Royal Purple

Although the Phoenicians are credited with being the first to produce purple, the Minoans were harvesting murex in the warm waters near Kommos, Crete in the Bronze Age.  Discoveries of ancient murex mollusks have shown evidence of large scale farming; the mollusks were so packed together that they cannibalized each other, a phenomenon which does not naturally occur in the wild.

Murex mollusks smell awful, like rotting flesh, but when processed they produce a vivid purple dye that was worth its weight in gold.  It took twelve thousand murex to dye the hem of a single garment.