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( Tyrian purple)
Tyrian purple (Greek p??f??a, porphyra, Latin purpura), also known as royal purple, imperial purple or imperial dye, is a purple-red dye which was first produced by the ancient Phoenicians in the city of Tyre. Tyrian purple was expensive the fourth-century BC historian Theopompus reported, "Purple for dyes fetched its weight in silver at Colophon" in Asia Minor.[1] The dye substance occurs naturally, but must be harvested by humans. It consists of a fresh mucus secretion from the hypobranchial gland of a medium-sized predatory sea snail, the marine gastropod Murex brandaris, currently known as Haustellum brandaris (Linnaeus, 1758). This species is commonly called the spiny dye-murex, and it is a species in the family Muricidae, the murex or rock shells. The current range for this species is the "central and western Mediterranean" [2] In Biblical Hebrew, which like Phoenician is a dialect of Canaanite, the Tyrian purple-red dye extracted from the Murex brandaris is known as shani ?????? [??ni], but usually translated as 'scarlet'. Another dye extracted from a related sea snail, Hexaplex trunculus, could produce a purple-blue color called argaman ?????????? [arg?m?n] (translated 'purple') when processed in shade, or a sky-blue indigo color, called tekhelet ????????? [t?xel??] (translated 'indigo') when processed in sunlight (see Photochemistry).
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