Ararat Scale

The red dye-producing insects of the Ararat plain were once plentiful: a 19th-century French traveler wrote that shepherds' flocks, when led to drink from the Araxes (Araks) River, would appear bloody from the insects. In the mid-20th century the extent of occurrence in Armenia was 100 km2 (39 sq mi) with a recorded distribution that included the Ararat and Armavir provinces in Armenia as well as the Turkish, Iranian, and Russian Caucasus, but by the 1990s the extent of occurrence in Armenia had shrunk to about 20 km2 (7.7 sq mi), mostly in Armavir Province. During the Soviet period, desalination of the Armenian salt marshes to create "economic and agricultural regions", and the creation of lakes for fisheries, "severely restricted the [habitable] area for the insects and [endangered their] existence."

The population in Armenia resides almost entirely in the Vordan Karmir State Reservation, a salt meadow habitat of 198.33 ha (490.1 acres) northwest of Arazap village and 21.52 ha (53.2 acres) in the north of Jrarat village established in 1987 near the Araks River border with Turkey, plus a site southeast of Ararat village and a few patches of several hectares elsewhere. …

P. hamelii is one of the ancient natural sources of red dye in the Middle East and Europe, along with the insect dyes kermes (from Kermes vermilio and related species), lac (from Kerria lacca and related species), and carmine from other Porphyrophora species such as the Polish cochineal (P. polonica), and the plant dye madder (from Rubia tinctorum and related species). It is possible that Armenian cochineal dye was in use as early as 714 BC, when the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II was recorded as seizing red textiles as spoils of war from the kingdoms of Urartu (the geographic predecessor of Armenia) and Kilhu. The Roman-era physician and pharmacologist Dioscorides, writing in the 1st century AD, noted that the best kokkos baphike, the kermes shrub and its "grain" (kermes insect) that some ancient writers likely confused with P. hamelii, came from Galatia and Armenia. In the Early Middle Ages the Armenian historians Ghazar Parpetsi and Movses Khorenatsi wrote specifically of a worm-produced dyestuff from the Ararat region. During the Middle Ages the Armenian cochineal dyestuff vordan karmir, also known in Persia as kirmiz, was widely celebrated in the Near East. Kirmiz is not to be confused with dyer's kermes, which was derived from another insect. …