Shades of Feathers : A Beautiful Guide to Dyeing (1915)

Written in Greek, the Papyrus Graecus Holmiensis (also known as the Stockholm papyrus) is a 4th century CE codex of craft recipes compiled in Egypt. The work’s 15 leaves contain 154 recipes for the manufacture of dyes and colours used in fashioning artificial stones.

Recipe 101 is as follows:

“Cold Dyeing for Purple which is Done in the True Way”

“Keep this as a secret matter because the purple has an extremely luster. Take scrum of woad from the dyer, and a sufficient portion of foreign askant of about the same weight as the scum – the scum is very light – and triturate it in the mortar. Thus dissolve the alkanet by grinding in the scum and it will give off its essence. Then take the brilliant color prepared by the dyer – if from kermis it is better, or else from kirmnos – heat, and put this liquor into half of the scum in the mortar. Then put the wool in and color it unmordanted and you will find it beyond all description.”

Back then, purple was the marker of rank and class.

The most well-known shellfish dye was the Tyrian purple, royal purple or imperial purple as it was called, which came from sea snails in the Eastern Mediterranean in the ancient city of Tyre. This dye was very special for all the civilisations around the Mediterranean and its use spanned whole centuries. It was the most expensive dye in the whole of ancient world, as the colour it produced was very bright and colourfast. Because of its properties, its use was restricted for royals, members of the royal family, and senior public officers and priests.

Archaeological evidence points out that the ancient Phoenicians first discovered and used it (Tyre was an important Phoenician city). From them, it became known to ancient Greeks, Romans and through them in Byzantium and Medieval Europe. It was so sought after that the Byzantine emperor Theodosius I prohibited its use from the lower classes or the penalty was death. The privilege of using this purple dye is so profound that the phrase “born in purple” was born in that period. In Western Europe, it was replaced in prominence around the 12th century, and finally went out of fashion around the 19th century, when a synthetic purple was invented and thus it became more accessible to the wider masses.

All that changed in mid 19th century, with the invention of synthetic dye. Dyed garments became more affordable, which coincides with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the middle class.

And we have a German teenager to thank. In 1856, William Henry Perkin was searching for a cure for malaria when he discovered the first synthetic dye. Mauve in colour, this aniline dye would be the beginning of a new era in the history of fabric dying.