Purple garlic

On this Wikipedia the language purple garlic are at the top of the page across from the article title. This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 14 January 2023. This article is about the color. Queen Elizabeth II in March 2015.

Purple is any of a variety of colors with hue between red and blue. Purple has long been associated with royalty, originally because Tyrian purple dye, made from the mucus secretion of a species of snail, was extremely expensive in antiquity. According to contemporary surveys in Europe and the United States, purple is the color most often associated with rarity, royalty, magic, mystery, and piety. Tyrian purple dye manufactured in classical antiquity from a mucus secreted by the spiny dye-murex snail. This CIE chromaticity diagram highlights the line of purples at its base, running from the violet corner near the left to the red corner at the right. Purple is closely associated with violet. In common usage, both refer to a variety of colors between blue and red in hue.

Purple first appeared in prehistoric art during the Neolithic era. The artists of Pech Merle cave and other Neolithic sites in France used sticks of manganese and hematite powder to draw and paint animals and the outlines of their own hands on the walls of their caves. The process of making the dye was long, difficult and expensive. Thousands of the tiny snails had to be found, their shells cracked, the snail removed. Mountains of empty shells have been found at the ancient sites of Sidon and Tyre. The snails were left to soak, then a tiny gland was removed and the juice extracted and put in a basin, which was placed in the sunlight.

There, a remarkable transformation took place. Tyrian purple became the color of kings, nobles, priests and magistrates all around the Mediterranean. Etruscan tomb painting from the 4th century BC shows a nobleman wearing a deep purple and embroidered toga. In Ancient Rome, the Toga praetexta was an ordinary white toga with a broad purple stripe on its border. The Toga picta was solid purple, embroidered with gold. During the Roman Republic, it was worn by generals in their triumphs, and by the Praetor Urbanus when he rode in the chariot of the gods into the circus at the Ludi Apollinares.

During the Roman Republic, when a triumph was held, the general being honored wore an entirely purple toga bordered in gold, and Roman Senators wore a toga with a purple stripe. However, during the Roman Empire, purple was more and more associated exclusively with the emperors and their officers. Roman garrison to mock his claim to be ‘King of the Jews’. The actual color of Tyrian purple seems to have varied from a reddish to a bluish purple.

In modern times, Tyrian purple has been recreated, at great expense. When the German chemist Paul Friedander tried to recreate Tyrian purple in 2008, he needed twelve thousand mollusks to create 1. 4 ounces of dye, enough to color a handkerchief. In the year 2000, a gram of Tyrian purple made from ten thousand mollusks according to the original formula cost two thousand euros. In ancient China, purple was obtained not through the Mediterranean mollusc, but purple gromwell. The dye obtained did not easily adhere to fabrics, making purple fabrics expensive.

China was the first culture to develop a synthetic purple color. An old hypothesis suggested links between the Chinese purple and blue and Egyptian blue, however, molecular structure analysis and evidence such as the absence of lead in Egyptian blue and the lack of examples of Egyptian blue in China, argued against the hypothesis. Lead is used by the pigment maker to lower the melting point of the barium in Han Purple. Purple was regarded as a secondary color in ancient China.

In classical times, secondary colors were not as highly prized as the five primary colors of the Chinese spectrum, and purple was used to allude to impropriety, in contrast to crimson, which was deemed a primary color and symbolized legitimacy. Nevertheless, by the 6th century CE, purple was ranked above crimson. Several changes to the ranks of colors occurred after that time. An Egyptian bowl colored with Egyptian blue, with motifs painted in dark manganese purple. The color could vary from crimson to deep purple, depending upon the type of murex sea-snail and how it was made. Through the early Christian era, the rulers of the Byzantine Empire continued the use of purple as the imperial color, for diplomatic gifts, and even for imperial documents and the pages of the Bible.

However, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the color lost its imperial status. The Empress Theodora, the wife of the Emperor Justinian I, dressed in Tyrian purple. 11th-century Byzantine robe, dyed Tyrian purple with murex dye. A medieval depiction of the coronation of the Emperor Charlemagne in 800.