The Purple Trade — Color of Kings

The Phoenicians discovered that the murex sea snail, found along the Lebanese coast, produced a dye of extraordinary richness and permanence — a purple that deepened with age and sunlight rather than fading. To produce one gram of Tyrian purple required the glands of ten thousand snails. This made it the most expensive substance in the ancient world, worth more than gold by weight. Only emperors, kings, and the very highest nobility could afford it. The word Phoenician itself may derive from the Greek for purple — they were the purple people, the color merchants, the civilization that turned a shellfish into an empire. Purple still means royalty because of them.

These signs carry the murex shell, the royal purple cloth, the dye vats of Tyre, and the color that defined power for three thousand years.