The Phoenicians also made an indigo dye, sometimes referred to as royal blue or hyacinth purple, which was made from a closely related species of marine snail.
The Phoenicians established an ancillary production facility on the Iles Purpuraires at Mogador, in Morocco. The gastropod harvested at this western Moroccan dye production facility was Hexaplex trunculus (mentioned above) also known by the older name Murex trunculus (Linnaeus, 1758).
This second species of dye murex is found today on the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa (Spain and Portugal, Morocco, and the Canary Islands).
Read more about this topic: Tyrian Purple
Famous quotes containing the words royal and/or blue:
“a highly respectable gondolier,
Who promised the Royal babe to rear
And teach him the trade of a timoneer
With his own beloved brattling.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
““... Can poet’s thought
That springs from body and in body falls
Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky,
Now bathing lily leaf and fish’s scale,
Be mimicry?””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)