Historical Data
Very fragile purple cotton fragments were found on two money bags in the excavations of Mohenjo-Daro ; old city in the valley of Indus , in Pakistan dated 3250 to 2750 B.C. In Egypt , alum mordant was not been found on a piece of flax dyed with the madder according to the previous analyses. The work carried out by Renate Germen recently shows that, the oldest examples of use of the madder was not mordanted by alum, textiles of Tel-el-Amarna dated from the 18th dynasty, gone back to approximately 1350 B.C. In 1930, the French Egyptologist Victor Loret had already pointed out that still under the 20th dynasty (1189-1069 BC), the plant was mentioned for the first time in the Lansing papyrus, was known only under its Semitic name and was perhaps imported to Syria or Palestine.
