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Tyrian purple (Ancient Greek: πορφύρα porphúra; Latin: purpura), also known as royal purple, imperial purple, or imperial dye, is a reddish-purple natural dye. The name Tyrian refers to Tyre, Lebanon, once Phoenicia.
The most prized Phoenician goods were fabrics dyed with Tyrian purple, which formed a major part of Phoenician wealth. 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.
No evidence of purple dye manufacture has been found at Carthage, but mounds of shells of the murex marine snails, from which it derived, have been found in excavations of the Punic town of Kerkouane, at Dar Essafi on Cap Bon.
Like their Phoenician predecessors the Carthaginians produced and exported the very valuable Tyrian purple dye that was extracted from shellfish. The Phoenician colony of Mogador on the northwestern coast of Africa was a center of Tyrian dye production. Dido and the foundation of Carthage Aeneas tells Dido of the fall of Troy. (Guérin 1815)
Archaeological evidence indicates that Tyre had already by the middle of the second millennium BCE established the industrial production of a rare and extraordinarily expensive sort of purple dye, known as Tyrian Purple, which was famous for its beauty and lightfast qualities.
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 ...
History of Phoenicia. Phoenicia was an ancient Semitic-speaking thalassocratic civilization that originated in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily modern Lebanon. [1] [2] At its height between 1100 and 200 BC, Phoenician civilization spread across the Mediterranean, from Cyprus to the Iberian Peninsula .
Tablets found in the Hurrian city of Nuzi in the early 20th century appear to use the term "Kinaḫnu" as a synonym for red or purple dye, laboriously produced by the Kassite rulers of Babylon from murex molluscs as early as 1600 BC, and on the Mediterranean coast by the Phoenicians from a byproduct of glassmaking.
These cities were centers of the pottery, glass, and purple dye industries; their harbors also served as warehouses for products imported from Syria, Persia, and India. They exported cedar , perfume, jewelry, wine, and fruit to Rome.
The area was first recorded in history around 4000 BC as a group of coastal cities and a heavily forested hinterland. [citation needed] It was inhabited by the Canaanites, a Semitic people, whom the Greeks called "Phoenicians" because of the purple (phoinikies) dye they sold.