EGYPT: New excavations on the eastern Nile Delta show that ancient Egyptians had large-scale glass-making operations several hundred years earlier than researchers had believed,according to British and German researchers.
The glass factory at Piramesses, which probably began production around 1250 BC - about 100 years after the reign of King Tutankhamun - used a two-step process in which pulverised quartz was heated with plant ash in ceramic jars to form a crude solid. Crushed again, the raw glass was heated to higher temperatures and colourised to form valuable ingots that were shipped to fabricators in Egypt and throughout the Mediterranean region, the team reports in the journal Science.
"For the first time, we can actually demonstrate that people made glass there and how they did it," said archeologist Thilo Rehren of University College, London, one of the paper's authors. Glassmaking is thought to have originated in Meso-potamia - now Iraq and Syria - about 1550 BC.
Researchers knew that craftsmen at several sites in Egypt were working with glass ingots, but most assumed the ingots were brought in from Mesopotamia or elsewhere.
A cargo vessel discovered off the Turkish coast of Ulu Burun in the 1980s carried 175 such ingots, and researchers had assumed they were destined for Egypt.
This new discovery, however, suggests that the ingots were manufactured in Egypt and bound for the Middle East, said Robert Brill of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York.
Ceramic vessels used to manufacture ingots at Piramesses were virtually identical to those found on the Ulu Burun wreck, he said.
Many historians assumed that sand was used for the glass, but the excavation reveals the Egyptians used pulverised quartz pebbles. - (LA Times-Washington Post)