TECHNOLOGY OF EGYPTIAN CORE GLASS VESSELS
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TECHNOLOGY OF EGYPTIAN CORE GLASS VESSELS Blythe McCarthy1, Pamela Vandiver2, Alexander Nagel1, Laure Dussubieux3 1
Freer|Sackler, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Materials Science and Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 3 Anthropology, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL 2
ABSTRACT Our knowledge of glass production in ancient Egypt has been well augmented not only by the publication of recently excavated materials and glass workshops, but also by more recent materials analysis, and experiments of modern glass-makers attempting to reconstruct the production process of thin-walled core-formed glass vessels. The small but well preserved glass collection of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. was used to examine and study the technology and production of ancient Egyptian core-formed glass vessels. Previous study suggests that most of these vessels were produced in the 18th Dynasty in the 15th and 14th centuries BCE, while others date from the Hellenistic period and later. In an ongoing project we conducted computed radiography, x-ray fluorescence analysis and scanning electron microscopy on a selected group of vessels to understand further aspects of the ancient production process. This paper will provide an overview of our recent research.
INTRODUCTION Ancient Egyptian core-formed glass vessels have a layer of glass that was formed around a porous or porely sintered sandy clay core. Several methods have been proposed for forming these vessels including the application of threads of glass to a rotating heated core then marvering and heating, dipping the core into molten glass, and rolling a preheated core in powdered glass followed by marvering and heating steps. Recent experiments of modern glass-makers have attempted to reconstruct the production process of thin-walled core-formed glass vessels [1,2,3]. Our knowledge of the production process has also been furthered by excavations of glass-workshops of the 2nd millennium BCE at Amarna, Lisht, Malkata and Gurob [4,5,6] and by the large number of excavated samples of core-formed vessels discovered since the nineteenth century [7]. Due to information from these studies, the use of powdered glass applied to a core is currently favored as the most likely production method [8,1]. While our knowledge about the process, beginning with the mounting of a prefabricated core and continuing through to the final glass product, has much improved through these excavations and experiments, further results may be achieved by analysis of the core-formed glass itself. In cases where subsequent working and annealing steps have not obliterated the evidence, the different forming methods should result in different patterns of inclusions, porosity and compositional variation. If the vessel is formed by wrapping threads around a core, porosity should be elongated and/or aligned in the direction of winding. Compositional variation would be expected to occur from thread to thread and also aligned with the threads. In the case where
the core is dipped
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