Roman Tyrian purple snail dye found in UK for first time

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjje132jvygo

by bookofjoe • 2 years ago

223 99 2 years ago

sublinear2• 2 years ago

The chunk of Tyrian purple, roughly the size of a ping pong ball, was dug up at Carlisle Cricket Club as part of ongoing yearly excavations.

Is anyone surprised how geographically stable these kinds of gathering places are?

gostsamo• 2 years ago

How often do you find roman baths in cricket clubs?

debesyla• 2 years ago

I think OP meant social gathering places?

sublinear2• 2 years ago

I don't really know, hence my comment

olddustytrail• 2 years ago

I suppose you could tell from how many ducks there are...

jl62• 2 years ago

Carlisle has been a continuously occupied town since before the Romans, and continuously since. I don’t think it’s too surprising that we find Roman things underneath modern things (in fact I strongly suspect that we have yet to discover most Roman things because they lie under modern structures that are difficult/controversial to excavate).

jdietrich2• 2 years ago

The river Eden is prone to flooding, creating a natural separation between Carlisle on the south bank and Stanwix on the north. In between, there's a lot of land that is conveniently located, but unsuitable for either intensive development or arable farming. There's the cricket club on this land, but also several parks, public gardens and other sports clubs.

When the baths were in use, there were also two separate settlements - the milecastle on the north bank forming part of the defensive line of Hadrian's Wall, and the civilian settlement of Luguvalium on the well-protected south bank. Being directly adjacent to the Eden bridge, the site would have been convenient for both settlements.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Roman+Archaeological+sit...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

logikblok• 2 years ago

Additionally from the article > Semi-precious gems, which had probably fallen out of rings after the bathhouse steam loosen their glue settings, were recovered from drains at the site

To think about the frustration the original owner might have felt when those were lost and now they're found all these years later for us to study and learn from.

boffinAudio• 2 years ago

What amazes me is the idea that at some point, a human being took their last look at the artwork of their gemstone jewellry, and then .. some thousands of years later, here we are gazing into the same nooks and crannies in wonder at the skills of the artist. One wonders, will some AI archeologist in the future, be digging through a cacaphonic digital noise, find some long-forgotten iCloud backup, and wonder at the collection of garden pictures I've left behind ..

48864w6ui• 2 years ago

It used to be standard practice, at the end of a year, to cut all the ads out of that year's issues and bind them in a single hardback volume.

Now historians realize that often the ads may be more interesting than the articles.

yard20104• 2 years ago

I wonder what kind of entity will find my lost necklace 2000 years from now and what would it think about me.

It's such a shame we can re-live the past through history but there is no way we can see the future.

It makes me think like in every moment of our lives we're on the tip of the ice berg of humanity.

And we still end up being history anyway.

tetris11• 2 years ago

"...and lo, it was a neck-trinket used to bind people to a specific suitor, here cast aside intentionally as an act of defiance, a liberation of sorts, to free oneself from the chains of monogamy..."

logrot• 2 years ago

What will they think then they find the laser powered orifice plug?

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

There's a meme, about archeologists in the future, finding still-viable Twinkies.

Then, we have Tallahassee, from Zombieland:

There's a box of Twinkies in that grocery store. Not just any box of Twinkies, the last box of Twinkies that anyone will enjoy in the whole universe. Believe it or not, Twinkies have an expiration date. Some day very soon, Life's little Twinkie gauge is gonna go... empty.

mjamesaustin• 2 years ago

I always find it fascinating how color by itself used to truly be a status symbol, due to the rarity and challenge of making natural dyes.

jl62• 2 years ago

A modern comparison might be a vantablack cloak.

Gud• 2 years ago

Nobody will kill you for painting your car in vantablack without the kings permission.

bookofjoe• 2 years ago

OT: I named my calico cat Vanta because of the deep black stripes on top of her head.

https://youtube.com/shorts/UzPPlEYX0NQ?si=m6EtgljZMb-iYM4e

mrob• 2 years ago

Natural dyes are common. The main three in medieval Europe were madder, weld, and woad:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubia_tinctorum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reseda_luteola

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isatis_tinctoria

These give red, yellow, and blue respectively, which are the primary colors of the traditional RYB subtractive color model:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RYB_color_model

However, RYB is a poor match for human vision. The better subtractive primaries are cyan, magenta, and yellow. Mixing red and blue produces a dull, desaturated purple even when you're starting with saturated primaries, and the three main natural dyes are not particularly saturated. Tyrian purple was esteemed because it produced a visibly better purple than mixing woad and madder, which makes a purplish brown. Likewise, crimson from Kermes insects produces a visibly better red than madder:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermes_(dye)

Poor people would still have colored clothing, because all clothing was expensive hand-made clothing back then, so the marginal cost of dying with the common plant dyes was relatively small. But rich people could afford expensive dyes, and afford multiple applications of the cheap dyes. In some cases there were also sumptuary laws restricting use of expensive dyes. Rich people's clothing would have looked far more garish by our standards.

yard20104• 2 years ago

Funny to think that in 2000 years someone makes the same statement only about a purple Porsche vs a purple Dacia

adrian_b• 2 years ago

Besides visual attractiveness when fresh, the value of the dyes also depended a lot on their lightfastness and water resistance.

Many of the dyes used in antiquity degraded quickly, so the clothes had to be dyed again periodically.

Tyrian purple was valued not only because it was hard to obtain, but also because the clothes dyed with it kept their color for a very long time. The next most resistant dye was the blue from indigo or woad, then the red from beetles. The other colors faded quickly.

philwelch2• 2 years ago

Poor people would still have colored clothing, because all clothing was expensive hand-made clothing back then, so the marginal cost of dying with the common plant dyes was relatively small.

Bret Deveraux has a fascinating, in-depth series about this: https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t...

To summarize from what I can remember: it wasn’t even quite that clothing was “expensive”. You didn’t buy clothing unless you were absurdly rich. You didn’t even buy cloth. You bought raw fabric, usually wool or linen, and you had to spin it into yarn or thread and then weave it into cloth. Spinning was the vast majority of the actual work you’d do though. And by “you” I meant if you were a woman, because this was always considered women’s work. And highly respected as such, to the point where even wealthy high status women took pride in still doing it or at least claiming to, or at least other people claimed it of women they admired.

yard20104• 2 years ago

Well, isn't it like a nice purple car or a cool looking NFT with extra (or less?) steps?

mdp20213• 2 years ago

[the] challenge of making natural dyes

You could get legal cover for divorce if married to a worker in the production of purple, from the rotting murex, given the awful smell it gave... (Production is in general "costly", but not always with similar legal sides.)

Remember that artistic pygments (so, for goods that also involved «status symbol») had traditionally been quite toxic - using arsenic, lead... That was the available technology, and it involved drawbacks and compromises.

Edit: sorry, not just artistic: people poisoned themselves just to wear makeup. "Met Gala"s involved a drastic amount of sacrifice.

AdmiralAsshat• 2 years ago

As the article mentions, you had to crush alot of snails to get that dye.

The story goes that Roman senators would wear a purple stripe across their toga as a symbol of their status. Julius Caesar, not to be outdone, started wearing an all-purple toga. Which then became the mark of the emperor.

corinroyal2• 2 years ago

Do not crush the snails. You poke them with a stick and they spit dye onto your skein. Then put them back.

ronyfadel• 2 years ago

I’m surprised the Phoenicians are not mentioned in the article, as they’re the first to use it, and Tyre was in Phoenicia.

mdp20213• 2 years ago

Well, "Phoenician" itself is said to mean "purple" ("blood reddish"), although some of us prefer the idea that it means "carpenters" (coming from Egyptian "pheneku") - it makes more sense in terms of an expression "the Canaanite carpenters [of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos]" (all Canaanites, some of them in city states of that "special" region and culture).

Or: "Phoenicia" is a culturally sound area (the producers of lumber, dye etc., colonizers etc., in the Levantine coast) - not a Statal entity. The term is thought to have meant "those of the purple" or "those of the lumbers" within the Canaanites.

debatem1• 2 years ago

Huh, very interesting. Who is 'us' above, and do you have any recommended reading on the Phoenician maybe-not-state?

junto• 2 years ago

Related HN post from 5 months ago links to another article that I found fascinating about the quest to recreate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38513073

epolanski3• 2 years ago

OT but interesting fact.

The first evidence we have of purple or red shoes used for kings is more than 3000 years old.

Etruscans (an ancient Italian population) used red shoes for their kings[1], albeit its uncertain whether they could be purple which is more likely. This habit then moved to the roman kings and later the Roman emperors.

It is uncertain when it went from purple to red, but it's likely a practical reason: when going outside you don't wear slippers but leather boots, which were very easy to get in a red color, purple? Not really. You can easily find purple used anywhere in clothing, but not shoes.

And who else claims (or claimed) to be the heir of the Roman empire other than the Pope?

The emperor of byzanthium [2], notice how he's the only one depicted with red/purple shoes.

The German emperor [3].

The Tsars [4] (Tsar word comes from Caesar, same as Kaiser) too claimed the inheritance of the Byzantine (and thus Roman) empires after the Ottomans took the city.

[1] https://www.pope2you.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Etruscan...

[2] https://www.thoughtco.com/thmb/QytBnfnDoP8aDE-rm3eYGbTYCpk=/...

[3] https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/field/im...

[4] https://www.mediastorehouse.com.au/p/731/tsar-boot-antiquiti...

mr_toad• 2 years ago

To be pedantic the Holy Roman Emperors claimed that title before Constantinople fell to Mehmed, which makes the claim even less legitimate.

The Byzantine emperors carried on many Roman traditions, including wearing purple. The imperial birth chambers were decorated in purple (actually a purple stone), giving rise to the term “born in the purple” to describe their legitimate heirs, these days used to describe any old toff.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_in_the_purple

mrangle2• 2 years ago

which makes the claim even less legitimate.

I'm not sure that follows. Who specifically "inherited" the Right to Rule from Roman Empire was always more of a political claim. The concept of "legitimacy" in this regard is dubious. That said, the original Northwest European territory of the Merovingians-Carolingians had a strong political connection to Roman Imperial Rulership. Not to say that this necessarily translated to "legitimate inheritance", but arguably no territory outside of Byzantium had a stronger historical political claim.

ffgjgf14• 2 years ago

which makes the claim even less legitimate

To be fair there was nothing unusual from the Roman perspective about there being 2 emperors. Even during the Byzantine period it was not particularly uncommon for heirs to be crowned as “co-emperors”. Despite effectively becoming a monarchy the empire retained some “republican” traits with the emperor reigning with the consent of God and the people of Rome.

throwawaylolx• 2 years ago

The emperor of "Byzantium" literally was the emperor of the Roman empire; it was not merely a claim like in the other cases but an administrative and historical fact. It is more accurate to say that "the Byzantine Empire" not being the actual Roman empire is merely a modern claim.

toyg• 2 years ago

Well, technically it was one of two emperors.

thaumasiotes6• 2 years ago

The emperor of "Byzantium" literally was the emperor of the Roman empire; it was not merely a claim like in the other cases but an administrative and historical fact.

Not in any useful sense.

Cyrus the Great was literally the King of Sumer and Akkad. Did he know where Akkad was?

Tsai Ing-wen is literally the President of China. You might object that China doesn't even have a president, but the administrative and historical facts are against you.

amenhotep• 2 years ago

It's a bit weird to write that the Romans of Constantinople "claimed" to be the "heirs" of the empire; as far as they were concerned they simply were Romans and their empire was obviously the same empire as Augustus', albeit with a change of capital city and so on. And given that they were Romans and the Emperor of Rome did become the Emperor of Constantinople, you have to do some work to argue against them.

In particular, very unsurprising that they'd share continue to like the same colours of shoes.

bigstrat2003• 2 years ago

It's not hard at all to refute the Byzantines' claims to being the Roman empire. If your empire doesn't include Rome, it cannot be the Roman empire. Similarly, Taiwan is not China even though they are the continuation of the old Chinese government.

plugin-baby• 2 years ago

It is uncertain when it went from purple to red, but it's likely a practical reason: when going outside you don't wear slippers but leather boots, which were very easy to get in a red color, purple? Not really. You can easily find purple used anywhere in clothing, but not shoes.

Wasn't the point of regal colours that they were scarce/expensive?

kadoban• 2 years ago

Scarse is good, for regal, but they do have to actually exist. Were there dyes that would work on leather at that time and yield the desired color and not wash off in 3 seconds and look like crap?

wil4212• 2 years ago

The snails produced red, purple, and a unique red/purple. It’s more likely they had the deep reddish purple.[1]

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple

boringg• 2 years ago

Byzantium = Eastern roman empire. They referred to themselves as Roman and in every way were Roman. Funny that we bifurcated the empire nomenclature for our own classification.

thaumasiotes6• 2 years ago

If it was actually true that in every way they were Roman, we wouldn't have done that.

coliveira• 2 years ago

The reason people continue to refer to "Byzantium" (this was not the name they used to themselves) is that the Western European countries also made the claim to be the heirs of the Roman Empire. So they couldn't accept the fact that "Byzantium" was the real Roman Empire (at least what remained of it).

legitster• 2 years ago

It is uncertain when it went from purple to red

The same dye produces a wide range of shades between purple and red depending on how the cloth is treated/the amount used/the aging of the piece. A shift in color could very much be a gradual shift over time as styles/process change.

1propionyl• 2 years ago

This is also true of the dye obtained from the cochinilla (cochineal) insect.

Adjust the acidity and you can get anything from mauve to crimson. Soda ash and citrus juice were well known even three thousand years ago.

Of course this was the dye of royalty halfway around the world to the Zapotec people even before the Aztec conquered them, but details, details.

yard20104• 2 years ago

I just found that video of someone from Tunis, Tunisia making this after years of trial and error: https://youtu.be/IVXqisH6VeM

Found in the comments of the other post about this linked here

unfocused• 2 years ago

This makes sense, because one of the more famous colonies that the Phoenicians established was Carthage, which is modern day Tunis. Since they had already invented creating purple back in Phoenicia (modern day Lebanon), they simply brought over their traditions/skills along.

I have a DVD from 2004 about them, as I did the National Genographic Project DNA test way back before it was popular, but I must admit, the DVD is so-so. I think afterwards, they got more and more data, and were able to track where they travelled to based on artifacts and DNA. Lots of websites about them, but hard to say what is what. I would trust information by Dr. Pierre Zalloua as he uses DNA analysis for his research into the Phoenicians.

hilbert423• 2 years ago

What amazes me is that an organic dye of this nature is still viable and recognizable after ~2000 years in the ground.

Seems to me this ought to spur on further research into the chemical.

(Given its nature and the way I've seen it prepared these days (on video, not in person) that it would have been much less stable (many organic dyes are very unstable).

This stability also suggests it must have been rather stable in use (togas dyed with it, etc.). Its stability would have made it even more valuable than otherwise.

wil4212• 2 years ago

Lots of things are stable if you bury them underground away from oxygen and sunlight.

hilbert423• 2 years ago

No doubt, at some point, the chemistry of the surrounding soil will be researched in depth and we'll know.

_xerces_• 2 years ago

Maybe the beeswax helped preserve it as intended.

hilbert423• 2 years ago

Likely so. Even so, I'm more curious than ever to know more about its chemistry.

yawpitch• 2 years ago

Interesting, but I just have to giggle at the fact that my reading of the headline at first had me absolutely boggled by the notion of the Romans dyeing snails Tyrian purple.

RobotToaster2• 2 years ago

The chunk of Tyrian purple, roughly the size of a ping pong ball

That stuff was worth more than it's weight in gold, someone must have been pissed at losing that much of it.

corinroyal2• 2 years ago

There's some guy on Facebook crushing up snails for this color. Don't do this. You just poke them with a stick and they spit dye onto your skein at the beach. Then you put them back.

FredPret2• 2 years ago

Finally we can break Tyre's stranglehold on the colour purple

amne• 2 years ago

Anyone else read the title as "Roman Tyrian, exotic luxury house brand of dyes known for making dyes out of unusual extracts, maker of purple dye out of snail juices somehow, is finally selling his stuff in UK either because some ban on mistreating snails was waived or his beef with the king is over" ?? Just me? Thought so

Roman Tyrian purple snail dye found in UK for first time

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