How Egypt turned dust into treasures of glass

WASHINGTON - Archaeologists have uncovered for the first time the remains of a Bronze Age glass factory, where skilled artisans made glass from its raw materials. Surprisingly, this factory, which was bustling around 1250 B.C., is in Egypt rather than Mesopotamia, which is generally thought to be where glass was first made.

Glass was extremely valuable during the Bronze Age, so this discovery implies that Egypt may have enjoyed more clout than was previously thought as a producer of this sought-after substance.

The oldest-known glass artifacts of consistently high quality date back to approximately 1500 B.C. These may have been made in Mesopotamia.

“But this is the first place that we have been able to put our fingers on and say, ‘Here it was and this is how they did it,’” said Thilo Rehren of University College London in London. “Until now we have only seen the final products of the glassmaking process, and nothing showing the level of skill and organization in which it was done.”

Rehren and Edgar Pusch from the Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim, Germany describe their findings in Friday's issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

A precious commodity
The most common glass objects made during this time period were glass beads and vessels with narrow necks, which may have held perfume or other valuable liquids. They were often made of blue glass, colored to emulate precious stones like turquoise and lapis lazuli, inlaid with white and yellow lines.

Amr Nabil / AP King Tutankhamun's gold mask, on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, contains glass inlays colored to look like lapis lazuli.

“These were not everyday items. This was absolutely a pharaoh-level of home decoration,” Rehren said.

Most of these objects have been found in Egypt and the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that was once Mesopotamia. They were made in two separate stages.

In the primary production stage, glass was made from plant ash and crushed quartz dust into round disks or “ingots.” In the secondary stage, the ingots were melted down and re-formed into specific objects. Many clues — such as a Late Bronze Age shipwreck off the coast of Turkey that contained a cache of cobalt-blue glass ingots — indicate that the ingots could have been made in one location and then exported to distant locations for the second stage.

“In the last 20 years, we archaeologists have realized this is a serious issue. We can tell the style of the glass objects, but we don’t necessarily know where the glass came from,” Rehren said.

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