Mountains of empty shells have been found at the ancient sites of Sidon and Tyre. Thousands of the tiny snails had to be found, their shells cracked, the snail removed. The process of making the dye was long, difficult and expensive. The deep, rich purple dye made from this snail became known as Tyrian purple. Clothing colored with the Tyrian dye was mentioned in both the Iliad of Homer and the Aeneid of Virgil. Īs early as the 15th century BC the citizens of Sidon and Tyre, two cities on the coast of Ancient Phoenicia, (present day Lebanon), were producing purple dye from a sea snail called the spiny dye-murex.
These works have been dated to between 16,000 and 25,000 BC. The artists of Pech Merle cave and other Neolithic sites in France used sticks of manganese and hematite powder to draw and paint animals and the outlines of their own hands on the walls of their caves. Purple first appeared in prehistoric art during the Neolithic era. Relationship to violetīyzantine Emperor Justinian I clad in Tyrian purple, 6th-century mosaic at Basilica of San Vitale The first recorded use of the word purple dates to the late 900s AD. The modern English word purple comes from the Old English purpul, which derives from Latin purpura, which, in turn, derives from the Greek πορφύρα ( porphura), the name of the Tyrian purple dye manufactured in classical antiquity from a mucus secreted by the spiny dye-murex snail.
In the CMYK color model used in printing, purples are made by combining magenta pigment with either cyan pigment, black pigment, or both. In the RYB color model historically used by painters, purples are created with a combination of red and blue pigments. In the RGB color model used in computer and television screens, purples are produced by mixing red and blue light.
Purple is any of a variety of colors with hue between red and blue. Clockwise from top left: Bishops, Queen Elizabeth II, Grapes, Creeping Phlox, Sunset