Purple: A middle kingdom fad?

This article is from Ancient Egypt issue 153

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‘Purple’ is usually defined as a mixture of red and blue, which are colours at the opposite ends of the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Although some people refer to the hybrid hue as ‘violet’, this is technically incorrect. True violet is the range of visible spectral wavelengths between blue and invisible ultraviolet. Mixing red and violet, however, also produces shades of purple. Many people have difficulty visually distinguishing between true violet and the darker shades of purple, and this has long been a source of confusion in recognising these colours.

Today, purple is one of the more popular colours. We see it on virtually everything that can be coloured, but why this should be so is unclear. For some people, purple may simply resonate with their aesthetic sensibilities, while for others the primary attraction may be the colour’s past associations with royalty and other elite personages.

In stark contrast to today, the pre-Middle Kingdom Egyptians lived in a world where no manufactured object or material was coloured purple, except for the rare jewellery that employed purplish gemstones. Many of these Egyptians, however, would have been familiar with the colour from its presence in the natural environment in the form of flowers and bird plumage. For example, the purple gallinule or ‘swamphen’, with vivid purple feathers extending from the back of its neck to its belly, was a common bird in the marshes along the Nile River and across the Nile Delta. It was frequently depicted in marsh scenes on tomb walls from the Fourth Dynasty onward but, when painted, the purple feathers are rendered in blue.

At the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, in the Eleventh Dynasty (c.2055-1985 BC), there was a sudden burst of purple into the Egyptians’ world due to the nearly simultaneous discovery of the sources of three stones: a purplish-brown variety of sandstone; and two gemstones, purple amethyst and purplish-red garnet. Whereas the Egyptians had names for the two gemstones (hesmen for amethyst and hemaget for garnet), they did not have one for their purplish colour. While it is possible that these discoveries were the result of targeted explorations for purplish stones, it seems more likely that they were a fortuitous by-product of the search for metals and building stones.

Sandstone, which came from quarries along the Nile River in Upper Egypt, became an important building material beginning in the Eleventh Dynasty. A purplish-brown variety of this rock was present in a few of the quarries, where it was a minor but highly conspicuous component. Consequently, it was noticed and, evidently, admired. Also in the Eleventh Dynasty, Egyptians were going into the Eastern Desert to search for sources of metals including copper, gold, and lead. Gold and the copper-bearing minerals (such as malachite) occur in quartz veins, as does amethyst. Thus, during their explorations, the Egyptians would have discovered amethyst-bearing quartz veins and the garnet-bearing rocks that are sometimes associated with them.

Unlike ancient Rome, where it symbolised power, prestige, and divine authority, the colour purple had no known symbolic value in ancient Egypt, and so the major consumption of purplish stones during the Middle Kingdom may simply be due to their novelty and appealing appearance. This article explores the uses and sources of these stones during this period, and briefly considers the continued presence of purple in the material culture of ancient Egypt during subsequent periods.

Sandstone

The sandstones quarried in ancient Egypt usually have an internal (fresh) colouration that varies from light shades of grey, yellow, orange, brown, pink, or a combination of these. Yellowish-brown is the most common colour of Egyptian sandstones and was the principal variety used in monumental constructions from the New Kingdom onward. During the Middle Kingdom, however, a purplish-red to mainly purplish-brown sandstone was employed as a building material for at least five temples in the Abydos–Thebes region. The best-preserved of these is the Mentuhotep II (Eleventh Dynasty) mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri.

Purplish-brown sandstone was employed for its octagonal columns and their bases, as well as for some of the walls and pavements. The other examples of this rock’s use include: the Eleventh Dynasty section of the Amun temple at Medinet Habu; the Twelfth Dynasty sections of the Osiris-Khentiamentiu temple at Kom el-Sultan in Abydos; the north temple of Min and Isis in Qift; and the dismantled Senusret I (c.1965-1920 BC) colonnade (now in the block yard near the Ptah temple) in the Amun temple complex at Karnak. Ordinary yellowish-brown sandstone was also utilised in the Middle Kingdom sections of some of these temples. The purplish-brown sandstone was not used in Egypt after the Twelfth Dynasty, but the reason for this is not known.

The source of this colourful rock is almost certainly the Gebel el-Silsila quarry, 60km north of Aswan. This site, which occupies both banks of the Nile River, was first worked in the Middle Kingdom and remained sporadically active until the end of the Roman Period. (For more on Gebel el-Silsila see our series of articles beginning in AE 113.) It mainly supplied yellowish-brown sandstone but also produced other colour varieties. One of these is purplish-red to mostly purplish-brown and is found only in the southern part of the West Bank section of the quarry, where it extends at least 300m along the river in a layer up to 14m thick. This rock continues another 5km to the north along the West Bank, but only in layers less than about 1m in thickness. These occur within the yellowish-brown sandstone in the north-west section of the Gebel el-Silsila quarry, and in the adjoining Nag el-Hammam and Wadi Shatt el-Rigal quarries.

The purplish-brown sandstone at Gebel el-Silsila is a good macroscopic match, in terms of colour and texture, to the sandstone used in the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasty temples of the Abydos-Thebes region. Although Gebel el-Silsila preserves some Middle Kingdom remains, the part of the quarry where the purplish-brown sandstone occurs was extensively reworked in the 20th century and, consequently, any evidence of Middle Kingdom extraction that may have existed there was destroyed. Such evidence does survive, however, in the nearby Wadi Shatt el-Rigal quarry, with its well-known rock-cut stela of Mentuhotep II.

Amethyst

Amethyst is a variety of quartz that ranges in colour from true violet to mainly purple, but the Egyptian amethyst is seldom uniform in tint, and commonly grades to white or colourless quartz. This gemstone was employed for beads and amulets throughout the Predynastic and Dynastic periods, but it was heavily used only during the Middle Kingdom. At that time, amethyst was carved into beads for necklaces, bracelets, anklets, and girdles; it was also fashioned into scarabs and other amulets, as well as small vessels. Amethyst was less common in the jewellery and decorative arts of the Second Intermediate Period, and thereafter remained scarce until the Graeco-Roman Period, when it was once again plentifully employed.

Small deposits of amethyst occur in quartz veins at numerous localities in the Eastern Desert’s Red Sea Hills. It was probably one or more of these that supplied the rare stones used before the Middle Kingdom. In the Eleventh Dynasty, rich deposits of amethyst (and rock crystal or colourless quartz) were discovered in the Wadi el-Hudi area, about 30km south-east of Aswan. From the many rock-cut inscriptions found there, it is known that mining began during the reign of Mentuhotep IV, at the very end of the Eleventh Dynasty, and continued until the reign of Sobekhotep IV (c.1725 BC) in the Thirteenth, with the bulk of the activity occurring during the Twelfth Dynasty. Although amethyst was commonly used in the Second Intermediate Period, there are no workings of this age at Wadi el-Hudi. It appears, therefore, that the Middle Kingdom amethyst was being recycled for objects in the succeeding period. This gemstone was not employed again on a large scale until the Ptolemaic Period, when the Wadi el-Hudi mine was reopened, and a new amethyst deposit was discovered in the Red Sea Hills at Abu Diyeiba, 25km south-west of the coastal city of Safaga.

Garnet

Garnet, like amethyst, was primarily employed for beads from the Predynastic Period onward. Its peak use, when it also occasionally appears in cloisonné inlays, was during the Middle Kingdom and, to a lesser extent, the Second Intermediate Period. Whereas the garnet mineral family includes several garnet sub-varieties exhibiting a wide range of colours, only red to mainly purplish-red garnet was used in the Dynastic jewellery. From the colouration of the beads and the few chemical analyses done on them, these stones are almost certainly the almandine or, less likely, pyrope varieties of garnet. After the Second Intermediate Period, when garnet was commonly available (but apparently only from recycled Middle Kingdom material), this gemstone was not again widely accessible in Egypt until the Graeco-Roman Period, when it was imported from India.

A cache of 131 purplish-red garnet crystals was discovered in the Buhen fortress at the Nile’s Second Cataract in northern Sudan. The crystals, which are now in London’s Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, were in a leather bag hidden under a Middle Kingdom pavement. Buhen was not just an Egyptian fort, it was a trading centre, too, for goods coming down the river from further south in Upper Nubia. The presence of these garnet crystals at Buhen indicates that Egypt was importing at least some of this gemstone from Nubia during the Middle Kingdom, and this was the case in other periods as well. For example, there is a painted scene in the Eighteenth Dynasty Theban tomb of Rekhmira that refers to garnet (hemaget) tribute from Nubia, even though this gemstone is largely absent from the surviving New Kingdom jewellery. More telling is an analysis of Predynastic garnet beads from Naqada near Thebes that showed them to be chemically identical to a known source of almandine garnet from around the western end of the Nile’s Fourth Cataract in northern Sudan. Here, in the Wadi el-Haraz and Wadi Abu Dom areas, large crystals (up to 3cm) of gem-quality garnet have weathered out of the granitoid gneiss bedrock, and are now found concentrated on the desert surface. Sudanese jewellers, in recent times, used the crystals from both areas for ring stones.

Although Nubia supplied some of the garnet during the Middle Kingdom, the strong temporal linkage in the heavy use of amethyst and garnet during this period suggests that the two stones had a common source, with this being the Wadi el-Hudi area. This is supported by three observations. First, the stela of Sobekhotep IV at Wadi el-Hudi (WH 23) lists garnet as one of the minerals sought by the Egyptians in the Wadi el-Hudi area. Second, much of the crystalline basement rock in this area consists of metamorphic granitoid gneiss that is rich in almandine garnet. This is the same geological setting as the western end of the Fourth Cataract. Third, many crystals (up to 1cm) of gem-quality garnet have been found in the archaeological excavations at the Wadi el-Hudi mine. Although no garnet workings have yet been recognised in this area, none are likely to be found if the garnet crystals were simply harvested from the desert surface, as has been done at the Fourth Cataract.

Later sources of purple

The popularity of purplish stones during the Middle Kingdom may have been the impetus for the development of new sources of purple at the beginning of the New Kingdom. Although there was still no purple paint pigment, purple glass and purple-glazed faience were occasionally manufactured. In both cases, the colourant was manganese oxide, which was probably derived from the mineral pyrolusite. Rich deposits of pyrolusite and other manganese-bearing minerals occur in the Sinai Peninsula, where they are found in the same general area as the copper and turquoise mines. Also in the New Kingdom, there were purple-coloured textiles made by either double-dyeing with red and blue tints, or by interweaving red and blue threads.

The Phoenicians began making a true purple dye for textiles, the so-called ‘Tyrian Purple’.

In the Levant, contemporaneous with the New Kingdom, the Phoenicians began making a true purple dye for textiles, the so-called ‘Tyrian Purple’. This was derived from the large Murex snails that lived in shallow Mediterranean waters. It is not known when this costly dye was first imported into Egypt, but it may have been very late. Beginning in the early 1st century AD of the Roman Period, the purplish-red imperial porphyry was quarried in the Eastern Desert at Mons Porphyrites (‘Purple Mountain’), 45km west of the coastal city of Hurghada. This famous ornamental stone was employed for statuary, sarcophagi, and columns in Egypt and elsewhere in the Roman Empire.

The widespread use of purple in ancient Egypt began in the Middle Kingdom and has continued, in one form or another, down to the present day. It is impossible to know how the early Egyptians felt about this colour, but it may be that they valued purple for no better reason than it was pleasing to the eye, a sensibility shared by many people today.

James A Harrell is Emeritus Professor of Geology at the University of Toledo (USA). He has long been a student of the archaeology and geology of ancient Egyptian stones, and has so far made 50 trips to Egypt and Sudan investigating their uses and sources.

Further reading:
J A Harrell (2024) Archaeology and Geology of Ancient Egyptian Stones (2 vols; Oxford: Archaeopress).