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Tyrian purple: Ancient pigment that was more valuable than gold
- bookofjoe 3y ago[flagged]
- conductr 3y agoThis is also pretty interesting about the guy trying to recreate it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVXqisH6VeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVXqisH6VeM
- corinroyal 3y agoWhy is he smashing them up? Such a cruel waste. Those snails are rare. You can just poke them with a stick and they spit dye. Then you put them back. I guess he doesn't know that there is still Murex purple being harvested in North America.
- emmet 3y agoOne of the first comments on that video in reply to someone saying this: > I'd rather animals suffer than humans Ah yes, the eternal suffering of not having purple clothes. It haunts me every day.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoIts stuff like this that makes me think it wouldn't be so bad for humans to be wiped out. We just suck so much
- hinkley 3y agoI saw this same video a couple of months ago. Don’t remember how I ended up getting that recommended to me. Probably watching videos about cinnamon and pepper (trying to figure out how white pepper is different from black).
- chubot 3y agoHa I just watched a documentary that mentioned this pigment. Fall of Civilizations 17 - Carthage: Empire of the Phoenecians https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dbdVhVSat8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dbdVhVSat8 This whole channel is absolutely amazing. I watched almost the entire thing over the last 3 months -- 17 episodes of 2 to 4 hours on various civilizational collapses. There were a bunch I didn't know about at all -- like medieval civilizations in Cambodia, Burma, and Jordan. They were wealthy, and built huge things, and then disappeared. Also, I have heard of "Carthage" from all those movies like Gladiator ... Somehow it escaped me until my 40's that Carthage was founded by people from what's now Syria, and the city was in what's now Tunisia :) I guess being American I have a fuzzy picture of that side of the world, and what it looked like in ancient times.
- yuppiepuppie 3y agoThere is a podcast too which I listen to on the go. I’m also American and living in Europe for the past decade, and having dived into history such as Roman, Carthage, the Celts, … has really made me appreciate the vast history of our species. I can drive down the ride and see a huge castle the was attacked by Hannibal on his quest for Rome. And my native friends where I live couldn’t care less :( I hope America can preserve its history for a while so others can enjoy it in 1000 years like we do with Rome.
- brnt 3y agoYou are perhaps only looking at big history, as does the trope prescribe ;) Chances are that your native friends have a lot of small history to tell, and you might find it interesting.
- yuppiepuppie 3y agoFor sure. Even my wifes grandmother has quite a good history story with the Spanish civil war :) I love hearing those stories.
- graphe 3y agoAmericans have preserved their history somewhat. https://youtu.be/aB6AUYr6Ecs https://youtu.be/aB6AUYr6Ecs great channel, fascinating especially their collapsing hierarchies. They formed temporary hierarchies to build luxurious settlements for everyone to live in, then collapsed back into being non hierarchical.
- relyks 3y agoJust noting: a similar pigment with high value was Tekhelet, which was also extracted from a similar sea snails species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet
- axionduck 3y agonoted! נגנז
- FergusArgyll 3y agoEven on HN you run into תכלת people...
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoHow am I supposed to be able to read that without the niqqud?
- credit_guy 3y agoVery interesting. If I understand correctly, it is exactly the same pigment, coming from the same sea snail (Hexaplex trunculus), only that the application to textiles was different: if you dye a cloth and keep it in the dark until it dries out it becomes reddish-purple, if you let it dry in the sun it becomes blue.
- sn00tz00t 3y agoYou can make natural purple dyes with ammonia and some lichens. Smashing up and boiling rare snails sounds like ass compared to that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxi2Up7YhM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxi2Up7YhM4
- adrian_b 3y agoPurple dyes can be made easily from many natural sources. Nevertheless, none of those has the lightfastness and the permanence of the pigment extracted from snails, which were the reasons for its very high value in the antiquity. After Tyrian purple, the blue dyes from indigo or woad are the next best in lightfastness, and then some of the red dyes. Most natural dyes fade rather quickly, so in antiquity it was usual to dye again the expensive garments from time to time, not only to wash them. Now it is possible to synthesize the pigments that compose the Tyrian purple, but the process is much more expensive than for the cheap purple synthetic dyes that are commonly used.
- dendrite9 3y agoThe Talmud specifically gave women the right to divorce their husband if they became a dye maker after marriage because of how badly they stank.
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoI’ve seen that claim several times but I’ve never been able to find the actual text to understand the context.
- jsmith99 3y agoI think it’s a mistaken reference to https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Ketubot.7.10 https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Ketubot.7.10 which mentions trades like a tanner but doesn’t mention a dyer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sandGorgon 3y agothe sadder and more impactful legacy of a dye is Indigo - which is not lost or forgotten. It was in such great demand that Europe funded explorers like Vasco Da Gama specifically to discover the source of Indigo. Named after India, it was one of the incentives for colonisation and indeed the Great Bengal Famine (which affected 30 million people). It became one of the most remarkable peasant movements of Indian history against the British. It came to be called the Neel Bidroha or the Indigo Revolt. The Indigo famine drama script that was created by the Anglican priest James Long and Indian writer Dinabandhu Mitra - Nil Darpan (Indigo Mirror) - was the root cause of the creation of the National Theatre in Kolkata. The British banned the play in England saying it "slandered British women for desiring the Indigo dye". The National Theatre (and the Indigo play) in Kolkata kickstarted the Indian commercial performing arts industry...eventually culminating in Bollywood.
- zeristor 3y agoI think it was the initial need for slaves in the Caribbean, which was later supplanted by sugar. https://history.howstuffworks.com/world-history/indigo.htm https://history.howstuffworks.com/world-history/indigo.htm
- hinkley 3y agoWe did something similar with cinnamon and Ceylon/Sri Lanka. Also moved to the Caribbean. Though now there are two plants we call cinnamon, and I think the new world mostly produces the other one, which is why Ceylon Cinnamon is a ‘thing’ now. Pepper was similarly more valuable than gold, but I don’t recall the sordid history on that one.
- rational_indian 3y agoPrinter ink is quickly approaching these price levels. I guess people have always loved to have some color in their lives.
- kqr 3y agoHumans have always loved decorating themselves and things. Metals were also to a large extent popular because of their use in jewellery and the like. (Come to think of it, many of the things we use wealth for today is also visual signalling in some sense.)
- RamblingCTO 3y agoWikipedia says: > In 1998, by means of a lengthy trial and error process, a process for dyeing with Tyrian purple was rediscovered.[37][38] This finding built on reports from the 15th century to the 18th century and explored the biotechnology process behind woad fermentation. It is hypothesized that an alkaline fermenting vat was necessary. An incomplete ancient recipe for Tyrian purple recorded by Pliny the Elder was also consulted. By altering the percentage of sea salt in the dye vat and adding potash, he was able to successfully dye wool a deep purple colour.[39] So in that regard, the article seems not entirely correct.
- wolverine876 3y agoWhy do you believe the article Wikipedia cites, filtered through some person who edited Wikipedia, rather than the OP? If the Wikipedia editor read the OP, the OP would be quoted/cited instead - and maybe that will happen.