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Scientists have found a strange, shapeless purple object at a Roman archaeological site in the United Kingdom. An investigation revealed it to be an extremely rare piece of Tyrian purple, or Tyrian purple, a type of ancient paint that was worth more than its weight in gold.
The find was made in 2023, on the grounds of the Carlisle Cricket Club, northern England. The excavation was part of research into a huge building that included a bathhouse from the 3rd century AD, during the reign of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus.
The piece of soft material was in the ruins’ pipes, and was identified by its unusual purplish hue. Sent to the University of Newcastle, the item turned out to have an organic pigmentation containing bromine (Br) and beeswax, an unmistakable sign of Tyrian purple from Roman times.
Purple paint in antiquity
As dyes are now easily produced in the laboratory, a finding like this does not seem very important, but in the past, they could be very difficult to obtain. In the case of purple, already rare in nature, the only way to obtain it was by crushing thousands of sea snails — the murex gastropods, found in the Mediterranean Sea.
To paint an entire garment or color an ornament, tens of thousands of murex had to be obtained and processed, which involved a lot of labor. This made the product extremely expensive, so it could only be obtained by royalty, such as aristocrats and Roman emperors. For a long time, princes were called “born in the purple”, synonymous with the current term “born with a silver spoon”.
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Many items with the color have been found around the Mediterranean, but finding one in the United Kingdom is quite unusual, as it was the northernmost border of the empire. It is the only example from northern Europe and probably the only sample of the unused pigment from the entire Roman Empire, according to the researchers responsible.
Septimius Severus, a Roman politician who was emperor from 193 AD to 211 AD, was born in what is now Libya and visited the province of Britannia (present-day England) in 208 AD, with the aim of strengthening Hadrian’s Wall, the northernmost border of the territory.
The presence of Tyrian purple in Carlisle, which is in the same region, is probably linked to the royal visit. For a time, Severus’ court was in the northern city of York (then Eboraco).
Source: Wardell Armstrong
