Sucedáneos, adulteraciones y falsificaciones de materias primas tintóreas en la industria textil del Mediterráneo Antiguo: la transmisión de una tradición técnica a través de los papiros del Egipto romano.

This summary is aimed to show the basic ideas presented in this research: Substitutes, adulteration and counterfeiting of raw materials in the Ancient Mediterranean textile dyeing industry: the transmission of a technical tradition through the papyri of Roman Egypt.The line of research started in 2008 with the study of natural dyes and pigments has been focused on this study in a particular and little known subject of the ancient societies: the world of fakes, adulteration and fraud of dyestuffs and pigments. Some dyes were considered as a symbol of prestige and status the higher classes of the ancient Mediterranean societies. We analysed the techniques usually used to make the substitutes and imitations of the expensive dyes as the purple. The nucleus of the research is constituted by the study and description of the raw materials used as substitutes of the original dye, so that we can well to resolve practical questions: production, manufacturing, areas of use, production site, especially those will help us distinguish them from the raw materials used to prepare of original dyes. This research is limited to the area of the ancient Mediterranean, focusing these studies on sources of early and late Roman Empire and limiting to geographic area occupied by the Roman Empire. Our work has concentrated fundamentally in Roman Egypt for two reasons: the origin of the examined technical documents and the number of textiles found in archaeological context in this area.The thesis is organized into chapters. The first chapter describe the working methods, and the election of sources. Also, the specific terms used for define a particular colour looking its correspondence with the terms of Greeks colour that are cited in the recipes papyri of Roman Egypt for the production of dyes for to fake purple and yellow gold. These topics have been discussed in the first chapter alongside the Roman legislation. In the second chapter we have analysed how and with what raw materials more expensive and appreciated these dyes were made. We have compared these processes with those described for substitutes and imitations of these colours. It has made an analysis of animal raw materials described in the sources to develop adulteration of purple dye.The next chapter focuses in the study on vegetable raw materials described for this same purpose. We have done a limited study of some inorganic materials exposed in the Greek papyri to emulate the colour of gold too. With these studies we tried to resolve how dyes are produced, and how purple wool and some threads for to imitate gold has been dyeing in antiquity.The last chapter is reserved to the study of how, who and where these substitutes were made.