usually decay and are not preserved,” said Ben-Yosef. “So we have a unique window into the people of the region at that very early period through these amazing and unique organic materials. We have dozens and dozens of fragments of textiles and ropes, cordage, basketry, things that usually you don’t find.”
Sukenik, the IAA’s curator of organic finds, told The Times of Israel that every year the collaborative research group takes a trip to the Timna site to access — and marvel at — the extremely rare ancient finds.
The new finds were located in Slaves Hill, arguably the largest copper smelting camp in the valley, which the team has excavated for the past six years. While excavating, the archaeologists discerned tiny pieces of textiles of many types emerging from the ground. Some were derived from rough tent coverings, some from sacks, and some of the pieces were brightly colored.
Sukenik said the team noted the brilliant purple peeking out on three of the many scraps of textiles excavated that year.
“We saw a few pieces in which the shade was really special. We really wanted it to be argaman [true purple], the most expensive dye in the ancient textile industry,” Sukenik said.
From field to lab
The textile pieces were taken back to the Bar Ilan University laboratory, where it was confirmed that molecules 6-monobromoindigotin and 6,6-dibromoindigotin — unique to the murex sea snails which produce the true purple dye — were discovered on the cloth scraps after High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) analyses, which is used to identify organic dyestuff.
According to the paper, “Identifying the organic dye colorants in archaeological textiles is a complex task due to the low concentration of the molecules in the fibers and the limited amount of material available for destructive analysis.”
Hitting upon this result was a “Sisyphean task,” said Sukenik, and required very intensive work.
Upon learning that the dye was indeed the ancient true purple, Sukenik said, “Personally, it made me really happy.” She said that a trove of ancient Murex trunculus snail shells were recently excavated at the Tel Shikmona site in northern Israel, dating back to the 10th-7th centuries BCE. Being organic material, one of the Timna cloth pieces was also sent for radiocarbon 14 testing at a laboratory in Oxford, where the date of 1,000 BCE was calculated.
During the early Iron Age, “We already knew that there was a true purple textile dye industry,” she said, but until now, there had been no dyed textiles. According to the paper, the first archaeological evidence for use of the dye dates from the 19th century BCE in the form of murex shells.
“I’m so happy that Erez [Ben-Yosef] gave us the opportunity to peek into the clothes closet from the period of David and Solomon and see the wardrobe of the elite that lived in the period at the copper mines,” she said.
“I suppose that if we were to peek into David and Solomon’s closet we’d see similar clothing — and perhaps even more true purple,” said Sukenik.
Getting hands dirty for science
Discovering that the 3,000-year-old textile scraps were dyed with royal purple was only one step of the journey undertaken by this ambitious research project. Another chapter not recorded in the PLOS One paper saw Bar Ilan University Prof. Zohar Amar visit the fish markets of Italy to conduct experiments on the three species of snail.
The three species of snail are endangered in Israel and Amar told The Times of Israel that he couldn’t obtain enough samples to truly conduct his experiments. So he took himself to Milano, which holds the largest fish market in Europe. There, the snails are eaten as part of the varied Italian diet and two of the species — Spiny Dye-Murex (Murex brandaris) and Banded Dye-Murex (Murex trunculus) — are plentifully traded in the market.
Amar rented a laboratory and hired local staff to conduct hundreds of experiments on thousands of snails. Each snail’s dye gland, he said, only holds a minuscule amount — circa one gram. So he ordered a massive supply, which arrived in special refrigerators that