Color: A Natural History of the Palette (51 page)

The concierge told me that if I thought Beirut was dismal that day then the pro-Syrian Muslim towns, including Tyre and Sidon, would be even worse. Head north, to the Christian area, he advised when I told him about my search. “They won’t be in mourning so much, and you’ll find many Phoenician remains there. And plenty of coffee, of course.”

The Phoenicians were the people I was looking for—early inhabitants of Lebanon who had arrived from the Arabian peninsula in the third millennium B.C., and established themselves all along this rocky coast. They were sea adventurers, traders, artists and carpenters, and they became known for their sophisticated steering by the stars and for their early creativity with colored glass. They were also said to have invented the archetype for the alphabet that made the words on this page possible. But, most importantly for my own search, these people also became so famous for trading the most luxurious dye in history that their very name derives from the Greek word for purple,
phoinis
. I would first find what remains of the Purple People, I decided, and then later I would look for the color they were named after. So I took the concierge’s advice and hired a car.

I had been surprised earlier, when I studied the map of Lebanon, to see how tiny the country was. Its violent civil war from 1975 to 1990 has given it an international notoriety—to my generation at least, watching the hostage crisis unfold through the 1980s—quite out of proportion to its area. The whole of Lebanon is in fact a little smaller than the Falkland Islands and half the size of Wales. In just over an hour I had negotiated Beirut—and was in the town where books were born.

THE PURPLE PEOPLE

The town of Jbail (its Arabic name) or Byblos (its Greek one) shows few signs of the country’s most recent war except that the hills above it are clad in ugly concrete villas. They are owned, I was told by a disapproving Byblos resident, by Beirutis fleeing the fighting on weekends. But if—or perhaps because—it doesn’t show much indication of contemporary warfare, it is one of the finest places in the country to see signs of all the other factions who have battled for this coastline for the past seven thousand years or so— including my Phoenicians.

It was almost sunset as I headed past the immaculately renovated souk, and went straight to the headland. This small area is covered with the rocks and ruins of many former residents of Byblos—starting with Neolithic settlers and continuing with the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Crusaders, Franks, Mamelukes, Ottomans, Arabs, and tourists. I was a member of the last category, and so I was assigned a guide—in the form of Hyame, an archaeologist, and we wandered contentedly between the old walls until nightfall, her stories bringing this deserted place of rubble and grasses to life.

The Phoenicians were little people, Hyame told me. If a man measured 1.5 meters and was handsome with it, he would have been a most desirable catch in Byblos four millennia ago—and women were even smaller. Their houses had neither doors nor windows, and were accessed by ladders, leading to trapdoors in the roof. They would light the dark interiors with oil lamps, which incidentally they had invented. What happened when they got too old to climb the ladders? I asked. “They didn’t live very long so it didn’t matter,” my guide answered cheerfully.

It was a curious notion, as we stood in this quiet place, that four thousand years ago the space in front of us would have been noisy and packed with people: tiny traders doing business with tiny consumers. The shops—you can still see the “dental” pattern where each stall was grooved into the city wall—were barely deep enough to swing a candle. Those spaces now filled with weeds would once have been stuffed with cheese and capers, ropes and remedies, and special things for boats and journeys. Some of the merchants would even have had thick slabs of ice dripping dark pools in the sunshine: with Mount Lebanon so close, agents could get ice rushed down the mountain throughout the year. It would have been useful for keeping food fresh on board, or perhaps even for providing cool lemon drinks for the sweltering passengers and crew as they journeyed away from this city, carrying bundles of the papyrus scrolls that gave both Byblos and the Bible their names.

And in the old Phoenician market there would, Hyame agreed, probably have been a whole street of colors—coal-like lumps of indigo, bags of scented saffron, cakes of white lead from Rhodes, chunks of lapis coming through from Afghanistan and, of course, that valuable purple dye. For millennia this was one of the most prized products of the coastline—and it was seen as symbolic of both the heavenly world and the best of the human world. It was used in the holiest of Jewish temples (the Tabernacle—the sacred tent containing the Ark of the Covenant which the Jews carried with them in the wilderness—was to be made “with ten curtains, of fine twined linen, and blue and purple and scarlet”: Exodus 26, 1) and at the same time it played an important role in secular offerings. In the sixth century B.C. King Cambyses of Persia sent a team of spies to Ethiopia, hoping they would come back with detailed plans of how best to attack the country. They carried with them many presents—incense, necklaces and palm wine, and a precious purple cloak. According to the Roman historian Herodotus,
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the King of Ethiopia was distrustful not only of Cambyses’s intentions but also of his gifts and particularly of how the cloak came by its very special color. “Taking the purple cloak, he asked what it was and how it was made, and when the [diplomat-spies] told him the truth about the purple and the way of dyeing, he said that both the men and their garments were full of guile.”

The Persians and Jews liked purple greatly, but it was in the Roman and then later the Byzantine appropriation of this dye that it gained its real reputation—when emperor after emperor had their new clothes made from it. So I turned inland to find the Romans—and the greatest temple they ever built.

THE FLUTTERING OF A BUTTERFLY’S WINGS

Near the famous cedars, high up on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, I picked up two Belgian hitchhikers. “We’ll get our luggage,” they said, and went inside their hotel to emerge with dozens of cases, and what looked like a huge hatbox. We filled the car. Alain was a butterfly collector looking for the rare Mount Lebanon Blue butterfly, and his wife Christina—now hidden under the bags—was there because he had promised her that they would stay in hotels rather than tents. Butterfly collectors were peculiar people, Alain said: “We like to camp in nature, wash in mountain streams and wake up early, just to see one specimen that is not dissimilar to another specimen.” Christina concurred with an element of resignation. “I don’t like to go: it’s boring and they drink too much,” she said.

As we drove along the curving mountain roads, Alain talked about his blues, and I talked about my purples. Butterflies, he then told me, are very good at seeing purple. In fact they have a very different range of color vision than humans. Reds are usually invisible for them, but they can see all the way up the rainbow scale from yellow to beyond violet and into ultraviolet. How could anybody know that? I wondered aloud, and he told me that some flowers—and butterflies—appear to human eyes to be completely white. But when you look at the petals or wings under an ultraviolet detector, they are covered in ghostly markings that butterflies respond to as signals.

At that moment in Alain’s story we drove past a large clump of white flowers on the roadside, and I wondered whether they had any markings that I couldn’t see. For the first time I thought how arbitrary our “visible light” spectrum is. Patterns drawn in ultraviolet might make those ordinary little petals into the exotic peacocks of the botanical world, and yet we cannot appreciate them. If we could see a wider range of light frequencies then those flowers could be as entrancing as tiger orchids. But if we could see a narrower range, then who knows: perhaps I wouldn’t even be able to see my original Tyrian purple. If I ever found it, that is.

PASSION AND POWER

We could see the giant columns of Baalbek from far away across the Bekaa plain: they dominated the small dusty town that shares their name. Today Baalbek is a series of picturesque ruins, but once this was the site of the largest temple in the Roman Empire— dedicated to Jupiter, ruler of the gods. As we passed I noticed it was full of building workers, so I dropped off the butterfly collector and his wife—together with their many nets and boxes—and went to investigate.

Once a year thousands of people go to Baalbek for a contemporary ritual—a music festival that invites international stars like Sting, the Paris Opera Ballet and the members of the Buena Vista Social Club to perform in the ruins. I was there a few days before it started, and the organizers were sorting out a stage and seating. All the noisy construction work only emphasized the general destruction of the ancient building—the Temple of Jupiter was truly a giant ruin. At one time it was twice as big as the Acropolis in Athens. Now there were just a few walls and a lot of Roman rubble—including great granite pillars from as far away as Aswan in Egypt and Tripoli in Libya—as a reminder of the past.

Nineteenth-century engraving of Baalbek

But close by the newly dedicated Temple of Song was another smaller temple that has always been dedicated to wine. This was the shrine of the party god Bacchus (the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Dionysus), and it had stayed relatively intact—I could still see the carvings of eggs and cattle horns, grape leaves and honey entwining pillars, all symbolizing fertility and fun. It was “the nightclub” of its time, said our guide, Ghazi Ygani, pointing out the wine cellar that was for the exclusive use of the priest, the bartender of his time perhaps. This temple was preserved, ironically, because it was less important than Jupiter’s showy complex— the foundations were lower down to represent the god’s lower position in the hierarchy. So when the priests moved out and decay moved in, its walls were more quickly covered by layers of protective soil. It is astonishing now—after extensive archaeological excavations cleared the site in the 1920s—to see how far the earth has settled. High up on the wall, 12 meters above our heads, I could just see the scrawled names of German visitors. “Those graffiti were written in 1882,” said the guide, as the four people in my tour group crowded into a tiny handkerchief of shade. “That was the level of the ground.”

It was interesting that the rivalry between Bacchus and Jupiter— between sexuality and power—should have been fought out so visibly in the very stones of this place. Because the symbolism of purple is equally ambiguous. In terms of formal power, purple often was, and often still is, the color of royalty or of the highest vestments of priesthood. And yet in terms of unbridled revelry, if Bacchus ever had a color he could claim for his own it should surely be the shade of tannin on drunken lips, of John Keats’s “purple-stained mouth,” or perhaps even of Homer’s dangerously wine-dark sea.

A defining moment for purple as the center of both sexuality and power was played out at a famous dinner party in 49 B.C. Julius Caesar had just won a key battle against Pompey, and Cleopatra organized a feast for the aging hero in a palace described as “luxury, made mad by empty ostentation.” It wasn’t just the Egyptian queen’s sails which were purple—her whole palace was lined with purple porphyry stone, as those of the Byzantine emperors would be lined centuries later, leading to the phrase “born in the purple.” The sofas in Cleopatra’s staterooms were covered with gleaming covers: most of them, “long steeped in Tyrian dye, took on their stain from more than a single cauldron.”
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A hundred years later, this would be seen as common: “Who does not use this purple for covering dining couches nowadays?” a jaded commentator on interior design called Cornelius Nepos would ask.
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But for Julius Caesar all this oriental excess was fairly new. Impressed, he fell into his hostess’s arms—to the disgust of his generals, who suggested Cleopatra was “whoring to gain Rome.” Caesar was unrepentant, and when, a short time later, he returned to Rome, he introduced a new fashion item in honor of his two most recent conquests: the totally purple, sea-snail-dyed, full-length toga. An item only Caesar was allowed to wear.
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