Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/666

Rh Assyrian. Creek. 648 GLASS mttern an.l ver ' difi"crent dc-Trees of skill in maui rulation. ' 3 0 Their wide dispersi.)n may be l'CI.l'l'.'L1 with much proba- bility to their having been objects of barter between the Phtenician merchants and the barbarous inhabitants of the various countries with which they traded. It is probable, however, that many of the specimens which exist in our museums date fron1 times several centuries later than those in which Tyre and Sidon ﬂourished; for, as we may learn from the 1’u'c'plus and Strabo, glass in various forms was an article imported in the 1st and 2d centuries, as well into the emporia of the Red Sea as into the ports of Britain. Even at the present day beads are very extensively made at Venice for export to Africa, which bear a resemblance, doubtless not accidental, to those which we have reason to believe to be of very early date. Next in date to the earlier Egyptian examples mentioned above would appear to be the vase of transparent greenish glass found in the north-west palace of .'ineveh, and now in the British Museum. On one side of this a lion is en- graved, and also a line of cuneiform characters, in which is the name of Sargon, king of Assyria, 72° 13.0. Frag- ments of coloured glasses were also found there, but our materials are too scanty to enable us to forn1 any decided opinion as to the degree of perfection to which the art was carried in Assyria. Many of the specimens discovered by Layard at Nineveh have all the appearance of being Iloman, and were no doubt derived from the Roman colony, Niniva Claudiopolis, which occupied the same site. The Greeks, excellent in the ceramic art, do not appear to have cultivated the art of glass-making at a very early period; but it was probably 1nade'_in many places on the shores of the Mediterranean for some centuries before the Christian era. At Mycenoe many disks of opaque vitreous pastes were found by Schliemann, and very similar objects at Ialyssus in Rhodes ; but it is not certain that these may not have been brought from Egypt, where very similar objects have been found, or whether they ought not to be attributed to Greek or to Phoenician artisans. At Camirus in Rhodes, however, many vessels of glass of very elegant forms have been discovered, which were probably made in the island. In Etruscan tombs in Italy are also found glass vessels of peculiar character; these are small bowls resembling in form the half of an egg; they are usually of the variety of glass which is mentioned further on as “madrepore,” the ground green and transparent, the stars yellow, while patches of colour of gold and of ﬁligree glass are sometimes inter- spersed. They diﬂ'er from and appear to be earlier than the madrepore glass, fragments of which are so often found in Rome. They are also said to be found in Magna Graecia. Another variety found in tombs in the same district is of blue anl opaque glass, with much gold in leaf, all twisted together; the most frequent form in which this kind of glass has been found is that of a bottle several inches long and about one inch in diameter, without a neck, having probably had a mounting of gold. It remains to be deter- mined whether these should be attributed to a Greek or to a Phccnician origin. Glass, however, was occasionally used for purposes of architectural decoration during the best period of Grecian art, for Stuart and Ilevett, when describing the temple of Minerva Polias at Athens, give the following note :—“ A remarkable singularity observed in the capitals of this portico is in the plaited torus be- tween the volutes having been inlaid at the interstices with C)1Ul1['Cd stones or glass.” Mr II. March Phillips states that he well remembers having remarked these decora- tions, and that he believes them to be of blue glass.‘ 1 ._n_ie_Viamplc of the c-mgployment of glass in a like manner is indicated by the odd story which Pliny tells (.'a.t. IIz'st., xxxvii. 5, 1.7; that on the tomb of Hcrmias, a prince of the island of Cyprus, [n1sTor.v. In the ﬁrst centuries of our era the art of glass—making was developed at llome and other cities under lloman rule in a most remarkable manner, and it reached a point of excellence which in some respects has never been excelled or even perhaps equalled. It may appear a somewhat ex- aggerated assertion that glass was used for more purposes, and in one sense more extensively, by the Romans of the imperial period than by ourselves iii the present day ; but it is one which can be borne out by evidence. It is true that the use of glass for windows was only gradually ex- tending itself at the time when Roman civilization sank under the torrent of German and Hunnish barbarism, and that its employment for optical instruments was only known in a rudimentary stage; but for domestic purposes, for architecturaldecoration, and for personal ornaments glass was nn1uestionably much more used than at the present day. It must be remembered that the Romans possessed no ﬁne porcelain decorated with lively colours and a beautiful glaze; Samian ware was the most decorative kind of pottery which was then made. Coloured and ornamental glass held among them much the same place for table services, vessels for toilet use, and the like, as that held among us by porcelain. Pliny (Nat. IIist., xxxvi. 26, 67) tells us that for drinking vessels it was even preferred to gold and silver. Trebellius Pollio, however, relates of the emperor Gallienus that he drank from golden cups, despising glass, than which, he said, nothing was more vulgar. Glass was largely used in pave- ments, and in thin plates as a coating for walls. It was used i11 windows, though by no means exclusively, mica, alabaster, and shells having been also employed. Glass, in ﬂat pieces, such as might be employed for windows, has been found in the ruins of Roman houses, both in England and in Italy, and in the house of the faun at Pompeii a small pane in a bronze frame remains. Glass of this description seems to have been cast on a stone, and is usually very uneven and full of defects; although capable of transmitting light, it must have given at best an indifferent view of external objects. When the window openings were large, as was the case in basilicas and other public buildings and even in houses, the pieces of glass were, doubtless, ﬁxed in pierced slabs of marble or in frames of wood or bronze. The invention and ingenuity employed by the Roman artisans in producing variety in glass vessels are most re- markable ; almost every means of decoration appears to have been tried, and many methods of manipulating glass, which have been considered inventions, have in reality been anticipated by the glass-workers of the period under con- sideration. The fertility of invention which devised so many modes of ornamentation and so many shades of colour, and the skill with which the manual execution is carried out, alike deserve great admiration. This prodigious variety seems to show that glass-making was at that time carried on, not as now in large establishments, which pro- ducc great quantities of articles identical in form and pattern, but by many artiﬁcers, each working on a small scale. This circumstance enables us to understand why very pure and crystalline glass was, as Pliny tells us, more valued than any other kind. To produce glass very pure and free from striaa and bubbles, long-continued fusion is required ; this the system of working of the ancients did not allow, and their glass is in consequence remarkable for the great abundance of bubbles and defects which it contains. was a marble figure of a lion with eyes of emerald which shone so brightly into the sea that they frightened away the tunnies from the adjacent ﬁsheries, so that it became necessary to change the eyes. In the great marble lion discovered by Mr Newton near Cnidus, and now in the British Museum, in the place of the eyes are deep sockets which probably, like those of the Cypriote lion, were ﬁlled with coloured glass. Roman,