It was produced by collecting thousands of dye-producing molluscs, crushing them and allowing them to rot in large vats before the colour was boiled out. The dye was hugely valuable because it has been estimated that it took thousands of shells to produce a single kilo. The nature of the other dye, blue-purple (biblical tekhelet, Greek hyakinthos) has been unclear until recently. 75800), made from spiny dye-murex and rock-shells. Red-purple (biblical argaman, ‘Tyrian purple’) was 6,6-dibromoindigotin (I, C.I. The dye’s origin was shrouded in mythology, not least the suggestion it was discovered by Heracles’ dog after it ate the shellfish and its mouth turned purple. Two types of precious purple dye were prepared in antiquity from Mediterranean shellfish.
The mollusc was one of the two major shellfish sources of the dye, which formed an ancient trade that was centred on the Levantine coast around the city of Tyre in modern-day Lebanon, from where it took its name. “In all … surveys conducted along the entire coast over the past seven years not a single live individual was recorded, and only three very large and seemingly old individuals were found in a shallow artificial lagoon at Akko in 2010.” “If so, these collapses may indicate the initiation of a multi-species range contraction at the Mediterranean south-eastern edge that may spread westward with additional warming.”Īmong the species identified by Rilov as having almost entirely disappeared from areas in Israel and elsewhere in the region where it once existed was the red-mouthed rock shell. “Though speculative at this stage, the fast rise … may have helped push these invertebrates beyond their physiological tolerance limits leading to population collapses and possible extirpations. While synthetic dyes can approximate the color, genuine Tyrian purple pigment remains expensive: up to 4,000 a gram. “Temperature trends indicate an exceptional warming of the coastal waters in the past three decades,” he wrote. In addition, he said he found strong evidence for major, sustained population collapses of two urchins, one large predatory gastropod and a reef-building gastropod. This sought-after dye was created from the extracts of marine snails. Rilov said coastal waters were a “potential hotspot” for species collapse and present-day surveys had failed to find 38 of 59 mollusc species once common on Levant reefs. CreatureCast: Tyrian purple was one of the only bright dyes available to ancient civilizations. In a survey for Nature’s Scientific Reports, the Israeli marine biologist Gil Rilov identified the mollusc as one of a number of species to have vanished in recent decades from shallow eastern Mediterranean coastal waters highly vulnerable to sharp temperature changes. A new Israeli survey of shallow water Mediterranean habitats has noted the almost total disappearance of stramonita haemastoma – the red-mouthed rock shell – which was one of the two main sources of the dyes. Described by Aristotle and Pliny among other ancient writers, Tyrian purple or imperial purple was a dye extracted from shellfish along the Levant coast and favoured by emperors and kings in a.
0 kommentar(er)
