4 ms·
Can someone explain the purple silk price and penalty?
by spapas82 5y ago
Can someone explain the purple silk price and penalty?
- master_crab 5y agoPurple dye in the day was made from hundreds of ground up snails. And the color was, as I understood it, an official representation of the emperor. So akin to falsely representing oneself as the emperor. I'm sure someone else might have more details on the penalty and dye-making process.
- daniel-cussen 5y agoHundreds? I think way more, the snails seem to have evolved to produce very little purple, it seems the Phoenicians killed the juicy ones preferentially. I've read the process in Medieval times required...don't know like tens of kilograms of snail for enough purple to die one item. Like bad economics.
- detaro 5y agoExtremely expensive to make (made from a gland in some species of sea snail, so lots of work), which thus turned into a symbol of power, which then was reinforced by restrictions on its use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple#History
- airstrike 5y agoFrom that Wikipedia link, "for scale": > In nature, the snails use the secretion as part of their predatory behavior in order to sedate prey and as an antimicrobial lining on egg masses.[14][b] The snail also secretes this substance when it is attacked by predators, or physically antagonized by humans (e.g., poked). Therefore, the dye can be collected either by "milking" the snails, which is more labor-intensive but is a renewable resource, or by collecting and destructively crushing the snails. > David Jacoby remarks that "twelve thousand snails of Murex brandaris yield no more than 1.4 g of pure dye, enough to colour only the trim of a single garment."