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All About Purple: An Introduction

 

When thinking of the Imperial Roman Empire and the many Emperors that took rule through the centuries, we recall the imagery and symbolism carried with it through art. The representation of Emperors in their dress was constantly depicted in purple robes. Purple thereby became associated with Roman Imperial Emperors in art, portraiture, and architecture. The extraction process of each material, porphyry and murex dye, held great difficulty and was therefore expensive. With the large price tag of these materials use, it was then only the Emperors that could take advantage of these products. Through such restricted usage, association grew between emperor rule to porphyry and murex dye. The rarity of the colour purple and complexity of its production and extraction during the Imperial Roman Empire was the reason for its use as a status symbol and aesthetic antiquity.

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About Murex

  • Writer: Sydney
    Sydney
  • Apr 16, 2018
  • 1 min read

Tyre purple dye comes from this region of the Mediterranean which it is named after and is found throughout. Tyre is located off the coast of Asia Minor and was the most expensive dye in the ancient world (Jensen 1963). The murex dye has been dated to being used as early as 1750 BCE by the Minoans (Stieglitz 1994). The culture and mass production that came in the result of purple dye from murex shells consumed specific locations of the Mediterranean and was of the utmost importance to the empire (Bruin 1966). Once the Murex snail is located after laborious diving trips in shallow water, the snail was then taken to land. The basic raw material for the dye production came as a liquid, obtained from the hypobranchial gland (Stieglitz 1994).

There are two ways of extracting the gland that produces the dye. Milking the gland from the snail is a renewable resource, but consumes time. The more popular method is to break open its shell, kill the snail and extract the gland. The second and more popular method lead to the over-hunting of the sea creature (Bruin 1966). Both methods are tedious ways of extraction, and a high number of snails is required to dye just one robe (Stieglitz 1994). This made it so that the highest of the elite could use it. Over time, it grow in popularity with Emperors as they were the individuals that could afford a full murex dyed toga. This association with the amount of purple on the robes added to the hierarchy of the Imperial Senate (Elliott 2008).

Types of Murex (Stieglitz 1994)

 
 
 

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