Tyrian purple

The chemist Sir Humphry Davy had, however, earlier concluded tat ‘the Greek and Roman painters had almost the same colours as those employed by the great Italian masters at the period of the revival of the arts in italy. They had indeed the advantage over them in two colours, the Vestorian or Egyptian azure and the Tyrian or marine purple.’ The despised dyers, clothiers, artists, decorators and cavalry-men of antiquity, indeed all sho in their callings then used colour terms with precision, must have had specialized vocabularies which have left little or no literary record.

….a fisher, on the sand
By Tyre the Old, with ocean-plunder,
A netful, brought to land…

Yet there’s the dye, in that rough mesh,
The sea has only just o’ver-shispered!
Live whelks, each lip’s beard dripping fresh,
As if they still the water’s lisp heard
Through foam the rock-weeds thresh…

Mere conchs! Not fit for warf or woof!
Till cunning comes to pound and squeeze
And clarify – refine to proof
The liquor filtered by degrees
While the world stands aloof…

Who fished the murex up ?
What porridge had John Keats ?

Browning, Popularity (1842)

Colour names as used by poets tend to be metaphorically or indefinitely applied. The lack of colour terms indicates a lack of need, rather that a lack of ability, to perceive and discriminate. The development of a colour vocabulary depends largely upon progress in extracting and manufacturing dye-stuffs and paints with consistent results.

The most celebrated of the ancient dyestuffs was the Tyrian purple, which has given botanical Latin the terms purpureus, phoeniceus, puniceus, tyrius and porphyreus, the dye of Browning’s poem quoted above, Embedded in their soft tissue, certain marine gastropod prosobranch mollusks, notably Murex brandaris, murex truncalus and thais haemastoma (Purpura haemastoma), have a small oblong hypobranchial gland which secretes a viscid colouless fluid. On exposure to light, however, this molluscan liquid turns yellow and green, then changes to bluish red colours, that of M. brandaris becoming deep blue-violet, that of M. trunculus and T. haemastoma scarlet (cf Forbes, 1956, also Bouchilloux & Roche, 1955), at the same time giving out a vile penetrating stench. From it the dyers of antiquity made their mostly costly dye, the purple of Imperial robes and aristocratic togas, known to the Greeks as πορφυρα (porphyra), to the Romans as purpura, which apparently was not purple as now understood but crimson. Some 8,000 snails of Murex brandaris together yielded 1 gram of dye. Piles of broken shells around Mediterranean coasts indicate where long ago, Cretans, Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans fished the murex up and extracted its marine purple (cf. J.W. Jackson, 1916). Such shells from which the hypobranchial gland was extracted all have a hole knocked out on one side. On more than one coast prehistoric fishermen gathering these shellfish for food must have independently discovered their purple producing secretion, but the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon (Saida) were most responsible for its exploitation on a large scale and the elaboration of the techniques whereby it yielded a variety of red and purple colours (cf. lacaze-Duthiers, 1859; Forbes, 1956). Their manufacturing secrets were lost when the Arabs destroyed the dyeworks in A.D. 638.

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whelks: 娥螺
http://members.cox.net/rbcollins/Watercolor%20RBC/Flowering%20of%20Lightning%20Whelks.JPG
murex: 骨螺
http://www.seashellgeerts.com/murex%20nigrispinosus.jpg
conch: 海螺
http://golf-in-virgin-islands.visit-the-virgin-islands.com/queen-conch-virgin-islands.jpg
thais haemastoma: 美国蚵岩螺

Murex brandaris: Purple dye murex
http://www.echinologia.com/Specimens%20en%20vente/plioceneitalien/Gasteropodes/imagepages/image66.htm
Murex trunculus:
http://waste.ideal.es/fotos/murextrunculus.jpg
这篇文章谈到两种上古的颜色,一种特别的蓝,一种特别的紫,仿佛
色彩在时间中的隧道,让人神往。

这紫色在伊朗现代的SOUL DANCE中时常能看见。

哪位能查查埃及蓝?

Ibid.