Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 November 1879 — How Old is Glass. [ARTICLE]

How Old is Glass.

Sunday Review. The oldest specimen of pure glass hearing anything like a date is a little molded lion’s head, bearing the name oi an Egyptian king of the eleventh dynasty, in the Slade collection at the British museum. That is to say, at a period which may be moderntely placed as more than two thousand years B. C. f glass was not only made but made with a skill which shows that the art was nothing new. The invention of glazing pottery with a film or varnish of glass is so old that among the fragments which bear inscriptions of the Egyptian monarchy are beads possibly of the , first dynasty. Of later glass there are numerous examples, such as a bead Jouud at Thebes, which has the name of Queen Hatasoo or Hashep, of the eighteenth dynasty. Of the same period are vases and goblets and many fragments. It cannot be doubted that the story prepared by Pliny, which resigns the credit of the invention to the Phoenicians, is so far true that these adventurous merchants brought specimens to other countries from Egypt. Dr. Schliemann found disks of glass in the excavations at Mycense, though Homer does not mention it as a substance known to him. That the modern art of the glassblower was known loug before is certain from representations among the pictures on the wails of a tomb at Beni H assan, of the twelfth Egyptian dynasty; but a much oiderjpicture,which probably presented the same manufacture, is among the half obliterated scenes in a chamber of the Jomb of Thy, at Sakkara, and dates from the time of the fifth dynasty, a time so remote that it is not possible, in spite of the assiduous researches of many Egyptologers, to giv« it a date in years.