[Regia-NA] Re: [SCAWeaving] Dyeing Imperial purple

[Carolyn Priest-Dorman]

Ælfgifu wrote:

>This came thru on another list.  I was surprised, as I didn't know there was
>any question about the process.  Would someone more knowledgable please
>comment?  Ælfgifu
>
>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3103354.stm

There aren't any good historic records of exactly how this process 
worked.  Researchers have been working on reproducing it for over a century 
with varying degrees of success.  Some have focused on getting the 
_tekhelet_ (Hebrew for the dark blue shellfish color mentioned in the 
Bible) and others on the _argaman_ (again, Biblical Hebrew, only this time 
it's the word for the red-violet "Tyrian" color).  John Edmonds, however, 
has been just getting down in the dirt and *trying* things.  He's a 
wonderful man, lots of fun to talk to, and he's very interested in all 
sorts of pre-industrial dyeing techniques.  His devoted and systematic 
experimentation has helped elucidate a number of issues relating to, most 
especially, woad and murex.  For example, he worked with the group that 
discovered exactly which microorganism was/is responsible for fermentation 
in woad vats.

There are still a lot of theories out there about how to get Tyrian purple, 
and not everyone agrees with his methods, but he hews closely to Pliny's 
(somewhat general) description of the methods used in Tyre and I think his 
ideas make fairly good sense.

I hadn't heard about the version where he uses some pickled mollusks to get 
the right juju into the vat, though. ;>


Carolyn Priest-Dorman              Þóra Sharptooth
  http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/thora.html