[michael_nielsen]

It's likely somehow a reference to the Emperor. Purple cloth was extremely rare and expensive, and it was the colour worn by the Emperors. Indeed, it eventually became a capital crime for people outside the Emperor's family to wear it. I don't know if that was yet true at the time of Vesuvius, although Wikipedia claims Caligula may have had someone killed for wearing purple.

[Terr_]

> Indeed, it eventually became a capital crime for people outside the Emperor's family to wear it.

Similarly, various Emperors far away in China had a similar enforced color-monopoly, except it was on yellow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture#Yello...

[thaumasiotes]

Under traditional Irish law, there was no significance to any particular color, but the number of different colors you could wear simultaneously was determined by your status.

The general phenomenon of legal protections on status signifiers goes under the name "sumptuary laws". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law

[opportune]

Interesting. Does that mean the Yellow Turbans choose Yellow to demonstrate a lack of legitimacy for the Eastern Han emperor?

[Terr_]

AFAICT the imperial color requirement came about a few hundred years later.

[Tao3300]

Tyrian purple was so incredibly expensive that you would have had to do something illegal to get it unless you were already an incredibly wealthy noble with the right political connection.

Still interesting that they found that word. As far as I know the sea snail it comes from didn't inhabit the waters off Herculaneum.

[Arete314159]

The other word visible is "oino", wine. Wine can be described as purple.

[stevula]

I see “oiōn” (οιων), not “oino” (οινο or οινω). I don’t see how it could be read as “wine”. οιων could be several things off the top of my head:

1. the beginning of some form of of οἰωνός “omen”

2. genitive plural of οἶς, meaning “of sheep”

3. a genitive plural of some other word with a stem ending in -οι-, but with the beginning of the word missing. For example, the demonstrative τοίων “of such”, relative οἵων “of which”, or ποίων “of a certain kind”. Or, as speculated in the article, ὁμοίων “same”.

The 3rd option seems most likely to me without any further context. ὁμοίων seems especially plausible since the preceding characters do resemble "ΟΜ".

[thaumasiotes]

Only if you assume that whoever scribed the scroll wasn't too concerned about what order the letters in a word should be written in.

The image is annotated OIWN and the article tentatively identifies the word as OMOIWN, meaning "similar".

[OfSanguineFire]

While modern people make that connection, that is culturally dependent. The color terms available to speakers of a language, and what objects those terms can be associated with, change over time. In the case of the Greek word for "purple", it was connected to a dye and therefore used for clothing, but one shouldn't expect it to be used for wine.

[fsckboy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer)

"Wine-dark sea is a traditional English translation of oînops póntos (οἶνοψ πόντος, IPA: /ôi̯.nops pón.tos/), from oînos (οἶνος, "wine") + óps (ὄψ, "eye; face"), a Homeric epithet. A literal translation is "wine-face sea" (wine-faced, wine-eyed). It is attested five times in the Iliad and twelve times in the Odyssey[1] often to describe rough, stormy seas. The only other use of oînops in the works of Homer is for oxen, for which is it used once in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey, where it describes a reddish colour. The phrase has become a common example when talking about the use of colour in ancient Greek texts."

[Ylpertnodi]

Says you.

[OfSanguineFire]

Says anyone familiar with Ancient Greek, and also anyone who has followed linguistics (even in pop-sci form like Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass) recently. The comment by fsckboy, which was already there when you commented, gets it. For the Greeks, the connotation of wine was different than purple, purple was not a basic color term in that stage of the language, and πορφυρός was used only in the context of purple clothing and the dye used to make it.

[londons_explore]

wine stains are decidedly more purple than the wine they came from too.