The Purple Brand
Phoenician merchants carried a dye made from sea snails to the far end of the Mediterranean. A single gram takes somewhere between several thousand and ten thousand shells. A dyer in Tunisia reviving the method today extracts one gram from forty-five kilos of shells, and sells it for around two thousand seven hundred dollars. In the fourth century BC the Greek historian Theopompus wrote that the dye traded for its own weight in silver. It was not only expensive. Rome legislated who was allowed to wear purple at all, separating those permitted a border from those permitted the whole garment; Nero made wearing or dealing in it a capital offence, and by the fourth century full purple belonged to the emperor alone. A value people ask for by name — this map calls that the first shape of a brand, but that is this map's phrase, not something the ancients are recorded as thinking. Worth adding: making the dye gave off such a violent stench that the dye works of Tyre were pushed downwind of the town. The far side of the colour of kings was a distinctly smelly industry.