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Jan. 28, 2021
Back in the time of King David you couldn’t wear Prada, but there already was a must-have high fashion item: anybody who was somebody had to wear purple.
Analysis of 3,000-year-old textile fragments unearthed in the copper mines of Timna, deep in Israel’s southern desert, has revealed some to have been stained with a precious dye believed to have decorated the clothes of biblical kings and high priests who served in the Temple in Jerusalem. Some of the wool fabrics, found in 2016, at the site were colored with “royal purple,” a team of researchers from Tel Aviv University, the Israel Antiquities Authority and Bar Ilan University reported Thursday in the journal PLOS ONE.