Archaeologists Unearth Rare Traces of the First Ancient Factory Dedicated to Purple Dye Production
Located at Tel Shiqmona in coastal Israel, the facility turned sea snails into purple dye at an industrial scale
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In the Book of Exodus, God commands Moses to “speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring me an offering.” Besides gold, silver, incense and onyx stones, he asks the Israelites for blue, purple and scarlet yarn and fine linen.
Biblical scholars and archaeologists have long labored to understand how ancient people created those kinds of colorful garments and textiles, as well as the role that color—especially purple, a rare pigment associated with royalty—played in ancient society.
Now, a study published in the journal PLOS One reveals how one site in modern-day Israel functioned as an industrial-scale purple dye factory—the only known facility of its kind.
Researchers unearthed the dye factory at Tel Shiqmona, an archaeological mound on Israel’s northern coast, on the outskirts of Haifa. As the authors write in the study, they found an “unparalleled” diversity of artifacts related to the dyeing process, including more than 135 purple-stained objects.
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“Tel Shiqmona stands out because it yielded roughly twice as many artifacts directly connected to the industry as all other known sites combined,” lead author Golan Shalvi, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, tells the Times of Israel’s Rossella Tercatin.
At this scale, Tel Shiqmona represents the only known site in the Mediterranean region where dye production was not just a cottage industry but a veritable business operation. Its products were sold far and wide during the Iron Age, which lasted from roughly 1100 to 600 B.C.E.
“In the past, the assumption was that the first large-scale production facilities of purple dye were only established in Roman times, around the first century C.E.,” co-author Ayelet Gilboa, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa, tells the Times of Israel.
“Tel Shiqmona offers evidence that already in the ninth century B.C.E., purple dye was produced at an industrial scale,” she adds. “It was not just one individual dyeing a garment for a king.”
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The site’s seaside location made it a prime spot to expand from its humble origins as a Phoenician fishing village into a regional dye-making hub. Tyrian purple, as the dye is known, is harvested from sea snails in the murex family. To defend themselves and combat prey, the snails secrete “a slightly greenish fluid, which oxidizes upon exposure to air and gradually turns purple,” Shalvi tells New Scientist’s James Woodford.
Transforming the purple fluid into an industrially viable solution that binds with materials like yarn and linen required a complex chemical process. Details on how this process operated in ancient times are still scant.
“I imagine it as a very smelly place—especially to a modern nose—since the production process emitted a terrible odor,” Shalvi says to New Scientist.
To accommodate this process, Tel Shiqmona became a veritable industrial site during the Iron Age. Archaeologists recovered purple-stained shards of massive vats that stood over three feet tall and held approximately 92 gallons of liquid, large enough to efficiently dye entire garments. At certain points, as many as 15 to 20 of these vats were in use at the same time.
“For the first time, we have identified a complete production system in which significant quantities of purple dye were produced using specialized tools designed to streamline the process,” Gilboa tells Ynet’s Yaron Drukman. “The scale of the operation confirms that Shiqmona was an extraordinary production center for its time.”
This industrial capacity helps explain how the Kingdom of Israel became a regional powerhouse starting in the ninth century B.C.E., commanding the production of luxury textiles linked to royal power.
The archaeologists theorize that after the kingdom fell to the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 722 B.C.E., the site at Tel Shiqmona was operated at a limited, local capacity for several years before returning to its industrial-scale production once the Assyrians firmly established their rule, per the Times of Israel.
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Because of the location’s humid climate, the researchers are unsure whether any textiles from the time survive today. But previous excavations in more arid parts of the region have uncovered purple-dyed scraps dating back to around 1000 B.C.E.
Whether these scraps were dyed at Tel Shiqmona or at a more local site remains to be seen. But the significance of such a hub with a capacity for mass production is groundbreaking for the study of dye-making.
“To find a site that really specialized in this economic branch is highly significant and special,” Aaron Schmitt, an archaeologist at the Heidelberg University in Germany who was not involved in the Tel Shiqmona excavations, told the New York Times’ Franz Lidz in 2024.
