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"...and lo, it was a neck-trinket used to bind people to a specific suitor, here cast aside intentionally as an act of defiance, a liberation of sorts, to free oneself from the chains of monogamy..."
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> The chunk of Tyrian purple, roughly the size of a ping pong ball That stuff was worth more than it's weight in gold, someone must have been pissed at losing that much of it. |
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Natural dyes are common. The main three in medieval Europe were madder, weld, and woad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubia_tinctorum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reseda_luteola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isatis_tinctoria These give red, yellow, and blue respectively, which are the primary colors of the traditional RYB subtractive color model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RYB_color_model However, RYB is a poor match for human vision. The better subtractive primaries are cyan, magenta, and yellow. Mixing red and blue produces a dull, desaturated purple even when you're starting with saturated primaries, and the three main natural dyes are not particularly saturated. Tyrian purple was esteemed because it produced a visibly better purple than mixing woad and madder, which makes a purplish brown. Likewise, crimson from Kermes insects produces a visibly better red than madder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermes_(dye) Poor people would still have colored clothing, because all clothing was expensive hand-made clothing back then, so the marginal cost of dying with the common plant dyes was relatively small. But rich people could afford expensive dyes, and afford multiple applications of the cheap dyes. In some cases there were also sumptuary laws restricting use of expensive dyes. Rich people's clothing would have looked far more garish by our standards. |
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> Poor people would still have colored clothing, because all clothing was expensive hand-made clothing back then, so the marginal cost of dying with the common plant dyes was relatively small. Bret Deveraux has a fascinating, in-depth series about this: https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t... To summarize from what I can remember: it wasn’t even quite that clothing was “expensive”. You didn’t buy clothing unless you were absurdly rich. You didn’t even buy cloth. You bought raw fabric, usually wool or linen, and you had to spin it into yarn or thread and then weave it into cloth. Spinning was the vast majority of the actual work you’d do though. And by “you” I meant if you were a woman, because this was always considered women’s work. And highly respected as such, to the point where even wealthy high status women took pride in still doing it or at least claiming to, or at least other people claimed it of women they admired. |
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Scarse is good, for regal, but they do have to actually exist. Were there dyes that would work on leather at that time and yield the desired color and not wash off in 3 seconds and look like crap?
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Byzantium = Eastern roman empire. They referred to themselves as Roman and in every way were Roman. Funny that we bifurcated the empire nomenclature for our own classification.
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The river Eden is prone to flooding, creating a natural separation between Carlisle on the south bank and Stanwix on the north. In between, there's a lot of land that is conveniently located, but unsuitable for either intensive development or arable farming. There's the cricket club on this land, but also several parks, public gardens and other sports clubs. When the baths were in use, there were also two separate settlements - the milecastle on the north bank forming part of the defensive line of Hadrian's Wall, and the civilian settlement of Luguvalium on the well-protected south bank. Being directly adjacent to the Eden bridge, the site would have been convenient for both settlements. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Roman+Archaeological+sit... |
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Interesting, but I just have to giggle at the fact that my reading of the headline at first had me absolutely boggled by the notion of the Romans dyeing snails Tyrian purple.
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There's some guy on Facebook crushing up snails for this color. Don't do this. You just poke them with a stick and they spit dye onto your skein at the beach. Then you put them back.
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To think about the frustration the original owner might have felt when those were lost and now they're found all these years later for us to study and learn from.