How Did Pphoenicians Make Awnings Of Purple

The history of tyrian purple indigo and other dyes is a fascinating reminder of how we forget the people and the labor behind the products we use everyday.

How did pphoenicians make awnings of purple.

The term did not correspond precisely to phoenician culture or society as it would have been understood natively and it is debated whether the phoenicians were actually a distinct civilization from the canaanites and other residents of the. Bond october 24 2017. The former was used to make a blue purple dye known as royal blue while the latter was used to make tyrian purple. Tyrian purple ancient greek.

In phoenician times purple garments were markers of elite status. Phoenician comes from the greek word for a brilliant reddish purple color phoinix. The term phoenicia is an exonym from ancient greek that most likely described a dye also known as tyrian purple a major export of canaanite port towns. Tyrian purple aka royal purple or imperial purple is a dye extracted from the murex shellfish which was first produced by the phoenician city of tyre in the bronze age its difficulty of manufacture striking purple to red colour range and resistance to fading made clothing dyed using tyrian purple highly desirable and expensive.

They were then boiled for days in giant lead vats producing a terrible odor. To make tyrian purple marine snails were collected by the thousands. The snails though aren t purple to begin with. The roman emperor nero made the association official when he declared the color off limits to anyone but himself an edict that gave rise to the term royal purple the exclusive hue came from a dye the phoenicians manufactured using the shells of mollusks known as murex.

The name phoenician used to describe these people in the first millennium b c is a greek invention from the word phoinix possibly signifying the color purple red and perhaps an allusion to their production of a highly prized purple dye. The name tyrian refers to tyre lebanon it is a secretion produced by several species of predatory sea snails in the family muricidae rock snails originally known by the name murex.