Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
History
Before there were dunes, mosques, or even carpet dealers in Morocco, this region was
under water. In the Atlas Mountains and Saharan steppes, strata mark the geologic
time and place where tectonic plates shifted billions of years ago and civilisation sur-
faced from a rugged seabed. The earliest evidence of human settlement in Morocco
dates from 75,000 to 125,000 BC, when the stone tools used locally were advanced
technology. But the ice age wasn't kind to these proto-Moroccan 'pebble people', and
left the country wide open for settlement when the weather warmed around 5000 BC.
WHEN PURPLE WAS PURE GOLD
The port that is today called Essaouira was hot property in ancient times, because it had one thing
everyone wanted: the colour purple. Imperial purple couldn't be fabricated, and was the one colour
strictly reserved for Roman royalty. This helps explain the exorbitant asking price, which according to
Aristotle was 10 to 20 times its weight in gold. The natural dye came from the spiky murex marine
snails that clung to the remote Purpuraire (Purple) Islands - as though that could save them from the
clutches of determined Roman fashionistas.
Technically the Phoenicians were there first and discovered the stuff, but everyone wanted purple
power. Savvy King Juba II established a coastal dye works in the 1st century BC to perform the tricky
task of extracting murex dye from the vein of the mollusc, and kept his methods a closely guarded
secret. The hue became wildly popular among royal celebrities of the day; Cleopatra loved the stuff so
much that she dyed the sails of her royal barge purple to meet Mark Antony.
But violet soon turned to violence. Legend has it that Juba's son Ptolemy was murdered by Emperor
Caligula for having the audacity to sport a purple robe, making trendy Ptolemy possibly the world's
first fashion victim. The bright, nonfading dye was never successfully produced commercially, and the
secret extraction methods were assumed lost in the siege of Constantinople in 1453. But in Essaouira
the stuff is mysteriously still available, for a price. The mysteries of the colour purple are still passed
down from one generation of murex collectors to the next, and are jealously guarded.
