 That's it. Thank you very much. Hello, my name is Vick Oren and I'm with the Shankar College of Engineering, Design and Art, a very nice mix of technology, engineering, science and humanities. I'm with the Department of Chemical Engineering and also I direct the Small Center for Analyzing Ancient Artifacts, specifically the ancient colorants on whether you're talking about dyes or pigments. Now, I will talk about royal purple. I've done analyses on different types of dyes and pigments, but my favorite, of course, there's nothing like royal purple. But to give you a little bit of a spoiler as I'm starting, based hopefully on my talk, a lot of the history books related to royal purple will need to be rewritten. Whoa. Okay, let's go. All right. So as I said, here we have lovely mollusks and lovely colors, and we have the logos that are needed, et cetera. Now, the work that I'm involved in is, of course, archaeological chemistry. Like many of you, I'm not an archaeologist. As I'm meeting people around this conference, they're asking me what I do. So I say disclaimer, I'm not an archaeologist, and they look at me. So what are you doing here? So like many of us who are scientists, we analyze ancient artifacts, and we do a lot of analyses, use different techniques, but there's nothing like chromatography specifically HPLC that many of you have heard about. Just to give you again a quick summary, with HPLC, High Performance Liquid Chromatography, you can get a chromatographic property, and that's called the retention time, the time that it takes for a component to elute, to come out of the stationary phase. You get a nice chromatographic property, such as this pigment, which I'll talk about later also. But you also get a spectrometric property, the UV vis absorption spectrum of different dyes. And of course, if you combine it with mass spectrometry, you get a third property, the molecular weight, but it's unnecessary. The last one, if you're talking about components that you know about. Much of the work that I've done relates to what is known as ancient Israel, the desert area, Judean desert sites. I always tell a slight joke that in Israel, when you dig in the ground, there's bad news and there's good news. When you dig in the ground, the bad news is you don't get oil. But the good news, we get archaeology, which is much more important in my opinion for mankind and womankind for later on. But I've also done analyses for various museums around the world. The organics, of course, as you know, survive in the desert sites. Now, I'm not going to talk about the various dyes of sources from flora and fauna, as you know, plants, insects, and sea snails, because as I said before, my favorite is, of course, the purple pigment producing snails. Well, I'll say that fast 10 times. Purple pigment producing snails. And in the eastern Mediterranean, we have a club med of sea snails. We have what are commonly known as murex snails. We have the sharp, the spiky ones, brandaris. We have the trunculus and we have the sexy stramonita hemostoma. Even the name sounds sexy with a nice red mouth, a very lovely concoction. And from the living snail, we get the pigment. These were not only used for sovereigns and kings and caesars. These were also used for colorants in the biblical aspects, something called argaman, royal purple, a reddish purple, and also another biblical color, which is bluish, which is sometimes known as biblical blue or chelet. Okay, now, in order to do some analyses, we first have to go diving for snails. So up, we're along the eastern Mediterranean, of course, going up north to Afsiv, a very nice spot. There was a club med there once upon a time. It closed many years ago. We can collect sea snails. What you see in the border up north is Lebanon high, and we're very close over there. We collect a whole basket full of snails. And on the beach or in the laboratory, you can knock the shell out. I'm not going to go through the details of how this pigment is produced by cutting out the hyperbranchial gland, whatever. There's a colorless fluid in there. Once it undergoes photochemical oxidation, you get the final pigment that's produced, such as the one that you see right over here. Now, what is the main component of that? Well, historically, the main component, the gentleman who's responsible for identifying the main component of this pigment is Paul Freelander. He actually did it with Murex brandaris, and he has some extraordinary amount of snails. I don't know if that's really true in order to get one gram, but Paul Freelander analyzed it, and he said it's based on the indigo molecule, 6-6-prime dibromoindigo. Basically, the indigo skeleton with two bromine atoms, as you see there, he did that in 1909. Now, how did he know that? Well, that is based on work from 1903. Six years before then, Saxon came with the first to synthesize dibromoindigo, and based on that work, Paul Freelander was able to identify the pigment from that particular snail. Okay, who came next? Well, Fister, the famous dean of all dynalsies. Fister analyzed various textiles from the ancient Near East, Egypt, et cetera, and he used that property that the pigment is dibromoindigo, and based on that identification, he looked for dibromoindigo in various samples from all over, as I said, the ancient Near East. Okay, so that's about nearly 100 years ago. Well, let's take a look at some of my analyses. The first time I did some analyses that I found the purple pigment, and that's in the previous millennium when I did this, it feels like 1,000 years ago, there was a, in Tel Dor, a Phoenician complex, there was a small, a couple of limestones that had some dark residual spots on them. When I analyzed it, Lone, and I did it with UV-Vis spectrometry, I did not have an HPLC 26 years ago, something like that, 27 years ago. So I did UV-Vis absorption, and Lone, behold, it died, it has the fingerprint or the lambda max, the maximum absorption wavelength of approximately 600, that is Tel Dor sample because only a dibromoindigo, bromine indigo will give you that. So this particular site was used for dying with a purple pigment. Okay, then I got the HPLC, and with HPLC, as all of you know, you're able to identify the various components. This is the beauty of HPLC, when done right, you can find all the lovely components. And what I found is that the purple pigment, even though the naked eye only sees a color, as I'm looking around, you see a textile with a particular color, there could be a hundred different molecules in there, of course, or one substance. HPLC sees the invisible, you can quote me on that. And in that purple pigment, there are yellow components, different reddish, purpleish components violet, and of course, a blue component. But of all the components, the major ones that I found in various archaeological samples is indigo, that skeleton, which is of course, a bluish pigment, and dibromoindigo, which is the reddish purple pigment, and a color in between. It's almost like you take indigo and dibromoindigo and you mix it together, but it's a separate molecule monobromoindigo with one bromine atom. Those are the ones to take a look at. So when I looked at purple as a paint pigment, one of the first samples that I analyzed, which gave me a very nice separation of the components, was a jar that belonged to King Darius I, or King Darius the Great. You notice all the kings were the great, never King, what's his name, the so-so. It's always the great, very humble. So this is when he reigned 520 of 486. There's a beautiful marble jar in the Biblelands Museum. For those of you who have been to Jerusalem, right next to the big famous Israel Museum, there's a Biblelands Museum much smaller, but very, very nice. Nevertheless, this marble jar, I call a Persian Rosetta Stone. It's a Persian Rosetta Stone from the King Darius' time. It's got three different cuneiform inscriptions, and it also has Egyptian hieroglyphics. And the Egyptian hieroglyphics is the most detailed, and it actually has Darius' name over there, which I think is something like Dar Yavush in ancient languages. Now, it says, what's interesting, King Darius living eternally year 36. Living eternally year 36? Well, unfortunately, he did not live eternally, because in this 36th year, that's when he died. And that's about 486 BCE. Anyway, if you take a look at it, you can see from the picture, of course, purple residues along the marble jar, when we did the HPLC analysis, we get di-bromo indigo, monobromo, and a bunch of other things. So I wanted, and this is the theme of my talk, can I tell the provenance, the biological or zoological provenance, what was used, which species was used for these archaeological purple dimes. Archaeologists are very interested in provenance studies, when they look at clays and metals, it came from this earth or that earth. Well, I talk about provenance also, biological, zoological. Where did this come from? So, and also in various five hours left. That's five hours. Okay, thank you. In the Tel-Kabri and Tel-Shikmona, there are various patchards also from ancient Phoenician sites, which we've analyzed. And the question is, what is the Malaskan source, the biological or zoological provenance for this pigment and for other archaeological pigments? So I started looking at various snails, such as the archaeological samples, the tronculous, brandaris, hemistoma. And with HPLC, which is a wonderful tool, you can see that there's a whole bunch of yellows coming up, there's reds, there's blues, et cetera, et cetera. But when I looked at it, I saw that there's one common denominator among the archaeological sample and the various tronculous samples, which I analyzed from Spain, from Israel, et cetera. The key is monobromoindigo, which you can see from this particular chart. That is, the brandaris and hemistoma have negligible monobromoindigo, and you cannot artificially produce in-the-dying monobromoindigo. Yes, it may be there in just an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny amount, but you don't get a lot of it. Only the tronculous and the archaeological sample, like the Dariusapho, has monobromoindigo. Well, only the, as I said, only the tronculous has much MBI significant amount of it. I try to quantify it. It also has a significant amount of monobromoindigo. And what is amazing is that all, I repeat the word, all archaeological purple pigments that have been analyzed properly by HPLC have all detected significant levels of monobromoindigo, not just the ones that I've analyzed, others that have analyzed around the world. They have a significant amount of monobromoindigo. What does that mean? Since monobromoindigo cannot be artificially produced, all archaeological purple pigments and dyes were produced from the tronculous species. When the history books write, royal purple was produced from brandaris, in my humble scientific opinion, wrong. Purple pigments from other snails could have been added. If you wanted to get more red, for example, you might have been able to add more. So the rundown is, let me go back, the rundown among these three snails, well, not all snails were created equal. It is not a democratic snail society. What happened? Well, the tronculous is different from the others, or we say in the Passover, why is this night different from all the other nights? Why is the tronculous different from the brandarisi mistoma and other snails that you find in the Atlantic Ocean? Because, oh, wow, it sounds like a Haggadah that I'm telling right now. It's because all the other snails have mainly di-bromoindigo, they only give you a purple pigment, excuse me, purple pigment. Whereas the tronculous I found has all three in significant quantities, and especially monobromoindigo. And there are two, I will call them subspecies. I may be wrong, I'm not a zoologist. When I spoke to zoologists, they said, well, you can't really call it a subspecies because in zoology, there is a very specific definitions of that. Okay, fine. So two different varieties of tronculous, one that will give you a reddish purple pigment, another one that will give you a bluish purple pigment or violet. Why do you get reddish purple pigment? Because it is rich in the red purple pigment di-bromoindigo. Why do you get a bluish purple pigment? Because it is rich in indigo. So that if we go back to the Darius pigment, we can see that the di-bromoindigo, the Darius pigment is rich in di-bromoindigo. We also did purple as a textile dye for a bunch of different textiles. We found it, especially in Masada and some other places. And this is a sample that can be associated with King Herod of the first century BCE. And this particular sample, when we analyze it without going into the details, this is his chromatogram, King Herod's chromatogram, I call it. That's what he called it. King Herod's chromatogram. He knew one day somebody will analyze it. You get di-bromoindigo again by looking at the sample because of the fact there's a significant amount of monobromoindigo. But there's a lot of di-bromoindigo. That's why, of course, it's reddish purple. It's just like paints. And finally, this one I will skip over in the interest of time. There are two different species involved. As I said, in order to get reddish purple pigment, you do not need the brandaris. Also, the amount of pigment in brandaris is negligible. Trunculus has much more. To summarize, all Malaskan archaeological purpose will produce from the trunculus nails. Some species produce reddish purple, others blue purple. These two species could have been, of course, mixed together. And also, other dye stuff could have been mixed into it. And therefore, Pliny's description is correct. That's another story. But for those of you who bashed Pliny's description of the purple dyeing process, shame on you. He was right. Okay, if you want a longer one, a longer talk, Aesor recorded me a number of years ago. It's on YouTube on the subject. And also I gave a TED talk, should you kiss with lipstick? I will not give you the answer nor demonstrate it. Thank you.