City of the murex hill
Sidon
A Phoenician port whose purple dye trade left behind a whole hill of crushed sea-snail shells.
Why Sidon is murex purple
Sidon, north of Tyre on the Lebanese coast, was another great Phoenician city and a rival centre of the purple dye trade. Ancient writers sometimes called purple cloth Sidonian. The proof lies in the town itself. A mound known as Murex Hill is made largely of the broken shells of the snails used by the dyers, piled up over centuries. Sidon was also known in antiquity for glass. Today the old town is a maze of vaulted stone lanes, with a sea castle built by Crusaders in the 13th century on a small island. A museum in an old factory explains the making of olive oil soap, another local trade.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Colours tied to Sidon
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Sidon" on Wikipedia. If you know Sidon and we have it wrong, tell us.
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The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Pampore In: Ashfaq ahanger, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Hue Vn: Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, source
- Tyre Lb: RomanDeckert, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- New Orleans Us: thepipe26, CC BY 2.0, source