Tyrian purple
A dye milked from sea snails, worth its weight in silver, that smelled of rotting fish.
- Made from
- Murex sea snails
- Chemistry
- 6,6'-dibromoindigo
- Yield
- ~12,000 snails for 1.4 g of dye
Tyrian purple comes from the glands of predatory sea snails, the murex. Crush or 'milk' them, let the secretion react with light and air, and it turns from clear to a deep red-purple: 6,6'-dibromoindigo, a cousin of indigo with bromine from the sea. Phoenicians were producing it by around 1200 BCE, and it's named for their city of Tyre.
It was staggeringly expensive. The Greek historian Theopompus wrote that purple dye fetched its weight in silver, and when the chemist Paul Friedländer worked it out in the early 1900s, 12,000 snails gave 1.4 grams of pure dye. That cost made it the badge of rank in Rome and Byzantium (see purple and power).
It also stank. Ancient writers complained of the smell of the dye works, where heaps of snails rotted in vats, and an Egyptian papyrus says a dyer's hands reek of rotten fish. Cloth could be dyed shades from a near-black, oxblood-like 'clotted blood' to violet by mixing species and double-dipping.
Imperial production ended when crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, and the recipe was lost. When chemists built cheap purples in the 1850s, starting with William Perkin's mauveine, purple stopped meaning money. The app's Byzantium and purple are the nearest names.
Swatches
- Tyrian purple · red-purple (approx.)
- Tyrian purple · violet shade (approx.)
Colors
Sources
- Cooksey, C. J. (2001). Tyrian purple: 6,6'-dibromoindigo and related compounds. Molecules 6(9): 736–769.
- Friedländer, P. (1909). Über den Farbstoff des antiken Purpurs aus Murex brandaris. Berichte der deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft 42.
- Wikipedia, 'Tyrian purple'.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.