Stone tool with purple dye residues found at Tel Shiqmona in Israel
Maria Bukin/Shalvi et al., 2025, Plos One, CC-By 4.0
For centuries, a coastal settlement in modern Israel was home to the industrial scale production from marine snails of a purple dye that was one of the old world’s most precious ingredients.
Known as a Tyrical purple, it was especially sought to color woolen textiles and was widely appreciated by the wealthy and powerful of iron -alive Mediterranean communities. But the unit now the direct proof of any places in large -scale production has been sparse.
From 1100 BC to approx. 900 BC Tel Shiqmona was a small Phoenician fishing village where purple dye was produced on a small scale. There, when the Kingdom of Israel began to expand, the site was transformed “from a fishing village to a fortified purple dye production center,” says Golan Shalvi at the University of Chicago.
During archaeological work on site, Shalvi and his colleagues found the remains of dye -colored vessels to treat the drug, each of which could have up to 350 liters of fluid. In total, 176 items related to purple dye production were recovered, included 135 purple-striking items.
The dye is harvested from port rule in the Muricidae family, as a secret mucus to defend itself and kill prey. “The secretion is originally a slightly greenish liquid that is oxidized by exhibition to air and gradually turns purple,” says Shalvi. “To transform it into an actual dye – one that chemically binds with textiles – however, it must be treated to a solution through a complex range of chemical steps.”
The researchers claim that Tel Shiqmona is the only place in the world where there is clear evidence of large -scale production of purple dye in specialized facility for so long.
However, there are no historical items that bind the place to the dye, and there is little about the actual process used to produce it, says Shalvi.
After the Kingdom of Israel fell around 720 BC, the extent of dye production was settled until the Assyrians took over the place and called the process up once again. About 600 BC, when the Babylonians conquered the region, the dye production at such Shiqmona was abandoned.
“It was an industrial place in most of the Iron Age without monumental architecture or any particular beauty or elegance,” says Shalvi. “I can imagine it as a very smelly place-ice to a modern nose as the production process released a terrible odor. I imagine woolfleeces colored in various shades that dry outside and inside the buildings, which may have given the place a purple-red-blue-blue tone.”
Purple Dye has fascinated people all over the world, he says, and it has been the subject of extensive research. “Its connection to elite classes and religious rituals gave it enormous cultural, symbolic and economic significance far beyond its function as a mother color.”
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