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A rare dye made from snails for the robes of the Roman elite almost 2,000 years ago has been unearthed at a cricket club.
The chunk of Tyrian purple, roughly the size of a ping pong ball, was dug up at Carlisle Cricket Club as part of ongoing yearly excavations.
A Roman bathhouse was discovered at the site in 2017 and in the last three years 2,000 items including pottery, weapons, coins and semi-precious stones have been found.
Lead archaeologist Frank Giecco said the find was of “international significance” and the first time the precious pigment had been discovered in the UK.
Mr Giecco said the pigment was worth more than gold and would have been used to dye the clothes of figures in the imperial court and the “highest echelons” of society.
He said it was made from the glands of marine snail and about 12,000 were needed to obtain less than 2g of pigment.
Fun fact: There’s an ancient Greek word for that color that the Romans also used.
That word is purple.
Also, holy fuck, the size of a ping-pong ball? Whoever lost that must have been seriously pissed off. That would have been amazingly valuable.
Maybe they went and died. Otherwise one would have recovered it, right?
Not necessarily. It could have gotten stolen, it could have been hidden and they forgot where they hid it, they could have given it to a slave and either of those could have happened to it or the slave died. Maybe it belonged to someone who was recalled to Rome suddenly and it was kept there until he got back. And those are just the possibilities I came up with off the top of my head.