Snail guts? Archaeologists discover 3,000-year-old secret to the prosperity of the biblical kingdom of Israel
An ancient factory producing ‘royal purple’ dye is revealed to have been a joint Israelite-Phoenician venture that cornered the market for one of world’s oldest luxury goods
Wool fibers dued with purple about 3,000 years ago found at Timna in southern Israel. Photo by Dafna Gazit/Israel Antiquities Authority
This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.
Israeli archaeologists are rethinking the history of an ancient factory that, thousands of years ago, was one of the largest sites for the production of “royal purple,” a dye that adorned the robes of the rich and powerful across the Mediterranean.
Tel Shikmona, located on the shore of the modern-day city of Haifa, was interpreted as a Phoenician settlement that produced royal purple from sea-snails. The dye was one of the most sought-after luxuries of the ancient world. But a new paper, putting together information from archaeological digs there over 50 years, reached a new conclusion.
For about two centuries, Shikmona was something of a joint venture: an industrial site controlled by the biblical Kingdom of Israel and run by skilled Phoenician workers, say Prof. Ayelet Gilboa, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa and Dr. Golan Shalvi, formerly also at Haifa and now a postdoctoral researcher at Ben-Gurion University.
Their study, published in June in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, offers rare insight into the closeness of the ties between the ancient Israelites and the Phoenicians. It also sheds light on the economical background behind the expansion of the Kingdom of Israel, which would rise to become a major regional power during the middle of the Iron Age (or the First Temple Period, if one prefers references to the biblical chronology).
Mixed signals
Ever since excavations started there in the 1960s, the tiny settlement, covering less than one hectare, has presented archaeologists with a puzzle. Its layers date roughly from the 11th to the sixth centuries B.C.E., which corresponds to most of the Iron Age. Much of the pottery recovered at Shikmona was typical of the Phoenician culture that then prospered on the coast of today’s northern Israel and Lebanon, and founded colonies across the Mediterranean. But Shikmona also housed architectural elements, such as a casemate wall surrounding the site and three-room houses, that are typical of Israelite sites inland.
So was the site Phoenician or Israelite? And in any case, why build and rebuild over the centuries what appears to be a fort on a rocky stretch of coast that didn’t offer a safe harbor to ships?
The answer to that last question has been known since 2017, when researchers sampled the purple stains found on dozens of clay vats from Shikmona and confirmed that the color was indeed royal purple, which in antiquity was painstakingly extracted from Murex sea-snails. Shikmona was apparently one of the most important production sites for the dye, known in the Bible as argaman, which adorned precious textiles like the veil in the First Temple or the robes of Roman emperors.
But questions remained over who controlled Shikmona during its roughly half a millennium of operations.
“When you look at the site, the first thing you see are the more significant and eye-catching finds, and that’s mostly Phoenician artifacts. Phoenician pottery is very beautifully made, often red and shiny or bichrome, much more impressive than the day-to-day tools of the Kingdom of Israel,” Shalvi explains.
So, initially, Shalvi and Gilboa too were convinced that Shikmona was a Phoenician site that produced royal purple, which also dovetailed with the traditionally close link between this coastal Levantine culture and the dye industry. While we don’t know how the Phoenicians called themselves (or if they even identified as a single people) their name is an invention of Greek writers that derives from phoinix, the word for a purple-red hue, and is likely a nod to the industry that made their fortune.
But at Shikmona it recently became clear that the Phoenicians were not there alone.
“After going through thousands of artifacts, including every pottery sherd that emerged from the dig, and figuring out to which layer and which period they belonged to, we realized that at Shikmona the picture is more complex,” Shalvi tells Haaretz.
It did indeed start out as a Phoenician village in the Early Iron Age, but in the middle of the ninth century B.C.E. it dramatically changed. The material culture became a mix of Israelite and Phoenician pottery and a casemate wall was built over the ancient village.
This type of fortification, composed of a double wall that creates internal chambers, is known from Israelite sites like Megiddo and Hazor.
It is true that archaeologists often caution that “pots don’t always equal people.” In other words, Phoenicians at Shikmona may have simply copied the Israelite fortification (as they would indeed later do in their colonies in Spain and at Carthage) and, for some mysterious reason, decided to import lots of inferior Israelite pottery to use next to their superior ware. But this unique blend of Israelite and Phoenician culture is not found anywhere else, Shalvi notes.
Purple reign
Looking at the broader historical context of the Levant in the mid-ninth century B.C.E., a more parsimonious explanation emerges.
This period was marked by the rise of the Kingdom of Israel under the Omride dynasty, led by King Omri and later his son, Ahab. The Bible claims that this kingdom was, a century earlier, part of the great monarchy of David and Solomon, encompassing both Judah, with the capital in Jerusalem, and Israel.
Most scholars today question the existence of the biblical United Monarchy, given that there is little or no archaeological or historical evidence for it. But while David and Solomon’s monarchy may be more myth than history, Israel and Judah, as separate (and often rival) kingdoms are well attested archeologically and in extra-biblical documents, written by the Israelites themselves or neighboring people like the Assyrians, the Moabites and the Arameans.
And while the Bible stresses the primacy of Jerusalem and Judah, most researchers agree that Israel, with its capital in Samaria, was the true power in the region, particularly starting with the Omride dynasty in the ninth century B.C.E. From its core lands around Samaria, in today’s northern West Bank, and the fertile Jezreel Valley, Israel expanded in every direction, toward modern-day Jordan and Syria, south at the expense of Judah and, of course, towards the sea to the west.
Everywhere they went, the Omrides left their mark, building monumental architecture (which earlier generations of archaeologists initially attributed to Solomon) and reorganizing the economy to serve the needs of the burgeoning state.
So it makes sense to conclude that Shikmona too came under the control of Omride Israel, which explains the construction of the casemate wall and the Israelite pottery at the site, Shalvi and Gilboa conclude. What is anomalous is the continued presence of Phoenician material culture, they note.
At Tel Dor, an ancient port town just a few kilometers south of Shikmona, the Israelites took over as well and, from the mid-ninth century B.C.E., Phoenician culture disappeared from the settlement, the researchers say. The difference is that, at that time, Dor was not a production center for royal purple, they add.
“The Israelite kingdom recognized the amazing economic potential of the luxury trade in argaman, or royal purple, and they wanted a piece of the cake,” Shalvi tells Haaretz. But making the dye is a tedious process that involves collecting thousands of shells to extract a small quantity of product and complex processing to fix the color onto textiles.
“This is a very traditional industry that requires deep knowledge of chemistry. Plus it’s very stinky work, and not everyone is willing to do it,” Shalvi says. “You don’t become a producer of royal purple overnight.”
In other words, the new Israelite overlords required the expertise of local Phoenician workers to keep the purple flowing.
“The unusual mix of Israelite and Phoenician material culture suggests an Israelite administrative takeover to take advantage of the economic potential of the site, while those who continued to work there were Phoenicians,” Shalvi says.
By the way, it’s not clear whether the Omride takeover was violent or whether the previous Phoenician village was abandoned shortly before the Israelites arrived, he adds.
Be that as it may, the Israelites built the casemate wall around the site but initially didn’t construct anything else inside.
“We find signs of a lot of activity inside the wall, but no architecture in this phase, so what they were protecting with the wall was the industry itself, not people or a specific building,” Shalvi says.
In the following centuries, the developments at Shikmona closely track with what we know of the history of the Kingdom of Israel. The site was destroyed at the end of the ninth century B.C.E. as the Omrides declined and parts of Israel were temporarily lost to an invasion led by the Aramean king Hazael, who was based in Damascus.
However, Israel recovered quickly from this setback under a new dynasty, the Nimshides, and so did Shikmona, where the casemate wall was rebuilt and the site expanded, through the construction of three-room houses, another hallmark of Israelite architecture.
This period, in the first half of the eighth century B.C.E., saw the height of territorial expansion and prosperity for the Kingdom of Israel, under the reigns of Jehoash and Jeroboam II, and the developments of the industrial site of Shikmona can probably be attributed to these monarchs, Shalvi says.
Shikmona was destroyed again in the second half of the eighth century B.C.E., either in the internal power struggles that followed the four-decade rule of Jeroboam II, or in the subsequent Assyrian invasions, which spelled the end for the Kingdom of Israel.
Production of royal purple at Shikmona resumed under the auspices of the Assyrian Empire in the seventh century B.C.E. In later periods, particularly in Byzantine times, Shikmona was expanded into a real town but the locals no longer engaged in dye production.
Why so blue?
For those two centuries in the Iron Age, it does seem that the Kingdom of Israel controlled a significant portion of the market for the precious dye. The quantity of purple-stained vessels found at the small site of Shikmona is much larger than what has been unearthed at other spots that were involved in producing the dye, Shalvi notes.
Equally significant is the presence of Cypriot pottery at the site during the ninth century B.C.E., a sign that Shikmona was deeply involved in international trade, he says.
Given that, so far, no other royal purple factory from this period has been found in Israel, Lebanon or the entire Mediterranean basin (there are older or later sites), it is possible that during this time window Israel possessed a quasi-monopoly over the production of argaman and tekhelet, a blue pigment that is also produced from Murex snails.
These dyes are mentioned in the Bible as having an important role in the rituals of the ancient Hebrews. Both pigments are described (2 Chronicles 3:14) as having been used for the paroket – the veil covering the Tabernacle in Solomon’s Temple – while Numbers 15:38 enjoins the people of Israel to decorate the tzizit, the tassels of their garments, with tekhelet. By the way, the latter’s symbolic importance is also reflected in the blue stripes in modern Israel’s flag.
Going back to the Iron Age, it is not a huge stretch of the imagination to assume that Shikmona provided royal purple and blue textiles to temples in the Kingdom of Israel and its neighbors – including the Temple in Jerusalem, Shalvi says.
In any case, the site at Shikmona offers us information about the “background” of the biblical stories and historical records about the prosperity and power of the Kingdom of Israel, which allowed it to hold its own for two centuries against the expansionism of the Assyrian Empire and other large polities in the region.
“We suddenly see the economic side of this power: where did Ahab get all his chariots from? Where did the prosperity that allowed them to build so monumentally come from?” Shalvi says. “Obviously it didn’t all come from Shikmona, but the site certainly played a part in transforming this kingdom into one of the major regional powers of the time.”
Shalvi and Gilboa’s reconstruction of Shikmona’s history is “completely reasonable,” and brings together for the first time scattered information from multiple excavations at the site over recent decades, says Dr. Omer Sergi, a senior lecturer in archaeology at Tel Aviv University.
While we knew from digs at Megiddo and Tel Rehov in the Jezreel Valley that ancient Israel had interactions with the coast, Shikmona sheds direct light on the kingdom’s relationship with the area, and particularly with the Phoenicians, says Sergi, who was not involved in the research but has excavated multiple Israelite sites.
The findings reflect the very close ties that are hinted to in the Bible, for example in the fact that King Ahab was married to Jezebel, the daughter of the king of Tyre, one of the most powerful Phoenician city states. But until now we lacked direct evidence of these connections, both because we didn’t have enough information from the northern Israeli coast and because of the enmity between modern-day Israel and Lebanon, which was the main territorial hub of the Phoenician culture, Sergi says.
Slaves to Samaria?
One remaining question is the nature of the power dynamics between the Israelite administrators of Shikmona and the Phoenician workers. Were the former cruel overseers and the latter enslaved locals?
It’s impossible to know for sure, but in modern times there is a knee-jerk tendency to believe enslaved people built everything in the ancient world, Shalvi notes. Archaeologists have dispelled some of this as myth. For example we now know that even the Great Pyramids of Egypt were not built by slaves.
And ancient copper smelters in the Edomite mines of Timna, in today’s southern Israel, have also been recently revealed to have been skilled laborers who were fed with expensive foods and clothed with fancy fabrics, including some dyed with royal purple.
This was likely the case also at Shikmona, Shalvi says. “I can’t tell you whether they were happy of the Israelite takeover,” he says. “But we can assume these were skilled laborers who wanted to make a living, so there was a joint interest on both sides to keep the industry going.”
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