An unroll of the dye
What a fascinating discovery in the Middle East tells us about purple, the colour of royalty, sea snails, the ruling class and why nomads were more advanced than anyone knew.
‘King Solomon made for himself the carriage; he made it of wood from Lebanon. Its posts he made of silver, its base of gold. Its seat was upholstered with purple, its interior inlaid with love.’
The passage from the biblical texts Song of Songs depicts the historic King Solomon, ruler of ancient Israel 3,000 years ago. But historians have often argued about passages like these, especially the mention of the colour purple.
Erez Ben-Yosef, a professor at Tel Aviv University’s archeology department, said some experts have claimed that King Solomon couldn’t have had textiles dyed with that rare colour — a writer hundreds of years later must have added the detail for flavour.
But a group of researchers, including Ben-Yosef, have found the oldest evidence yet of the use of purple dye in the Southern Levant — a region encompassing Palestine, Israel and Jordan — dating back 3,000 years. The study, published in PLOS One in January, not only confirms that it was used in King Solomon’s time, but also suggests that the nomadic tribes of the region were much more advanced than believed.
“People are trying to understand if the biblical stories are history or imagination or fiction,” Ben-Yosef said. “For this time period, we have physical evidence that this colour was in use. And it was there.”
Purple has, for centuries, been regarded as the colour of royalty and the ruling class. Owning even a single textile dyed with the colour was a signifier of great wealth. A big part of that came from how impossibly difficult it was to create. Most other dyes at the time were made with plants or insects, but the “true purple,” also known as “Tyrian Purple,” was made with sea snails found in the Mediterranean Sea.
Artisans had to harvest a special mucus from three different species of mollusk, dry the mucus in the sun, and mix them together to form the royal colour. It reportedly required harvesting thousands of mollusks to make even an ounce of purple, which made the colour more precious than solid gold.
Ben-Yosef and his team would go on expeditions to the Timna Valley in Israel to study the copper mines used by the local nomadic tribes of ancient times. It was on one of these expeditions, starting in 2013, that they found various textiles dyed with true purple — some, they believe, remained in their original hue.
“We started finding these textiles, leather, ropes, organic materials. Simple clothing, remains of tents,” Ben-Yosef said. “And then, a few pieces were this beautiful colour, this purple colour, which we knew was very rare. We couldn’t believe it was actually true purple. There were a lot of imitations in antiquity for this very expensive colour.”
The research team partnered with dyeing and textile experts, including Dr. Naama Sukenik from the Israel Antiquities Authority. Initially, some experts believed the purple couldn’t have been that old and must have been a relic from the roman era hundreds of years later. But, thankfully, the mollusks used for the dye left behind traces of organic material, which were able to be carbon dated.
Sure enough, the textiles were 3,000 years old.
Next, they had to figure out who actually created and used the purple textiles. The researchers initially believed it was the inhabitants of Ancient egypt, but the civilization hadn’t reached the Southern Levant then.
“We kind of left without any empire,” Ben-Yosef said. “And we left only with the local people of the south, the local nomadic tribes, to associate all of this industry with.”
The people living in the Timna Valley region were nomadic, which means they didn’t settle anywhere or build cities or settlements. Many historians believed this meant they were simpler and less established than more sedentary societies, comparing them to the more modern Arab bedouin tribes of today, but Ben-Yosef believes the use of true purple shows otherwise.
The presence of the rare and valuable dye suggests there was some form of hierarchy and ruling class presiding over the nomads, and could possibly refute past theories that the societies never really began to advance until they settled down.
“They didn’t use stonebuilt palaces and walls to manifest their social status and power,” he said. “But they could have used other things, including this true purple, which was in times more expensive than gold.”