Thoughts about modulations in color from purple to red and from purple to blue while previewing a seminal work by Morris Silver, with afterthoughts about the color yellow

Abstract

Over many weeks now I have been previewing, not yet reviewing, a heretofore unpublished work by Morris Silver, The Purpled World: Marketing Haute Couture in the Aegean Bronze Age. This work, by an economist whose vast learning includes an acute understanding of historical and archaeological approaches to the ancient world, has profoundly influenced my thinking about the Aegean Bronze Age, as he refers to it. I concentrate here on what Silver has to say overall about purple dye, derived from the gland of a kind of “shellfish,” the murex, and about yellow or saffron dye, derived from the stamen of the crocus plant. Like Silver, I am interested in the use of these purple and yellow dyes in the mass production—and marketing—of woolen textiles, fueled by a commensurate mass production of wool shorn from countless herds of sheep, in the Minoan-Mycenaean world of the second millennium BCE. The vast scale of such mass production and marketing, as Silver demonstrates, is of imperial dimensions. And the fashionable clothing made from the dyed woolen textiles was correspondingly imperial in prestige. As Silver also demonstrates, this prestige is ostentatiously advertised in Minoan-Mycenaean fresco paintings that picture a wide variety of charismatic female and male figures who are seen in the act of showing off the multicolored beauty of their fashionable wear. I say “multicolored” because yellow and purple are not the only colors that are featured in Minoan-Mycenaean haute couture: the varying technologies of decoction from the gland of the murex, as also the existing varieties of this kind of “shellfish,” belonging to the taxonomic family Muricidae, can produce blue and red as well as purple dye. For a salient example, I highlight the red and blue stripes adorning the skirt of the young lady in the fresco painting that I show here. In what follows, I will argue that such modulations from purple to red or to blue are comparable to the color-coding of the Peplos or Robe of the goddess Athena as pattern-woven for the festival of the Panathenaia during the attested centuries of the first millennium BCE.