As a result, the researchers found evidence connected to the production of the purple dye dating as early as 1,100 BCE and throughout the 6th century BCE. These are exactly the years in which many of the narratives included in the Bible are said to have taken place. In 586 BCE, for example, the Babylonian conquest completely destroyed the regional economy and Jerusalem’s First Temple.The underlying article has just been published in PLOS ONE, open access. It takes into account information from the most recent excavations at Shiqmona.“In the past, the assumption was that the first large-scale production facilities of purple dye were only established in Roman times, around the 1st century CE,” another author, Prof. Ayelet Gilboa from the University of Haifa, told The Times of Israel over the phone. “Tel Shiqmona offers evidence that already in the 9th century BCE, purple dye was produced at an industrial scale. It was not just one individual dyeing a garment for a king.”
Tel Shiqmona during the Iron Age: A first glimpse into an ancient Mediterranean purple dye ‘factory’I have noted previous reports on the Phoenician dye factory at Shiqmona (Shikmona) here and here. Follow the links at the latter (cf. here) for PaleoJudaica posts involving Tyrian purple dye and the Israelite telekhet dye, both made from the murex snail. For more on the early-tenth-century BCE dyed textile fragments excavated in the Timna Valley (and their implications), see here.Golan Shalvi , Naama Sukenik, Paula Waiman-Barak, Zachary C. Dunseth, Shay Bar, Sonia Pinsky, David Iluz, Zohar Amar, Ayelet Gilboa
Published: April 16, 2025
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0321082Abstract
Purple-dyed textiles, primarily woolen, were much sought after in the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean, and they adorned the powerful and wealthy. It is commonly assumed that in antiquity, purple dye—extracted from specific species of marine mollusks—was produced in large quantities and in many places around the Mediterranean. But despite numerous archaeological excavations, direct and unequivocal evidence for locales of purple-dye production remains very limited in scope. Here we present Tel Shiqmona, a small archaeological tell on Israel’s Carmel coast. It is the only site in the Near East or around the Mediterranean—indeed, in the entire world—where a sequence of purple-dye workshops has been excavated and which has clear evidence for large-scale, sustained manufacture of purple dye and dyeing in a specialized facility for half a millennium, during the Iron Age (ca. 1100–600 BCE). The number and diversity of artifacts related to purple dye manufacturing are unparalleled. The paper focuses on the various types of evidence related to purple dye production in their environmental and archaeological contexts. We utilize chemical, mineralogical and contextual analyses to connect several categories of finds, providing for the first time direct evidence of the instruments used in the purple-dye production process in the Iron Age Levant. The artifacts from Shiqmona also serve as a first benchmark for future identification of significant purple-dye production sites around the Mediterranean, especially in the Iron Age.
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