"King Solomon has made his carriage out of the timber of Lebanon. He has made its posts of silver, its base of gold, its seat of purple fabric. Its interior is inlaid with love by the daughters of Jerusalem," says the Song of Solomon (9-10).
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Now, for the first time in Israel or the entire southern Levant, rare evidence has surfaced of cloth dyed royal purple dating back to the time of kings David and Solomon.
Researchers from Israel Antiquities Authority, Tel Aviv University, and Bar-Ilan University spent years studying colored woven fibers excavated at Timna in the Negev Desert, the site of King Solomon's famed copper mines. Carbon-14 dating determined that they date from 1,000 BCE, the period in which David and Solomon reigned in Jerusalem. They published their findings on Thursday in the journal PLOS ONE.
The purple color, known as "argaman" in Hebrew and extracted from a type of Mediterranean sea snail at a distance of some 300 km (186 miles) from the Timna Valley in the southern Negev Desert, is mentioned in biblical sources a number of times. However, this is the first time that a Bronze Age woven fiber dyed royal purple has been found in Israel or anywhere else in the region.
The research was carried out by Dr. Naama Sukenik from the Israel Antiquities Authority and Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef, from the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with Prof. Zohar Amar, Dr. David Iluz and Dr. Alexander Varvak from Bar-Ilan University and Dr. Orit Shamir from the Israel Antiquities Authority.
Sukenik, who curates organic finds at the IAA, described the discovery of the purple cloth fibers as "extremely exciting and important."
"This is the first time that woven material from the time of David and Solomon died in the precious 'argaman' has been discovered. In ancient times, purple clothing was associated with the nobility, the priestly class, and of course, kings. The beautiful color of the argaman, the fact that it does not fade, and the difficulty of producing the dye, which exists in very small quantities in the bodies of the snails, made it the most expensive dye, sometimes costing more than gold.
"Until the current discovery, we had only fragments of the snails and pottery shards with remnants of color to serve as evidence of the Bronze Age argaman industry, but this is the first time that we have direct evidence of fibers dyed with argaman, which have been preserved for 3,000 years," Sukenik said.
Ben-Yosef said that a TAU team has been digging at Timna since 2013. "Thanks to the extremely dry conditions there, we are able to find organic matter like cloth, rope, and leather from the Bronze Age, the time of David and Solomon – a collection that gives us a unique look into life in biblical times. The level of preservation at Timna is outstanding, rivalled only by much later sites such as Masada or the Bar Kochba caves."
The researchers wrote that true purple was produced primarily from three species of sea mollusks of the Muricidae family, which were common in the Mediterranean Sea: Hexaplex trunculus (Murex trunculus), Bolinus brandaris (Murex brandaris) and Stramonita haemastoma (Thais haemastoma), in contrast to the "imitation purple" dye that was manufactured using various techniques that were based on much cheaper materials than the dyes from the sea snail.
Shades of true purple ranged from purplish-red to violet blue. The source of the dye was extracted from the snail's hypobranchial gland (located under the mollusc's mantle, and the exact shade depends on different parameters, such as the chemical precursors compounds of each snail species, the dyeing process, and the levels of oxygen and light to which the dye was exposed.
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