By Micah Halpern
I've Been Thinking:
A fragment of royal purple cloth, dating to 1000 years BC, was recently discovered in the Israeli desert, near the Dead Sea, in a place called Slaves Hill.
The dig in which the cloth fragment was unearthed has been dated to the reign of King David.
The royal purple color of the cloth is officially known as argaman. Cloth of that color, which came from a murex sea snail, was more valuable than gold. The color does not change over time. It does not fade. 3000 years later the purple is the same purple.
The textiles made their way from the Mediterranean coast where the snails were caught to Jerusalem where the clothing was worn.
This small fragment is proof that there was much more interaction between geographic areas and socio-economic groups than historians and archaeologists had thought. It is now clear that people of the rural desert and royalty must have interacted.
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