A Factory for Producing Tyrian Purple Discovered on the Israeli Coast

March 26 2024

Along with the blue dye t’khelet, the Hebrew Bible makes frequent mention of a purple hue called argaman that was similarly derived from the murex snail and used in the making of the priestly vestments and sacred items. This pigment was also used as a marker of status by the ancient Romans, who referred to it as “Tyrian purple” after the Phoenician city in what is now Lebanon. Franz Lidz reports on a recent discovery that sheds light on its production:

Where all this purple came from has long been a mystery. Just a few locations along the Levant’s southern coast and in Cyprus show evidence of dye-making at the start of the period, and all were on a modest scale. But a new study by researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel suggests that through most of the Iron Age biblical era, from roughly 1150 BCE to 600 BCE, a small promontory called Tel Shiqmona on Israel’s Carmel coast was not a residential settlement, as previously supposed, but a major purple-dyeing factory.

The research, published in the Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv, proposes that during the first half of the 9th century BCE, the Israelites took over Tel Shiqmona and set about cornering the lucrative purple-dye market by converting the small dye installation into a fortified manufacturing plant surrounded by a casemate wall. (This was at about the same time that Ahab ruled the kingdom of Israel.)

The new operation was more or less a joint venture, run by the Israelites and staffed by skilled Phoenician workers who held the secrets to making the dye.

Read more at New York Times

More about: Ancient Israel, Ancient Rome, Archaeology

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023