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The color, called Tyrian Purple, may have been originally made by the ancient Phoenicians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? Thanks so much to our patreon supporters
who support this channel. If you would like to make a contribution, please visit our patreon
page at patreon.com/Littlearttalks. So if you would like to make a contribution and
see more videos, that is one way to do it. I would certainly appreciate it. Thanks so
much for watching and I’ll see you guys next time.