The origins of glass: melts, metals and motive

Glass objects are present in the archaeological record from the late third millennium BC onwards. This material, however, only becomes widespread in Syria-Mesopotamia and Egypt, in the fifteenth century BC. During this period, the amount of glass used literally exploded, as colors and types diversified. Colored glass was considered a high status material, resembling semi-precious stones. Glass production shares with metallurgy the use of high temperatures along with a suite of relatively uncommon elements as colorants. This led to speculation that the development of glass technology was closely related to the metal production ‘industries’. Several technological inventions (silica melting, high temperature processes, use of elements such as Sb, Cu, Pb, Co, Mn…) are united in the making of glass. However, this adoption and integration of new techniques and materials remains poorly understood. With new analytical techniques and reference databases available through recent work of the researchers in this project, the major questions on the origins of glass as a material can now be investigated. Non-destructive chemical analyses characterize the technology used in earliest glass manufacturing. In this way, the origin of mineral resources used for the glass craft can be compared to the development of metallurgy. With the information of where inventions occurred, an archaeological-historical framework can be reconstructed for the time-area around 1500 BC.