Did you know, you can create a dye from the
secretions of a sea snail?
Well, you can!
Hey guys, welcome to little art talks.
My name is Karin, and I'm talking about a
specific dye which you can make from a species
of predatory sea snails, called Muricidae
or Muricidae.
And they were formally known as Murex snails.
Now, you might be imagining what kind of color
can you get from snails - maybe a brown color?
But, it turns out, that you get a vibrant
purple!
That’s pretty cool, if you ask me.
The color, called Tyrian Purple, may have
been originally made by the ancient Phoenicians
as early as 1570 BCE.
They were an an ancient Semitic thalassocratic
civilization that lived in what is now modern
Lebanon.
Known by the Classical Greeks and Romans as
“traders in purple”, they were most famed
for their much sought after, very expensive
purple dye, which was often used for royal
clothing.
The dye is created from a mucous secretion
that can be collected from one of several
species of medium-sized predatory sea snails
found in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, including
the the spiny dyemurex, the banded dye-murex,
and the rock-shell.
In solution, the colour is blue but as a dye
in the solid state it is purple.
In nature, the secretion is a mechanism of
their predatory behaviour and it’s also
used as an antimicrobial lining of egg masses.
They also secrete the substance when attacked,
humans can collect the dye via physical antagonization…
like poking it.
By the way this is not an animal friendly
dye, so if you’re gonna get upset about
this, maybe you don’t want to listen to
the rest of this.
A less labor intensive way of collecting the
dye is just crushing them.
Yeah.
Pliny the Elder described the whole process
of creating Tyrian purple.
And, just very quickly, it’s pretty much
collecting the snails, removing the vein where
the color is located, salting them, putting
them in heated vats, and letting it sit.
The whole process took about ten days, and
and yes, the records do say it smelled real
bad.
Like horribly bad.
David Jacoby remarks that "twelve thousand
snails of Murex brandaris yielded no more
than 1.4 grams of pure dye, enough to colour
only the trim of a single garment."
That’s just ridiculous!
4th century BCE historian Theopompus wrote,
“Purple for dyes fetched its weight in silver
at Colophon" in Asia Minor.
It was such a status symbol that courts even
restricted their uses.
Who can wear it, who can make it, how much
you can make, and what you can dye with it.
Despite how expensive and labor intensive
it was to make this dye was, it was prized
for the bright purple that was impossible
to achieve otherwise at the time - it was
color-fast, which means it didn’t fade or
weather in the sun, and in fact it became
a more vibrant purple.
The color itself varied a lot, but the most
prized variation of Tyrian Purple was that
of “blackish clotted blood.”
That’s certainly a way to describe color.
The production of Murex purple for the Byzantine
court ended with the Siege of Constantinople
in 1204.
Jacoby write, “no Byzantine emperor nor
any Latin ruler in former Byzantine territories
could muster the financial resources required
for the pursuit of murex purple production”
While similar dyes and processes continue
to exist in Egypt and Mexico, there's no further
mention of the color in Western Europe.
Certainly not in the commercial extant as
before.
And instead they turned to vermilion, which
is a whole nother story in itself.
I hope you guys enjoyed this video about tyrian
purple and that you learned something new.
If you enjoyed this video, please check out
my previous videos about the history of different
colors.
I have Flake white, Maya Blue, Mummy Brown,
Alizarin Crimson… no..
Lapis Lazuli!
I must be thinking about Crimson still, maybe
that will be my next one.
What do you guys think?
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Thanks so much for watching and I’ll see
you guys next time.
