Purple is known to be the hue which is between crimson and violet. We have heard people associating it with royalty, power and wealth for centuries. ‘Queen Elizabeth I forbade commoners, except only a few close relatives of the royal family, to wear the colour’. So why is this elite and sophisticated status given to this colour?
The reason is actually associated with the limited availability of the colour. This rarity, lead to the colour being outrageously expensive, so much so that only the rulers could afford it. The dye that was originally used to produce the colour had only one source, the Phoenician city of Tyre, which is now known as Lebanon. Amazingly the dye was actually obtained from a small mollusk, known as Bolinus Brandaris, that was only found in the Tyre region of the Mediterranean Sea. To harvest the dye, the producers had to crack open a shell of the mollusk, extract the purple producing mucus, and …show more content…
It had become the colour of the kings, nobles and magistrates. Both in the Iliad by Homer and Aeneid of Virgil there are mentions of clothing coloured with Tyrian purple. In the Iliad by Homer the belt of Ajax is said to be purple and the tails of the Trojan horses are described to be dipped in purple dye. In Homer’s Odyssey, the sheets on the wedding bed of Odysseus was purple. In her poems, Sappho commemorates the dexterity of the dyers of the Greek Kingdom of Lydia who made purple footwear. It is also said that Agamemnon was welcomed by his queen Clytemnestra who accessorized the palace with purple carpets. King Solomon embellished the Temple of Jerusalem with purple fabrics by specially bringing artisans from Tyre in 950 BC. The Tyrian purple was worn by Alexander the Great, the basileus of the Seleucid Empire and the kings of Ptolemaic, Egypt. In ancient Rome, togas with purple belts were worn by freeborn Roman boys who had not yet come of
The reason is actually associated with the limited availability of the colour. This rarity, lead to the colour being outrageously expensive, so much so that only the rulers could afford it. The dye that was originally used to produce the colour had only one source, the Phoenician city of Tyre, which is now known as Lebanon. Amazingly the dye was actually obtained from a small mollusk, known as Bolinus Brandaris, that was only found in the Tyre region of the Mediterranean Sea. To harvest the dye, the producers had to crack open a shell of the mollusk, extract the purple producing mucus, and …show more content…
It had become the colour of the kings, nobles and magistrates. Both in the Iliad by Homer and Aeneid of Virgil there are mentions of clothing coloured with Tyrian purple. In the Iliad by Homer the belt of Ajax is said to be purple and the tails of the Trojan horses are described to be dipped in purple dye. In Homer’s Odyssey, the sheets on the wedding bed of Odysseus was purple. In her poems, Sappho commemorates the dexterity of the dyers of the Greek Kingdom of Lydia who made purple footwear. It is also said that Agamemnon was welcomed by his queen Clytemnestra who accessorized the palace with purple carpets. King Solomon embellished the Temple of Jerusalem with purple fabrics by specially bringing artisans from Tyre in 950 BC. The Tyrian purple was worn by Alexander the Great, the basileus of the Seleucid Empire and the kings of Ptolemaic, Egypt. In ancient Rome, togas with purple belts were worn by freeborn Roman boys who had not yet come of