Tunis, Feb. 9 (BNA): A Tunisian history buff is making dye from sea snail shells inspired by a decades-old school project on ancient Carthage and the purple coloring that brought great fortune to the classical world.
Mohamed Ghassan Nweira works from a hut in his garden to process murex snails using techniques first developed by the Phoenicians to produce a dye known as photo purple that sells online for about $2,500 a gram, Reuters reports.
The color was so expensive even in antiquity that the Romans restricted its use to the elite, whose purple fringed robes became a sign of the most powerful dynasty in the Mediterranean.
For the ancient Phoenicians, from modern Lebanon, the trade in saurian purple helped build a trading empire that established new colonies across the Mediterranean, including Carthage, near modern Tunisia, under the legendary Queen Dido.
“This hobby began when I was a boy in the history class, studying the Canaanites, the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, and how they were famous for extracting the purple color from the murex, and it was more expensive than gold,” Nouira said.
Years later, he noticed a dead Murex on the beach, remembered the history lessons he had taken, and decided to experiment with dye-making methods. “From that time on, my adventure began,” he said.
lost secret
Carthage is believed to have been founded by Phoenician settlers nearly 3,000 years ago and eventually became one of the great powers of antiquity with a powerful naval power stationed in an impregnable port complex.
Under the leadership of its greatest general Hannibal, who marched the path of war elephants across Spain and over the Alps, Carthage nearly invaded Italy. But it was Rome that finally prevailed.
The city was later rebuilt by the Romans and is now a suburb of Tunis, with columns of ancient buildings protruding along residential streets and a port that was once home to small fishing boats, where murex shells dot the nearby beaches.
As the centuries passed, the secret of turning murex into a sham gradually got lost until a few enthusiasts began trying to reformulate the formula.
Noera spent 14 years working on how to produce the dye from murex nets he buys from a local fisherman, extracting the glands, crushing the shells, fermenting and cooking them, and ultimately producing trace amounts of the purple powder.
It takes 54 kilograms (119 lb) of murex shells to produce one gram of saury purple, making it difficult to be economically viable. Huge piles of broken shells from the dye industry of past centuries are still found near the great Phoenician centers.
He said that people initially criticized his new hobby, complaining about the time and energy he devoted to it. But when he started getting results, people saw that he was on his way to something.
“Criticism turned into encouragement, which kept me going,” he said.