Write about a technology from the history of your world - is it lost to the ages, or did it shape the world today?— Technology
Tyrian Textile Dye Process
The ancient Phoenicians developed a technique for dying cloth with a vibrant, saturated purple or red hue that became the hot gotta-have fashion of the Bronze Age Mediterranean Basin. The process was secretive and labor intensive, which made the end product especially expensive and valued by elites from Mycenae to Egypt.
The Secret is Secretion
We now know that to make this special dye, the secret ingredient was love. Specifically, the love of harvesting the mucus secretions from the hypobranchial gland of a tiny sea snail known to the ancients as the murex.
Today we know the murex as several members of the family Muricidae. We know that the chemical responsible for the purple color is '6,6′-dibromoindigo, which the snails use to sedate prey and to coat their eggs to keep them safe from microbes.
And we know that the hex-code for reproducing Tyrian purple on screen is #66023C.
BEHOLD! THE COLOR THAT ONCE MARKED EMPERORS IS NOW JUST A FEW KEYSTROKES AWAY!
History of Usage
The production of Tyrian purple fabric dyes began at least by the end of the Bronze Age around 1200 BCE, but may have been made as early as the 16th Century BCE. The dye quickly became the primary industry of the Phoenician city of Tyre and a major export that built Phoenician wealth and launched Phoenicia as a Mediterranean trading power. In fact, the name Phoenicia itself may have meant, "Land of the Purple Dye."
The Greeks and Romans used Tyrian purple dyes until the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. Without an Emperor, there was no longer anyone in the world rich enough to afford to wear Tyrian purple dyed clothes.
Green and Non-Green Production of Purple
There were to ways to obtain the dye chemicals from the murex sea snail.
The first way was to poke the sea snail to make it think it was in danger, harvest the resulting secretion, and allow the snail to live and reproduce, and be used again on another day.
This non-lethal, eco-friendly method was eventually abandoned in favor of a second method, which was to crush the snail and its shell and extract the dye ingredient from the remains.
Either way, the smell of manufacture was said to be horrendous.
Exclusivity
Tyrian purple dyed cloth was so expensive and so exclusive that its use was limited by law in the Roman Empire. Only the most senior Roman magistrates were allowed to wear a white toga with a stripe of Tyrian purple. A Roman general would be allowed to wear a Tyrian purple toga while celebrating a Triumph, the ceremonial parade through the City of Rome to commemorate a major military victory. You, as an ordinary citizen, would be in serious trouble if you ever tried wearing this color, no matter how many sea snails you harvested to do it.
The color only became more exclusive over time. Eventually, only the Emperor was allowed to wear the color, and the word "purple" became synonymous with royalty. For example, if someone said, "Here comes the purple," everyone else would look around for the approaching emperor.
Variation
Depending on how it was applied, Tyrian purple dyed cloth ranged from red to violet in hue. When mixed with lapis lazuli, it became a blue pigment called ultramarine.
Tyrian Purple in Myth
It was believed that Heracles of Tyre discovered Tyrian purple when he noticed that his dog, upon digging up and chewing on the sea snails in the shells, got all purple around the mouth. Heracles refined the method and presented the first purple-dyed cloth to his king, Phoenix, who ran with the idea and turned the City of Tyre into an empire he named after himself: Phoenician.
In
Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, Queen Clytemnestra tricks King Agamemnon into walking on a carpet dyed with Tyrian purple. This outrageous act of hubris brought the wrath of the gods down upon the returning king, justifying his nearly-instant death.
Luckily, no one since then has been so full of themselves as to think they actually deserved to walk across a bright red carpet.
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