Hobbyist recovers lost secret of Tyrian purple?

PHOENICIAN WATCH: Biblical royal purple dye from snails recreated by Tunisian enthusiast. So expensive was the color even in ancient times that the Romans restricted its use to the elite, whose purple fringed robes became the mark of the Mediterranean's most powerful dynasty (Reuters via the Jerusalem Post).

Mouhamad Ghassen Nouira works from a hut in his garden to process murex snails using techniques first developed by the Phoenicians to produce a dye known as Tyrian purple that sells online for about $2,500 a gram.

Everyone needs a hobby. This one sounds lucrative. But also work intensive:

Nouira spent 14 years working out how to produce the dye from nets of murex he buys from a local fisherman, extracting the glands, crushing the shells, fermenting and cooking them and eventually producing tiny amounts of purple powder.

It takes 54 kilograms (119 lb) of murex shells to produce a single gram of Tyrian purple, making it hard to be economically viable. Huge mounds of broken shells from the dye industry of centuries past are still found near great Phoenician centers.

For PaleoJudaica posts involving Tyrian purple dye and the Israelite telekhet dye, both made from the murex snail, start here and follow the links.

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