In the Ancient World, This Pigment Was Worth More Than Gold. Archaeologists Discovered It Buried With Babies in Roman Coffins
A funerary custom in Roman Yorkshire of pouring liquid gypsum over bodies before burial preserved traces of Tyrian purple
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Centuries ago, there was a shade of purple so valuable that Cleopatra marked her sailboat with it; Roman emperors threatened to kill anyone else who used it; and the Catholic Church designated it for the garb of religious leaders and the decoration of holy texts.
Last month, archaeologists shared that they discovered this precious pigment in cloth buried in the coffins of two babies in York, England.
Tyrian purple dye, made in modern-day Lebanon through an elaborate process involving crushing thousands of murex sea snails, was worth more than its weight in gold. “It is not really easy to obtain the color,” said Ioannis Karapanagiotis, a scholar of conservation chemistry at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, to BBC News’ Zaria Gorvett in 2023.
A team of scientists at the University of York found the pigment in two graves from the late third or early fourth century C.E. A stone sarcophagus held a baby wrapped in Tyrian purple cloth in between two adults. A tiny lead coffin held an infant only a few months old who was “covered in two layers of textiles, a tasseled shawl and over that a fine textile of Tyrian purple-and-gold embroidery,” reports Maev Kennedy for the Art Newspaper.
Although the bodies and the fabric pieces in the graves decayed, some remnants of the burial can be detected because of a unique practice. When burying their dead, people in York during the period of Roman rule of Britain poured liquid gypsum into coffins, which hardened to create a plaster cast and preserved imprints.
Though archaeologists remain unsure why people used gypsum in their burials, it’s proved a helpful tool to researchers, archaeologist Maureen Carroll told Live Science’s Hannah Kate Simon in 2023. Carroll is the principal investigator for the Seeing the Dead project on funerary customs in Roman Yorkshire.
“We are very lucky to have this casing, as it shows the precise position of the bodies and their relationship to each other exactly at the moment when the liquid gypsum was poured over them and the lid of the coffin closed about 1,700 years ago,” Carroll said.
Fun fact: Producing purple
Synthetic purple was first produced by young chemist William Henry Perkin at the Royal College of Chemistry in London. In 1856, while trying to create quinine in the lab to help treat malaria, he accidentally made a substance that, when combined with alcohol, produced a purple dye.
In these graves, the gypsum also preserved the shape of cloth, traces of purple dye and flecks of gold from gold thread. This is the first time this dye has been found in textiles in York, “indicating that the city’s wealthy inhabitants had access to expensive and exotic commodities from the other end of the empire,” Carroll says in a statement from the University of York.
It’s also rare to see this type of burial treatment for young children, especially for the baby in the lead grave, who was only a few months old at death and buried alone. In a time when infant mortality was so high, any form of public mourning was uncommon for children less than a year old—let alone one featuring the most valuable dye in the Roman Empire.
“This remarkable discovery tells us a lot about the importance of children in Roman York and the willingness of the family to give their baby the best possible send-off in tragic circumstances,” Carroll adds in the statement.