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 on New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/05/science/archaeology-tyrian-purple-murex.html