"A scholar studying preserved textiles from first-century C.E. Masada has identified the precise shade of the mysterious and long-debated Biblical color tekhelet. The Bible often mentions tekhelet as the color of royal garments and priestly robes, and in later times, it colored the tasseled fringes, or tsitsit, of Jewish prayer shawls.
While Jewish tradition generally associated the color with the bluish dye produced from the secretions of Murex snails, no clear examples of tekhelet from Biblical antiquity had been found...until now. In studying a piece of 2,000-year-old embroidery from Masada, Israeli scientist Zvi Koren analyzed a distinct bluish-purple, almost indigo patch of dye and found that it had clearly been produced from the ancient Murex snail."
BAR blog, March 2 post
2 comments:
FYI... by the 1st Century AD "purple" dye was being manufactured from the madder root... a process that had been developed in Lydia's hometown - Thyatira, Asia Minor. Evidence of a 1st Century AD dyers guild has been discovered there. The murex dye (Phoenician) would have been much more costly & rare. And Lydia, as a "seller of purple" had left Thyatira and settled at Philippi (Macedonia/No. Greece). She was probably a wealthy widow (she was the head of a household) and quite wealthy (the first church in Philippi met in her home).
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