What's on your workbench?

[Purple]

They can keep her.
I’ll stick to Anna Kendrick and Imogen Poots

[MarshalNey]

Really?

[FreddBloggs]

The ballsed up central court at the british museum and a woman who is a tv rent a historian

[Purple]

Really?

Yes she’s older than most of you lot lol

[levied troop]

I have no objection to being a toy boy.

[MarshalNey]

I'll rent her anytime.

[MarshalNey]

Now to restick Achilles and his Myrmidons back on the bottletops. They were unceremoniously ripped off to make way for my Ayton 8th Army figures.

[goat major]

I hope you were careful with Achilles' heels when you ripped him off the bottle top

[MarshalNey]

Ho ho.

[levied troop]

Looking back through some of my old data on the Bronze Age I found some further thoughts on Murex shells:

Early purple dye production on Crete
According to Julius Pollux (Onomasticon I, 45-49), writing in the second century AD, purple dye was first discovered by Herakles, or rather, by his dog, whose mouth was stained purple from chewing on snails along the Levantine coast, the area most famous in antiquity for its purple dye. Palaephatus (De Incred 62) also attributes the discovery of purple dye to Herakles and locates it at Tyre in the mid-second millennium B.C. King Phoenix received a purple-dyed robe from Herakles and decreed that the rulers of Phoenicia should wear this colour as a royal symbol.

Although the Levantine coast and the people of Tyre were renowned for their purple in antiquity, the earliest archaeological evidence for purple-dying from sea-snails in the Mediterranean is found on Crete. The earliest known deposits of murex shells on Crete, in quantities substantial enough and worn in such a way as to suggest dye-extraction, occur on the small island of Kouphonisi, at Palaikastro, and at Kommos. Pottery found at these sites suggests a date within the early Middle Minoan period, ca. 20th- 18th c. B.C. Slightly later finds of murex shells occur elsewhere in the Aegean, at Troy, and in the Levant. The great value and esteem of murex dye is traceable in the archaeological record and indicates early organised craft production of elite goods. Products such as purple-dyed cloth would have been a highly valuable trade item during the formative Old Palace period and would have had important consequences for emerging Minoan elites.

What's Bettany Hughes got that I haven't eh?I am available for rent at a rate described by many as extortinate.