Phoenician glass spreads

The story

A material that seems like magic

Glass is made of very ordinary things, such as sand and the ash of certain plants, but when it is heated to very high temperatures it turns into a transparent, shining material that, when molten, can be shaped. To the people of antiquity it must have seemed like magic. Archaeologists do not know exactly where it was first made. The best evidence points to the coast of northern Syria, Mesopotamia or Egypt. The oldest glass objects we know date from the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, and they are beads.

Ancient glass was made with sand and a substance that helps it melt, soda, obtained from the ash of plants that grow on the coasts. In Egypt and Syria it was done this way; later, in northern Europe, it was replaced by potash, obtained from wood ash. In the Mediterranean soda remained the main ingredient.

How a little vase was made

How do you make a glass container without yet knowing how to blow glass? The ancient masters used the “core” technique. First they shaped a small form out of clay and sand, as big as the inside of the future vase, and fixed it to the end of a metal rod. Then they wound threads of molten glass around the core, in layers. The piece was heated again to make the threads stick, and then, once the vase had cooled, the core was scraped away, leaving the hollow inside. The glassmaker could add threads of other colours and drag them with a point to make zig-zag or festoon decorations, and then attach handles and a foot.

This technique arose, according to the sources, in Mesopotamia in the 16th century BC and was taken up in Egypt. Between the end of the 6th and the 5th century BC it was very widespread in the eastern Mediterranean, and the little vases can be seen today in many museums: small bottles shaped like an amphora or an alabastron, meant for perfumes, oils and ointments. The Metropolitan Museum in New York, for example, keeps an alabastron-shaped flask from the end of the 6th to the 5th century BC with yellow and turquoise zig-zag threads.

Were they really Phoenician?

Here we must be careful. For a long time books said that the coloured flasks were Phoenician production. In reality museums, when they describe them, give a general origin in the eastern Mediterranean, and for some the Greek island of Rhodes has been proposed. It is not proven that a single people made them. It is likely that Phoenician craftsmen, in particular those of cities such as Sidon and Tyre, were among the producers, but the same type of vase was made in various parts of the region.

A story told by Pliny

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder tells a fascinating story. Some Phoenician merchants, landing on the beach near the river Belus with a cargo of natron (a salt used as soda), had no stones to support their pots over the fire and used blocks of natron. The heat made the natron melt with the sand of the beach, and a transparent liquid flowed out: glass. But it is almost certainly a legend. Scholars think it reflects the glass production of the Roman world, which greatly prized the white sand of that area, more than the real origin. Glass had existed for many centuries before the Phoenicians.

Blown glass

The great revolution came later. In the 1st century BC, on the coast of Syria and Palestine, glassblowing was invented: the glassmaker takes a lump of molten glass on a blowpipe and blows into it, like a soap bubble, giving it the shape he wants. The oldest traces of this technique have been found in Jerusalem, and the glassmakers' workshops of the region quickly spread it through the eastern Mediterranean. From then on glass became so cheap and common that it has been said “glass was the plastic of the Romans”. Around AD 100 the use of manganese dioxide made it possible to obtain clear glass, suitable for windows.