The best known historical description of the dyeing procedure can be found in Pliny’s the Elder “Natural history” (1): “The most favourable season for taking these fish is after the rising of the Dog-star (= Sirius), or else before spring; for when they have once discharged their waxy secretion, their juices have no consistency: this, however, is a fact unknown in the dyers’ workshops, although it is a point of primary importance. “Actually, no-one could give me any advice because so few people were doing it, so I had to go it alone, learning the hard way,” Nouira explains. All rights reserved. Endeavour 1993, 17 (4), 191-199. https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-9327(93)90062-8, Phoenician purple, royal purple, imperial purple, From Latin Tyrius “of Tyre,” (Latin Tyrus), island-city in the Levant, from Greek Tyros, from Hebrew/Phoenician tzor, literally “rock, rocky place.” From Online Etymology Dictionary. “When the teacher was talking about the Murex, I thought, I know those snails, they stink, but how is it possible to make dye from them?” he recalls. But the Murex’s purple dye remains extremely valuable, and German dye company Kremer Pigment markets Tyrian Purple for €2,500 ($2717) per gram. “In antiquity, people didn’t have entire royal robes in purple, just bands and stripes. Pure pigmentation production is even more complex, involving endless scraping and filtering, before the concentrated pigment is dried and ground down, and the fine powder then carefully cleaned of any tiny remaining shell fragments. Doi:10.3184/003685013X13680345111425. They said there was an abundance of them in Tunisian waters, and their spiky shells meant they got caught in nets very easily.”, With few mentions in historical texts about Phoenician dyeing techniques, Nouira found himself with a bag of snails but no idea where to start. Synthetic Communications, 31 (23), 3721-3727 (2001). © Middle East Eye 2020 - all rights reserved. "We have good reasons to believe that the purple dye from Meninx was not exported as such, but was used locally to dye textiles, which were then sold further afield.". Whereas in a CMYK color space, it is composed of 0% cyan, 98% magenta, 41.2% yellow and 60% black. (6) Cooksey, C., Tyrian purple: the first four thousand years, Science Progress (2013), 96(2), 171 – 186. An overview of mahogany color with a palette. The pigment was expensive and complex to produce, and items colored with it became associated with power and w… None of them is to be confused with bone black (made from burnt animal tusks, horns, and bones) or Mars black. Parts of the saffron flowers were painted in Tyrian purple. Poking his head out of the tiled garden outhouse in a Tunis suburb, Ghassen Nouira tells Middle East Eye, with a grin, how his work producing purple dye powder using millennia-old methods nearly cost him his marriage. Reproduction of materials found on this site, in any form, without explicit permission is prohibited. It is the oldest, most well-known, most expensive, most prestigious and most vivid dye or pigment. ColourLex is being supported by the cogito foundation. Noting that Jewish customers are more interested in the colour blue, Nouira says he loves the cross-cultural nature of being a Muslim dyer selling this traditional dye to Christians and Jews. Life there came to an abrupt stop because of earthquakes followed by a volcanic eruption, à la Pompeii, in 1650 – 1600 BC, according to data from Greenland ice-cores. For some reason, Harvard goes with “the crimson” as the nickname for its sports teams, not “the lice.”. Father of three Nouira fits his passion for the colour purple around a full-time day job managing a unit in a market research company, with dye sales helping to cover research and production expenses. The letters stand for “pigment red.” It was a popular choice for automotive bodies in the ’90s. "By the 10th-century BC, there were hundreds of these production centres, and the largest were Tyre, Sidon (both in modern-day Lebanon) and the ancient city of Meninx in Djerba (Tunisia),” he says. “They scanned the whole Mediterranean looking for Murex and, where they found them in abundance, they’d consider that spot as a good place to stay and build a dye-making facility. 2017, 48, 744-749. Beale himself has just led a successful expedition sailing a replica Phoenician vessel from Tunis to America, proving the ancient civilisation could have made the journey thousands of years before Christopher Columbus. That pigment also includes lamp black, soot black, and vine black. Nouira now runs workshops across Tunisia, for schools, museums, organisations and at historical or cultural events. doi:10.3390/molecules15085561. The endless cleaning of snails, which inhabit the muddy ocean floor, the extraction and drying of their dye-producing gland and his experimental dyeing activities all generate an overwhelming stench. Egyptian blue, the world’s oldest synthetic pigment, was made to imitate lapis lazuli. Carbon black? “[She] threatened to divorce me because of the terrible smell my work generates, so my dad gave me his shed, in a desperate attempt to save my marriage.”. Those contents make up the Forbes Pigment Collection, part of the museums’. Many of his Christian customers have made reference to a Biblical quote that says that Christ "was clothed in purple" before the crucifixion [Mark 15:17]. It is the oldest, most well-known, most expensive, most prestigious and most vivid dye or pigment. (5) Kanold I B, The Purple Fermentation Vat: Dyeing or Painting Parchment with Murex trunculus, Dyes in History and Archaeology, 2005, 20, 150-154, (6) Cooksey C J, Making Tyrian purple, A convenient synthesis of 6,6′-dibromoindigo via a nitrone, Dyes in History and Archaeology, 1994, 13, 7-13, (7) Wolk, Joel L; Frimer, Aryeh A (2010-08-15). Endeavour 1993, 17 (4), 191-199. https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-9327(93)90062-8. Natural ultramarine, another blue pigment, comes from crushed lapis lazuli. Years of experimentation with the three different types of Murex found in Tunisian waters led Nouira to discover the ultimate combination of two different types of Murex, creating a long-lasting deep and intense purple shade. Emerald green, a favorite of Vincent Van Gogh, dominates his. Tyrian purple comes from marine molluscs of the Muricidae family and the colour precursors are contained in the hypobranchial gland. Anyone who has in the past made the climb to the fourth floor of the Harvard University Art Museums, which remain closed because of COVID-19, has had an experience both transfixing and frustrating. The pigment made from this natural dye is called Tyrian Purple or Imperial Purple. This, he believes, is how history should be taught. Each vessel contains one of some 2,700 pigments. It can be used for painting. I can also bake the shells in large pottery furnaces, then grind them, which results in a very high-quality lime, that can be used as a building material, as a base for Purpurissum (purple paint pigment), makes an excellent fertiliser for acidic soils, and can even be reused instead of soda in dyeing processes,” he says.