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Carolyn Wilke, Knowable Magazine-November 28, 2021 at 3:00 PM UTC

Today, glass is something on ordinary kitchen shelves. But early in its history, glass was gleaming to the king.

Thousands of years ago, the pharaohs of ancient Egypt surrounded themselves with these things even after their deaths, leaving behind amazing specimens for archaeologists to discover. In the tomb of King Tutankhamun, there is a decorative writing palette and two blue headrests made of solid glass, which may have supported the heads of sleeping royals. His funeral mask is inlaid with blue glass inlays, which alternately decorate the king's face with gold.

In a world filled with light yellow, brown, and sand tones of more practical late Bronze Age materials, glass — full of blue, purple, turquoise, yellow, red, and white — will provide the most The eye-catching color says that Andrew Shortland is an archaeologist at Cranfield University in Shrevenham, England. In the material grade, glass will be slightly lower than silver and gold, and its value is as high as gems.

However, many questions about precious materials still exist. Where did glass first appear? How did it work, color, and spread in the ancient world? Although there are still many mysteries, in the past few decades, materials science and technology and reanalysis of unearthed cultural relics in the past have begun to fill in the details.

In turn, this analysis opens a window for understanding the lives of artisans, merchants, and kings in the Bronze Age and the international connections between them. Enlarged / The Amarna Letters, a clay tablet containing the cuneiform script of the ancient king unearthed in Tell el-Amarna in modern Egypt, including a reference to glass. Some figures from Yidya, the Canaanite ruler of Ashkelon (pictured), include a comment on Pharaoh’s glass order: “As for the king, my lord, I have ordered some glass, and I hereby Send the glass to the king, my lord, 30 ('pieces') glass. And, who is the dog that disobeys the king’s orders, my lord, the sun from the sky, the son of the sun beloved by the sun?” British Trustee Museum

Glass, whether ancient or modern, is a material usually made of silicon dioxide or silicon dioxide, which is characterized by its atomic disorder. In crystalline quartz, atoms are fixed at regular intervals in a repeating pattern. But in glass, the same component—a silicon atom bound to oxygen—is arranged upside down.

Archaeologists discovered that the history of glass beads can be traced back to the third millennium BC. The glazed surface based on the same material and technology is earlier. But in the late Bronze Age-between 1600 and 1200 BC-the use of glass seems to have really started in Egypt, Mycenae, Greece, and Mesopotamia, also known as the Near East (located in what is now Syria and Iraq).

Unlike today, the glass of that era was usually opaque and saturated in color, and the source of silica was crushed quartz pebbles, not sand. The clever ancients figured out how to reduce the melting temperature of crushed quartz to the temperature reached by Bronze Age furnaces: They used the ashes of desert plants, which contained high concentrations of sodium carbonate or bicarbonate and other salts. These plants also contain lime-calcium oxide-to make the glass more stable. Ancient glass manufacturers also added materials that gave the glass color, such as dark blue cobalt or yellow lead antimonate. These components fuse in the melt, providing the chemical clues researchers are looking for today.

Mark Walton, a materials scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said: “We can start analyzing the raw materials used in glass production and then suggest where in the world it came from.” He is a co-author of an article on materials. Scientific and archaeological artifacts and works of art in the 2021 annual review of materials research.

But these clues only let researchers know the end. When Shortland and his colleagues investigated the origin of glass about 20 years ago, glass from Egypt, the Near East, and Greece appeared to be chemically similar, which was difficult to distinguish based on the technology available at the time.

Blue glass is an exception, thanks to the work of Alexander Kaczmarczyk, a Polish-born chemist who discovered elements such as aluminum, manganese, nickel, and zinc in the 1980s, as well as cobalt, which gives the glass a deep blue hue. By examining the relative amounts of these substances, Kaczmarczyk's team even traced the cobalt ore used to color the blue to its mineral origin in a specific Egyptian oasis.

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