The seafaring Phoenicians controlled the Mediterranean market for a vibrant purple dye crafted from humble sea snails and craved by powerful kings
Coin depicting a Phoenician ship and a hippocampus. Sixth to first centuries B.C. National Archaeological Museum, BeirutFrom the ninth century B.C., as they spread throughout the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians were famous for their boats. Ancient Greek accounts desribe their distinctive ships and called themfrom the horse heads on their prows. Archaeologists got a chance to find out for themselves when they explored the remnants of two remarkably preserved ships in 1999.
Both dyes were indelible and did not fade easily, a rare property for ancient colorants. Its production, however, produced an offensive smell, and the irony that such a prized product could come out of such an unpleasant process was not lost on ancient authors, such as Pliny himself, who wrote: As each murex produced only a few drops of precious mucus, the manufacture of commercial quantities of Tyrian purple required the harvesting of vast quantities of these creatures. Archaeologists have calculated that 12,000 averaged-size mollusks were required to produce barely 0.05 of an ounce of dye. Such an amount was sufficient to color just the trim of a regular-size garment, and so distilling enough dye to stain even a small piece of cloth required enormous numbers of the animals.
The presence of sizable quantities of crushed murex shells at Almuñécar , Toscanos, and Morro de Mezquitilla in Spain; Carthage, Kerkouane, and Djerba in Tunisia; and Essaouira in Morocco, provide evidence for the large-scale manufacture of purple dye in both Iberia and North Africa. According to Pliny, after Tyre, it was the North African city of Meninx that produced the most vivid hue of purple.
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