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The Royal Purple and the Biblical Blue (Argaman and Tekhelet)

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The Royal Purple and the Biblical Blue (Argaman and Tekhelet) The History of Science Society Review: [untitled] Author(s): Patrick E. McGovern Source: Isis, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), pp. 563-565 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/233453 Accessed: 24/07/2009 11:32 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Isis. http://www.jstor.org BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 81: 3: 308 (1990) 563 friendly, humorous, and modest person of lax and for visibility of the new moon) from unbelievable erudition, with no tolerance an Arabic astronomical handbook for the for sham and with but one standard of per- Mongol viceroy of Tibet (the manuscript is formance: the highest. However, I did not truly unique: it contains lists of fixed stars learn of his standing within the interna- with their Chinese names written in Arabic tional community of Assyriologists until the characters and with glosses in Mongol and summer of 1963, when I went to the British Tibetan). Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat writes Museum to look at tablets on mathematical on the role of cuneiform mathematical texts astronomy that Abe had noticed in the in the arduous training of scribes. course of his survey of the texts there. David Pingree and Christopher Walker I was fortunate enough to share a table publish in copy, transcription, and transla- with Abe in the Students' Room in the De- tion a Babylonian star catalogue from partment of Western Asiatic Antiquities in roughly the seventh to the fifth century B.C. the museum. There were many visiting As- Most of the fixed stars are arranged in syriologists that summer, and they were the "strings"-groups with roughly the same very opposite of amateurs. Yet I soon dis- right ascension. F. Rochberg-Halton treats covered that if one of them was in trouble of benefic and malefic planets in Babylo- with a text, he or she went to Abe. He nian astrology and adduces a new text. would take his glasses off, squint at the G. J. Toomer writes elegantly about Hip- tablet, and say that he didn't know any- parchus's reliance on Babylonian astron- thing about its genre or period, but to him it omy. looked like such and such, to which the The most spectacular contribution is by reply was usually "Fits perfectly." He told Otto Neugebauer; it is also the shortest. He me once that if one studied cuneiform texts publishes a fragment of a Greek papyrus, of a certain period, one ought to know ev- privately owned, from Roman Egypt that, erything that went before, and since he so help me, could be taken for a transcrip- dealt with the very latest texts the implica- tion of a Column G of a Babylonian lunar tion for himself was clear. text of System B. It is a zigzag function Whenever I get stuck with my work my giving the variable length of the synodic immediate reflex is still to ring Abe, and in month, taking in account only lunar anom- this I am surely not alone, for he was gen- aly, whose mean value (1 month = 29;31,- erous to a fault with help and advice. 50,8,20 days) enabled Franz Kugler to It is a measure of his colleagues' and show dramatically the Greek indebtedness friends' admiration and devotion that they to Babylonia in the matter of astronomical brought out this volume dedicated to his parameters. We have just begun to explore memory. It contains twenty-seven articles the consequences of the discovery that by thirty-one authors and a bibliography of Greek control of Babylonian astronomy Sachs's published works. An unusually was not limited to parameters, but was large number of these studies deal with as- extended to the complicated arithmetical tronomical and mathematical texts-which, schemes as well, for this column makes no of course, reflects Sachs's particular con- sense in isolation. cerns-and it is this group that makes the The other articles in this handsome vol- volume of interest to historians of ancient ume range in subject from Sumerian to Se- and medieval science. I shall limit my fur- leucid texts. ther comments to these studies. ASGER AABOE Alan C. Bowen and Bernard R. Gold- stein have a long and thoughtful article on Ehud Spanier (Editor). The Royal Purple the so-called Metonic cycle, which equates and the Biblical Blue (Argaman and Tekhe- with 235 months and was 19 years synodic let): The Study of Chief Rabbi Dr. Isaac used for intercalary purposes in Babylonia Herzog on the Dye Industries in Ancient well before Meton's time. Hermann Israel and Recent Scientific Contributions. who completed and published the Hunger, Foreword by Chaim Herzog. Introduction first volume of Sachs's Astronomical by Moshe Ron. Preface by Sidney Edelstein. Diaries in 1988, presents a long text of Mer- 220 pp., illus. Jerusalem: Keter, 1987. cury observations from 196 to 180 B.C., very likely extracted from the diaries. This book on early Jewish sources re- E. S. Kennedy and Jan Hogendijk pub- lated to purple dyeing has been eagerly lish and analyze two tables (for lunar paral- awaited, since it includes a fully annotated 564 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 81: 3: 308 (1990) publication of Rabbi Isaac Herzog's Ph.D. shawl (tallit), as well as being an important thesis "Hebrew Porphyrology" (until now dyestuff in the adornment of the temple and only available as a faded microfilm), to- the vestments of the priests. The art of gether with a synopsis of the thesis pre- dyeing tekhelet had been lost by the early sented to the Belfast Natural History and eighth century A.D. It was only in the later Philosophical Society, a selected bibliogra- nineteenth century that an attempt was phy, and other relevant published and un- made by a rabbi in Russian Poland, Ger- published material. Although written early shon Enoch Leiner of Radzin, to produce in this century, Herzog's thesis is an exact- the dye from secretions of the cuttlefish, ing treatment of the available historical Sepia offinalis. Herzog details the initial sources in light of the then-current biologi- enthusiastic reception of this dye as genu- cal, chemical, and archaeological data. It ine tekhelet, although it was later shown to provides the indispensable starting point be Prussian blue, which might be produced from which to evaluate Herzog's interpre- from any organic material by fusion with tations according to more up-to-date re- iron filings and potash. search, as presented in six appended arti- More recently, as the appended articles cles, primarily written by modern Israeli demonstrate, another marine source has scholars. been advocated for tekhelet-Truncula- Herzog's thesis highlights the difficulties riopis trunculus. In support of this hypoth- in identifying the specific mollusk species esis, piles of T. trunculus, with the shells that were exploited for purple dyeing, since often preferentially broken for removing only the general Hebrew word hillazon, for the hypobranchial gland, have been dis- "shell," was used in the Jewish writings covered along the Eastern Mediterranean and the shape, color, habitat, and biological coast, and glandular extracts of the species behavior of the marine animals briefly de- have been shown to give a violet or blue, scribed. Whereas the color of the purple depending upon which sexes are exploited molluscan dye is virtually certain (Heb. ar- at specific times of the year. Yet two other gaman = Gk. porphyra = Lat. purpura), mollusk species, Murex brandaris and the hue of a second dye (Heb. tekhelet, Thais haemostoma, which are also com- which is probably equivalent to Gk. ia- monly found in ancient midden heaps as kinthos) is debatable. According to Greek preferentially broken shells, cannot be usage, a violet or reddish-blue is the most ruled out as sources of tekhelet. The 6,6'- likely coloration, but allusions in the He- dibromoindigotin purple dye, which is the brew sources to tekhelet being the color of exclusive product of these mollusks in the the sky or sea suggest a purer blue. Primar- presence of purpurase and on exposure to ily on the basis of its violet-colored shell air and light, might have been reduced to and dye and its rarity, as implied by Talmu- the colorless, soluble leuco base in a chem- dic sources, Herzog opted for the genus ical or fermentative reduction system Janthina, several species of which occur in (R.
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