4,000-year-old dye found on Egyptian artifact

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4,000-year-old dye found on Egyptian artifact

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4,000-year-old dye found on Egyptian artifact
It’s earliest evidence of extracting dye from plant to get pigment

By Randolph E. Schmid
updated 4:59 p.m. ET Aug. 10, 2009

WASHINGTON - Four thousand years ago Egyptians had mastered the process of making madder, a red dye, according to a researcher who uncovered the earliest known example of the color still used today.

Refining a technique that allows the study of microscopic bits of pigment, Marco Leona of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was able to analyze the color of a fragment of leather from an ancient Egyptian quiver.

The discovery that the color was madder is the earliest evidence for the complex chemical knowledge needed to extract the dye from a plant and turn it into a pigment, Leona reports in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
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The find is some 700 years earlier than any previously known use of madder, which became highly popular in the Middle Ages and provides many of the red shades and glazes in the work of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

"Tracing the use of organic colorants offers a way to follow trade routes, identify relations among archaeological objects, detect forgeries and attribute works of art," Leona wrote.

Leona refined a technique called Raman spectroscopy, which relies on the scattering of light to study materials. That process is not generally suitable for studying madder or some other dyes, but Leona enhanced the result using tiny metal particles that could amplify the findings and detect even very low levels of chemicals.

In addition to tracing madder, he was able to identify as kermes the red in the painting "St. John the Baptist Bearing Witness," from the workshop of Francesco Granacci in the early 1500s in Florence, Italy. Kermes was a dye made from the bodies of insects and was common in Europe before the importation of cochineal from the New World.

And the red color in the Morgan Madonna, dated at between 1150 and 1210, turned out to be based on lac dye, which originated in Asia and may have been imported to southern Europe by Muslim traders.

This is the first documented example of lac dye in European art before the 15th century, according to Leona. He noted that this sculpture was originally housed in the French region Auvergne, which borders Provence, where commercial records from a few decades later record importation of lac.


Karen Trentelman of the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles welcomed the findings.

Such work demonstrates how "fundamental scientific research of works of art and cultural heritage materials can impact our understanding of past societies and cultures," said Trentelman, who was not involved in Leona's research.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the David H. Koch Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32362118/ns ... e-science/


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Post by Horus »

Interestingly enough, I recently took this photograph at the 'Eden Project' mainly because of the reference to the Madder plant being used to colour a belt belonging to Tutankhamun. The stitching around the edge is showing the various shades it can produce.

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Post by Ebikatsu »

History

Early evidence of dyeing comes from India where a piece of cotton dyed with madder has been recovered from the archaeological site at Mohenjo-daro (3rd millennium BCE).[1] In Sanskrit, this plant is known by the name Manjishtha. It was used by hermits to dye their clothes saffron. Dioscorides and Pliny the Elder (De Re Natura) mention the plant (Rubia passiva). In Viking age levels of York, remains of both woad and madder have been excavated.

The oldest textiles dyed with madder come from the grave of the Merovingian queen Arnegundis in St. Denis near Paris (between 565 and 570 AD).

not any more it's not!

:)



In the "Capitulare de villis" of Charlemagne, madder is mentioned as "warentiam". The herbal of Hildegard of Bingen mentions the plant as well. The red coats of the British Redcoats were dyed with madder.

According to Culpeper's herbal, the plant is ruled by Mars and has an opening quality, and will bind and strengthen afterwards. It was used in the treatment of jaundice, obstruction of the spleen, melancholy, palsy, haemorrhoids, sciatica, and of bruises. The root should be boiled in wine, and sugar or honey added. The seed of madder, drunk with vinegar and honey is used for the swelling of the spleen. Leaves and stems are used when the monthly female menstrual bleeding is late. Leaves and roots are squashed and put on freckles and other discolorations of the skin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubia
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