The Phoenicians discovered how to produce a pruple dye, that was highly appreciated in the Mediterranean region. They kept the secret of its production to themselves and sold the dye at high prices. Roman emperors dressed in purple, it was a symbol of wealth and extreme luxury. ipsum
They obtained it from the murex shellfish. A vast quantity of shells had to be processed to obtain small amounts of the purplue Tyrian dye (one-eighth of a drop of dye from each shell). 60,000 shells were required to produce one pound (453 g) of dye. In 1971, J. P. Robinson (Tyrian purple. Sea Frontiers 17: 77-82) noted that one pound of silk dyed with Tyrian purple would have cost $28,000 (this is equivalent to $224,000 in 2025 value).
The Phoenicians exploited murex to the brink of extinction, and had to expanded their production to the Northwestern Atlantic Ocean coast of Africa, where they harvested and processed shellfish for this purpose.
Phoenicians used Banded Dye Murex (Murex trunculus L.) and the Spiny Dye Mureх (Murex brandaris L.), they also used the Rock Shell (Thais haemastoma), known as buccinum at that time.
Shellfish dyes in the Americas
Robinson noted that the Phoenicians broke open the shell to access the punicin dye compound or removed the gland that produced it. instead, the Mixtec Indians of Oaxaca and Guerrero, in Mexico, milked the snails, which preserved them.
The natives in Nicoya, in Costa Rica,dyed cotton with shellfish at the time of the Spanish conquest.
An article (Purple Dyes from the Carlos Museum Pre-Columbian Textiles Collection: Direct Mass Spectrometry and HPLC Analyses. Jennifer Campos-Ayala, Reneé Stein, Rebecca R. Stone, and Ruth Ann Armitage, 2017) investigated the chemical makeup of different purple dyes used in coloring textiles in ancient Pre-Hispanic Peru.
The textiles span almost 1,500 years (between 100 and 1470 AD) and different colors were obtained by combining dyes and overdying the cloth repeatedly. The authores noted that "Purple derived from mollusks is well known in the Old World, and was also used in Central and South America, though originating from a different species of marine snails./p>
But some purples were obtained by combining red and blue: "Red yarns were overdyed with blue, or vice versa, to produce purple. Red dyes in ancient Peru were generally derived from the roots of the Relbunium plant or from cochineal (Dactylopius coccus) insects... cochineal dye can yield a purple color when copper is used as the mordant. Blue dye was obtained from the Indigofera, Isatis and Polygonum genera.".
They did detect one dye that was a true purple, obtained from shellfish because it had the typical chemical signature of such an origin: "Only a single sample showed traces of dibromoindigo, characteristic of shellfish-derived purple dye."
Another article looked into the specific species of shellfish that yield the purple dye dibromoindigo. These species are found around the world, and also in America: "Three of them have been reported to inhabit the Pacific coast of South America: Red-mouthed rock shell of the Eastern Pacific (Stramonita biserialis) from Mexico to Chile; Loco (Concholepas concholepas) from Callao, near Lima, Peru, to the Strait of Magellan in the southern end of Chile, including the Juan Fernández Archipelago, and Chocolate rock shell (Stramonita chocolata or Thais Chocolata) from Peru to Valparaiso, Chile".
The Chilean natives in northern Chile used them 9,500 years ago as food, tools, and containers. This article mentions "the use of this dye for textile production, Phipps indicated that dyed purple yarns appeared no later than 500 AD... In 1963, Saltzman and collaborators found shellfish purple dye in pre-Hispanic cloth, and Michel identified it on a fabric from Pachacamac, Peru, dated back to 900–1200 AD."
Phoenicians in America?
José Imbelloni published a long article titled "Mollusks and the ancient migrations of Mediterranean peoples to America according to the Manchester School" (Los moluscos y las antiguas migraciones de pueblos mediterráneos hacia América según la Escuela de Manchester - Estudio crítico. Revista del Museo de La Plata, 1926, Vol. 29) in which he critically reviews the evidence on Phoenicians in America as put forward by the "Manchester School" as espoused by Elliot Smith, W. J. Perry, J. Wilfrid Jackson, and W. H. R. Rivers.
Jackson proposed in 1916 that the Egyptians had reached America with their "heliolithic" culture, and introduced the use of shells as money-cowries and shell-trumpets, as well as purple dye. Imbelloni argues against the money and trumpet uses of shells, and although he accepts the ancient tradition of the use of shellfish dyes in Tehuantepec, Mexico, Costa Rica (Nicoya), and Santa Elena in Ecuador, and possibly among the Incas of Peru. But, he states that there is nothing extraordinary in these facts as there are several mollusks that produce purple dye, living in the Caribbean and the Pacific coast of America. He disagrees with Jackson's conclusion that "Mediterranean sea farers" introduced the secrets of purple dye into America.
You can read Jackson's book here: J. Wilfrid Jackson, 1917 Shells as Evidence of the Migrations of Early Culture, Manchester University Press.
Jackson mentions the use of Purpura patula in Central America adding that it is similar to the "Purpura hemastoma of the Mediterranean, one of the species used by the ancient Tyrian dyers, and which, as previously mentioned, is still used by the Minorcan fishermen to mark their linen." On the Pacific coast, the natives of Panama and Guatemala dyed "Poupre de Panama" using Purpura perszca.
For Jackson, "all the foregoing, in addition to other associated elements of culture, could have developed independently in the Old and in the New World is inconceivable." It was discovered once, in the Old World, and transmitted to America:
"It seems almos easier to believe that certain elements of an ancient European culture were at one time, and perhaps once only, actually transmitted by the traditional small band of ... Mediterranean sea-farers, than to explain how, under totally different conditions of race and climate, the identical ideas and customs should have arisen. The peculiar and distinctive character of the shellpurple industry is in itself sufficient justification for this conclusion, as it is altogether unlikely that different people could have adopted so remarkable a custom, along with identical methods of extracting the precious purple matter from shell-fish."
As the map shows, the use of this dye was also known in Japan. We know that (Source) the Japanese used the Rapana bezoar for dyeing, and that it was used by professional divers to stain their cotton diving suits because they believed that the snail purple had supernatural powers.
Closing Comments: No Phoenician influences in America
In my opinion, like many other discoveries (agriculture, domestication of animals, metallurgy, etc.) the use of purple dye obtained from shellfish was a convergent discovery, it took place in different locations among different people, just by chance.
So, no, the Phoenicians did not bring their know-how to America.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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