Inv. no 816_c

On many areas of the surface of the first two qualities of fabric, one can observe traces of a very degraded, blackish, different textile, which has almost disappeared. Since these traces occur on both sides of the fragments, it seems plausible that these textiles were wrapped in another fabric. The poor state of conservation of this textile and the strong contrast with the linen textile (quality 1) indicates that it was either made of animal fibres, such as wool, either dyed, or both. This is the third quality of fabric. Unfortunately, the altered condition of the find didn’t allow for a sample extraction in order to examine the fibres in the Scanning Electron Microscope to ascertain the nature of the fibres.

On the largest fragment of the linen fabric, there is an area with a bright purple colour amongst traces of black degraded fabric. This colour derives from the degraded dark textile and not from the linen one. The non-destructive hyperspectral analysis carried out on the fragment by Philippe Walter and Clarisse Chavanne, Sorbonne University, detected the presence of real shellfish purple. However, the HPLC analysis, carried out by Dr Ilaria Serafini at the A3Tex Lab of the University of Sapienza, Rome, showed that the fabric has been dyed with a double-process plant dye, a mixture of madder and indigo dyes to obtain the bright purple colour still visible today. This is a groundbreaking result, marking the first evidence of both these dyes in ancient Greece. Madder has been already identified in a wool fabric from Lefkandi (radiocarbon dating: 13th-10th c. BCE), while indigo has never been identified in a Greek archaeological textile.