"All around the Mediterranean there are wide stretches of beaches composed of crushed murex shells, silent witnesses to the geographical scope and longevity of the Phoenician dyeing industry".

It was all from a gigantic murex snail farm off the coast of modern day Lebanon, which was notably monopolized by the Late Roman/Byzantine imperial courts at Constantinople for a millennium. Tyrian purple, the purple ooze that was squeezed out of the snails, became a dye that was hard to obtain for the average Mediterranean person but was liberally used in the silk robes, vellum books, and gilded tapestries of the imperial court. God and Gold in Late Antiquity by Dominic Janes has a great analysis of how Late Roman elite gift culture was defined by the imperial court's monopoly over certain materials (such as the murex farms in Lebanon, gold mines in Spain, and porphyry mines in Egypt).