The deep purple dye commonly known as Phoenician purple got its start centuries before the Phoenicians, with the Minoans and their expansive trading network. The dye, created from the excretions of several different species of sea snails, was one of the most expensive in the ancient world. And it's one of the ways the Minoans became so wealthy.
The Minoans were producing the murex dye on the island of Chrysi off the coast of Crete as early as 1600 BCE. That's the earliest confirmed date, anyway. It's likely there were other dyeworks around Crete that haven't been discovered yet, and some of them will probably date to earlier, given how extensive and developed the Chrysi dyeworks were.
The lovely young lady in the image above is picking the stigmas and styles of the saffron crocus, also called the autumn crocus, to give as an offering to the Sun Goddess.
This is one part of a story that plays out in a series of frescoes from Akrotiri, the Bronze Age town on the Mediterranean island of Santorini. Saffron crocus blooms float like a wallpaper design across these frescoes, Minoan artists' way of showing us that behind the human figures was a spreading field of crocuses.
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...
