The dog bit a sea snail, and the snail's blood dyed the dog's mouth Tyrian purple. In Pollux's story, Hercules and his dog were walking on the beach on their way to court a nymph named Tyro. The painting shows a scene from an origin myth in the Onomasticon (a collection of names, similar to a thesaurus) of Julius Pollux, a 2nd-century Graeco-Roman sophist. It's possible that LRM has a synthesized dibromoindigo ingredient, but I'm just speculating.A Phoenician coin depicting the legend of the dog biting the sea snail That said, La Reigne Mauve, when diluted, looks a lot like the color portrayed by the South American dyers. So the pigments made from the South American and the Mediterranean Murex snails are probably about the same, but it's not unlikely that the Romans had some more specific recipes that included that pigment to make their dyes. I think I remember reading that the Murex pigment may have been mixed with a similarly valuable red pigment, and it's likely that there was cooking procedure that affected the color or durability of the dye. However, Tyrian purple may not have been made solely from the Murex pigment. As a bonus, the pigment is the same: 6,6'-dibromoindigo (according to a quick Google search), and is found in many mollusks in the Murex family. They may be distant relatives.Īctually, it is a Murex mollusk, just not the same Murex as that used in the archaic Mediterranean. That's an interesting dye from a South American snail and I hope the sustainable harvest methods work out. OK, that's not real Tyrian purple from Murex mollusc.
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