The Snail That Launched a Thousand Ships

The Phoenicians’ Purple Pipe Dream That Built an Empire then Broke It

Dawn breaks over the Mediterranean, 1500 BC. A Phoenician fisherman— let’s call him Chad of Tyre— a grizzled man with a salt-crusted beard and a hangover that could fell an ox. He’s hauling his nets, cursing the gods, when he grabs a jagged murex snail from the catch. He crushes it in his calloused fist, and—oh, sweet hubris—a viscous, milky goo oozes from the snail’s ruptured gland. It’s not blood, not bile, but something else: a secretion that stains his hands a deep, radiant purple, a color so rich, so regal, it looks like the gods themselves bled it. Chad stares, dumbstruck, as the stain sets, unyielding to the sea’s scrub. He doesn’t know it at the moment, but his hands are stained with the glittering destiny of his people, dripping from a mollusk’s corpse.

Little did Chad know, but this snail will one day bankroll a glorious empire, spurn many colonies, and Phoenician script will sire many of the world’s writing systems that endure for millennia.

It was the snail that launched a thousand ships.

Who are these Phoenicians? And how did a snail change their destiny?