Ha I just watched a documentary that mentioned this pigment.<p><i>Fall of Civilizations 17 - Carthage: Empire of the Phoenecians</i><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dbdVhVSat8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dbdVhVSat8</a><p>This whole channel is absolutely amazing. I watched almost the entire thing over the last 3 months -- 17 episodes of 2 to 4 hours on various civilizational collapses.<p>There were a bunch I didn't know about at all -- like medieval civilizations in Cambodia, Burma, and Jordan. They were wealthy, and built huge things, and then disappeared.<p>Also, I have heard of "Carthage" from all those movies like Gladiator ... Somehow it escaped me until my 40's that Carthage was founded by people from what's now Syria, and the city was in what's now Tunisia :) I guess being American I have a fuzzy picture of that side of the world, and what it looked like in ancient times.
the sadder and more impactful legacy of a dye is Indigo - which is not lost or forgotten. It was in such great demand that Europe funded explorers like Vasco Da Gama specifically to discover the source of Indigo.<p>Named after India, it was one of the incentives for colonisation and indeed the Great Bengal Famine (which affected 30 million people).<p>It became one of the most remarkable peasant movements of Indian history against the British. It came to be called the Neel Bidroha or the Indigo Revolt.<p>The Indigo famine drama script that was created by the Anglican priest James Long and Indian writer Dinabandhu Mitra - Nil Darpan (Indigo Mirror) - was the root cause of the creation of the National Theatre in Kolkata. The British banned the play in England saying it "slandered British women for desiring the Indigo dye".<p>The National Theatre (and the Indigo play) in Kolkata kickstarted the Indian <i>commercial</i> performing arts industry...eventually culminating in Bollywood.
Wikipedia says:<p>> In 1998, by means of a lengthy trial and error process, a process for dyeing with Tyrian purple was rediscovered.[37][38] This finding built on reports from the 15th century to the 18th century and explored the biotechnology process behind woad fermentation. It is hypothesized that an alkaline fermenting vat was necessary. An incomplete ancient recipe for Tyrian purple recorded by Pliny the Elder was also consulted. By altering the percentage of sea salt in the dye vat and adding potash, he was able to successfully dye wool a deep purple colour.[39]<p>So in that regard, the article seems not entirely correct.
Just noting: a similar pigment with high value was Tekhelet, which was also extracted from a similar sea snails species: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet</a>
This is also pretty interesting about the guy trying to recreate it:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVXqisH6VeM" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVXqisH6VeM</a>
You can make natural purple dyes with ammonia and some lichens.
Smashing up and boiling rare snails sounds like ass compared to that.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxi2Up7YhM4" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxi2Up7YhM4</a>
Humans have always loved decorating themselves and things. Metals were also to a large extent popular because of their use in jewellery and the like.<p>(Come to think of it, many of the things we use wealth for today is also visual signalling in some sense.)