruleum) has been used to produce a purple dye. Choctaw artists traditionally used maple ( Acer sp.) to create lavender and purple dyes. [28] Purples can also be derived from lichens , and from the berries of White Bryony from the northern Rocky Mountain states and mulberry ( morus nigra ...
Tyrian purple is a dull purple dye that is secreted by a common Mediterranean snail. It was highly prized in antiquity. In 1909, its structure was shown to be 6,6'-dibromoindigo (red). 6-bromoindigo (purple) is a component as well. It has never been produced on a commercial basis.
The analysis identified it as an “incredibly rare” lump of Tyrian purple dye, also known as imperial purple, the company said in a May 3 news release. “For millennia, Tyrian Purple was the ...
The violet-purple dye derived from the hypobranchial gland of the Murex marine snail, once profusely available in coastal waters of the eastern Mediterranean Sea but exploited to local extinction. Phoenicians may have discovered the dye as early as 1750 BC.
Purpura is the color of a dye extracted from a mollusk found on the shores of the city of Tyre in ancient Phoenicia (contemporarily in Lebanon), which color in classical antiquity was a symbol of royalty and political authority because only the very wealthy could afford it, including the Roman Emperors. Therefore, Tyrian purple was also ...
"[Lydia's] name is an ethnicon, deriving from her place of origin". The first refers to her place of birth, which is a city in the ancient region of Lydia (modern-day Akhisar , Turkey). The second comes from the Latin word for purple and relates to her connection with purple dye.
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.
Although William Morris in the late-19th-century Arts and Crafts movement tried to revive use of British natural dyes, most were so low-yield and so inconsistent from locality to locality (part of the reason for the historical tartan differentiation by area) that they proved to have little mass-production potential, despite some purple dye ...