Tyrian purple

Tyrian purple is a purple dye made in the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre from a secretion of Spiny Dye-Murex (Murex brandaris), a marine snail. A similar dye, "Hyacinth Purple" was made from the related Banded Dye-Murex Murex trunculus.

The dye was expensive: Aristotle assigns a value ten to twenty times its weight in gold. The fast, non-fading dye was an item of luxury trade, prized by Romans, who used it to colour ceremonial robes. Pliny the Elder described the dyeing process of two purples in his Natural History. The Roman mythographer Julius Pollux, writing in the second century BC, asserted (Onomasticon I, 45–49) that the purple dye was first discovered by Heracles, or rather, by his dog, whose mouth was stained purple from chewing on snails along the coast of the Levant. The myth has been discredited as mere cultural boasting. Recently, the archaeological discovery of substantial numbers of Murex shells on Crete suggests that the Minoans may have pioneered the extraction of Royal purple centuries before the Tyrians. Dating from colocated pottery, suggests the dye may have been produced during the Middle Minoan period in the 20th–18th century BC.

The main chemical constituent of the Tyrian dye was discovered by Paul Friedländer in 1909 to be 6,6′-dibromoindigo, a substance that had previously been synthesized in 1903. However, it has never been synthesized commercially.

See also

• Indigo dye