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Upvote just for good historical reference! Murex were the shells whose excretions were used to make the Tyrian purple of the Mediterranean. Tyrian referring to
by nickpinkston 1y ago
Upvote just for good historical reference!
Murex were the shells whose excretions were used to make the Tyrian purple of the Mediterranean. Tyrian referring to Tyre, one of the major Phoenician city-states.
It was so iconic that the "Punic Wars" are called that because Punic = Phoenicia = "Purple People".
Carthage was the Phoenician colony that outlasted the home country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple
- jabedude 1y agoMurex also has significant religious significance to Jews. It is the source of the biblically mandated blue threads for four cornered garments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet
- gausswho 1y agoIt's a one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple people eater...
- throwaway894345 1y agoAlso, the Phoenicians were the descendants of the Canaanites, who (according to one etymological theory) are also named after the color purple. The Phoenicians were a semitic people like the Jews, and they gave the world its first alphabet which was adopted by both the Hebrews and the Greeks. The Greeks added vowels, and the Romans adopted that alphabet and it became roughly the one we use today. If you go to the Wiki page (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet) and scroll down to the Table of Letters header, you can see how the letters evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the letters we use today. It’s particularly interesting to me that our letter “B” (which the greeks called “beta” and which forms the tail end of “alphabet”) was originally a house, and the semitic languages called it “bēt” which was their word for house, which you can still see today in Biblical place names like Bethel (house of God—“El” was a very old name for God).
- nickpinkston 1y agoYea, I loooove that history too. It's interesting how, unlike Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs that were complex systems that came from dedicated scribes of the court, Phoenicia's alphabet was the kind of pragmatic system you can imagine a more mercantile society developing. It's wild that it turned into the scripts: Latin, Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and beyond. Also interesting is Chinese script, which was saved from this by Stalin telling Mao that China should keep its unique writing, which Russia of course was already doing. Mao did do the simplification, but he turned away from his previous plan to standardize the latin script for Chinese.
- cyberpunk 1y agoMurex is also an extremely expensive front of house trading platform whose typical installations cost in the millions. I would change the name tbh.