HERB - Origins of Glass

[lilinah@grin.net]

Sorry about the late response, but i'm catching up on several weeks backlog
of messages due to hardware problems.

On Thu, 16 Sep 1999, Rauthulfr <mwolfe at nwlink.com> wrote:
>Glass was invented by the Romans.

This is not true. Glass was invented much earlier.

>From "The Phoenicians", under the scientific direction of Sabatino Moscati,
Abeville Press Publishers, New York, 1988. (a major, major work on the
Phoenicians - anyone interested should look for this)

>From the chapter on glass, which begins on page 474:

By the 3rd millennium BCE glass was being made in Mesopotamia. Scholars
believe that knowledge of glass-making travelled from there to the
Egyptians.

Glass paste, although not blown glass, was used by the ancient Egyptians
for jewelry, various amulets and small objects, little deity statues, etc.

However, it was the Phoenicians who took the few rudimentary techniques and
expanded the repertoire.

The Phoenicians were producing in Egyptian styles for the Egyptian market
and their own use before the 7th C BCE in a number of techniques.

1. Faience, glass paste, which technique the Egyptians used.

2. Sand core glass is produced by making the desired shape of damp sand,
wrapping it in fine cloth and dipping it in molten glass.

3. Other small glass objects were made in molds, such a jewelry pendants.

4. They also produced what is now called cane-work from twisted canes or
thread of glass in a wide variety of colors - white, transparent,
opalescent, navy, turquoise, pale blue, green, yellow, orange, red,
purple-red.

5. And finally blown glass, of which the Phoenicians were probably the
inventors.

They made a wide variety of tiny glass paste and majolica polychrome
unguent jars and bottles.

The Phoenicians also produced many amazing beads.

Some are in the form of faces with pendant curls on heads and beards, with
other fine details, by the method that i think is today called lampworking
and date from at least the 4th century BCE. There's a picture of one at:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/2938/histcult.html
It's just a little bigger than life-size - some bead vendors were selling
real Phoenician beads at a show i went to a few years ago, but they cost
about 1 dollar/year of age and i didn't have that many thousands to spare
:-)

They also made glass eye-beads. And ripply patterned canebeads that look
alot like what are today sold as "African Trade Beads", most of which were
actually made in Italy in the 19th and 20th centuries, called Venetian
glass, of which the Phoenician beads were forerunners.

One striking transparent turquoise glass bowl from the 7th century BCE is
7.5 cm high and 10.4 cm in diameter.

While the Romans eventually controlled the regions that produced glass by
Late Antiquity, no form of glass that i know of was *invented* by them.
They were just users and importers/exporters. Certainly their contact with
the actual producers and their control over their countries could have
allowed *actual* Romans to learn how to produce glass. Much in museums that
is labeled "Roman glass" was imported from the Levant and produced by
Phoenicians. It is "Roman" because Rome controlled the region of origin,
and was made for import to Rome and other Roman controlled regions, but the
Romans were not the originators of it.

They did not make, as far was we know, windowpanes, nor did they make large
glass pieces. The majolica unguent jars and blown glass "lacrimae" were
very expensive luxury items.

Anahita Gawri bint-Karim al-hakim al-Fassi

Ride your camel to Bayt Anahita, a Maghribi domicile
http://witch.drak.net/lilinah


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