It was. It was the royal color because it was famously hard and expensive to make purple dyes out of sea snails.
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melsaskca@lemmy.ca 2 weeks agoWasn’t purple a “royal” colour back in Roman toga times? Maybe it was called something different?
jve@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It was “purpura” in Latin. OP said purple is relatively modern in English.
Denjin@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Yes but not in English, which was my point
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The Latin and Greek speaking parts of the world probably had a word for purple by that point. Remember the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who would evolve into the medieval Anglo-Saxons were from around modern continental Denmark to about the modern Hanover region. This area didn’t really have the color purple all that much and frankly speaking Britain ain’t much better on that front, probably why it took till around the viking age to get a word for it since that’s when pan European trade started to pick up again to a large enough degree for purple dyes to start getting to Britain on a regular basis.