Ancient Tyrian Purple Site found

[robcat2075]

Today it is easy to mix RGB for almost any color we want but in ancient times color wasn't simple to come by.

NY Times article:

In Israel, a 3,000-Year-Old Purple Factory

Quote

Archaeologists have revealed a major production site for one of history’s most luxurious, and smelliest, colorants.

The most prized pigment of antiquity was processed not from a tangle of root or the frothy extract of a weed, but by drawing out a slimy secretion from the mucus glands behind the anus of murex sea snails — “the bottom of the bottom-feeders,” the historian Kelly Grovier has written. The common name of the dyestuff, Tyrian purple, derives from the habitat of the mollusks, which the Phoenicians purportedly began harvesting in the 16th century B.C. in the city-state of Tyre in present-day Lebanon...

 

...Tyrian purple was the sole colorfast dye known to the ancients; fabric tinted in the color grew brighter with weathering and sunlight. Shades ranged from bluish-green to a purplish red, depending on how the dye was prepared and fixed in textiles. The most vibrant tone was the deep crimson of “clotted blood” tinged with black, the Roman historian Pliny reported...