This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.įunding: The research was supported by funding by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant 1143/19 1880/17).
Received: SeptemAccepted: JanuPublished: January 28, 2021Ĭopyright: © 2021 Sukenik et al. PLoS ONE 16(1):Įditor: Andrea Zerboni, Universita degli Studi di Milano, ITALY In conjunction with other observations of the very high quality of the Timna textiles, this provides an exceptional opportunity to address questions related to social stratification and organization of the nomadic society operating the mines (early Edom), the “fashion” of elite in the region during the early Iron Age, trade connections, technological capabilities, and more.Ĭitation: Sukenik N, Iluz D, Amar Z, Varvak A, Shamir O, Ben-Yosef E (2021) Early evidence of royal purple dyed textile from Timna Valley (Israel). While evidence for the important role of purple dyes in the ancient Mediterranean goes back to the Middle Bronze Age (early 2 nd millennium BCE), finds of dyed textiles are extremely rare, and those from Timna are the oldest currently known in the Southern Levant. The samples originated from excavations at the extensive Iron Age copper smelting site of “Slaves’ Hill” (Site 34), which is tightly dated by radiocarbon to the late 11 th–early 10 th centuries BCE. Furthermore, by comparing the analytical results with those obtained in a series of controlled dyeing experiments we were able to shed more light on the specific species used in the dyeing process and glean insights into the ancient dyeing technology. Our identification is based on the presence of 6-monobromoindigotin and 6, 6-dibromoindigotin components (detected using HPLC analysis), which is considered unequivocal evidence for the use of murex-derived purple dyestuff.
In the context of a broad study aimed at examining dyeing technologies in the Timna textiles collection, three samples of prestigious fibers dyed with murex sea snail were identified.
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