Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/669

Rh 0'’ "Syria . ersia. ndia. H1sToRv.] languishing condition. In the 11th century, however, we ﬁnd in the life of St Odilo, abbot of F ulda (ob. 10l9), men- tion of a “vas pretiosissimum vitreum Alexandrini generis,” and in the same century N asir Ibn Khusru (S((_f((?'ll(t77l(6]L, published by Royal Asiatic Society), who visited Jerusalem in l060, says that pictures of our Lord a11d others in one of the churches of that city were covered with plates of glass. N 0 examples of ornamental vessels dating from this period have, however, come down to us. But we have many very remarkable examples of the skill of Egyptian and Syrian glass-workers in the 13th and 14th centuries,—large bottles, basins, and lamps, very striking objects from the free use of enamel a11d gilding in their decoration. This is, as in most objects of Eastern art, chiefly composed of inscriptions written in large characters ornamentally treated ; but ﬁgures of birds, lions, sphinxes, &c., may be found, especially on vessels made i11 Egypt. Although there may have been some indigenous practice of the art of glass-making in the East,—for in the cup of Chosrocs I. of Persia (531-579) preserved in the Bibliothcque Nationale at Paris are medallions of coloured and moulded glass,——the arts of gilding and enamelling, as we see them exhibited in the Syrian and Egyptian works of the 13th a11d 14th centuries, were probably derived fro111 the Byzantines. Damascus was also the seat of a like manufacture. In inventories of the 14th century, both in England and in France, mention may frequently be found of glass vessels described as of the manufacture of Damascus. That city was taken by Timur in 1402, and we are told by Clavijo, who visited his court in 1403-1406, that he carried off to Samarcand “men who made bows, glass, and earthenware, so that of these articles Samarcand produces the best in the world.” Glass no doubt continued to be made, as it still is, in Syria and Persia, but no very remarkable products of the manufacture are known in Europe, with the exception of some vessels brought from Persia, blue richly decorated with gold. These probably date from the 17th century, for Chardin tells us that the windows of the tomb of Shah Abbas II. (ob. 1666) at Kom, were “de cristal peint d’or et d’azur.” At the present day bottles and drinking vessels are made in Persia which in texture and quality differ little from ordinary Venetian glass of the 16th or 17th centuries, while in form they exactly resemble those which may be seen in the engravings in Chardin’s Trcwds. Pliny states (Nat. I[[.st., xxxvi. 26, 66) that no glass was to be compared to the Indian, and gives as a reason that it was made from broken crystal; and in another passage (xii. 19, 42) he says that the Troglodytes brought to Ocelis (Ghella near Bab-el-Mandeb) objects of glass. We have, however, very little knowledge of Indian glass of any considerable antiquity. A few small vessels have been found in the “t0pes,” as in that at .Ianikyala in the Punjab, which probably dates from about the Christian era; but they exhibit no remarkable character, and fragments found at Brahminabarl are hardly distinguishable from Roman glass of the imperial period. The chronicle of the Singhalese kings, the '.Iahawanso, however, asserts that mirrors of glittering glass were carried in procession in 306 B.C., and beads like gems, and windows with ornaments like jewels, are also mentioned at about the same date. If there really was an important manufacture of glass in Ceylon at this early time, that island perhaps furnished the Indian glass of Pliny; or it is possible that it really came from China. Glass is made in several parts of India——as Behar and .Iysore——by very simple and primitive methods, and the results are correspondingly defective. Black, green, red, blue, and yellow glass is made. The greater part is worked into bangles, but some small bottles are blown (Bipglgajnan, Journey through JI3/sore, vol. i. p. I47 ; vol. iii. P. u . GLASS 651 The history of the manufacture of glass in China is China. obscure, but the common opinion that it was learnt from the Europeans in the 17th century seems to be erroneous. A writer in the lllémoires coucernant les C’/Linois (vol. ii. p. 46) states on the authority of the annals of the Han dynasty that the emperor Ou—ti (140 B.C.) had a manufactory of the kind of glass called “lieou-li,” that in the beginning of the 3d century of our era the emperor ’l‘ai-tsou received from the “fest a considerable present of glasses of all colours, and that soon after a glass-maker came into the country who taught the art to the natives. The Vei dynasty, to which Tai-tsou belonged, reigned in northern China, and at this day a considerable manufacture of glass is carried on at Po-shan-hien in Shantung, which it would seem has existed for a long period. The Rev. A. Williamson (Jom'ne_ys in North C’/Lina, i. 131) says that the glass is extremely pure, and is made from the rocks in the neighbourhood. The rocks are probably of quartz, z'.e., rock crystal, a correspondence with Pliny’s statement respecting Indian glass which seems deserving of attention. Whether the making of glass in China was an original dis- covery of that ingenious people, or was derived via Ceylon from Egypt, cannot perhaps be now ascertained; the manu- facture has, however, never greatly extended itself in China. The case has been the converse of that of the Romans; the latter had no ﬁne pottery, and therefore employed glass as the material for vessels of an ornamental kind, for table services and the like. The Chinese, on the contrary, having from an early period had excellent porcelain, l1ave been careless about the manufacture of glass. A Chinese writer, however, mentions the manufacture of a huge vase in 627 A.D., and in 1154 Edrisi (ﬁrst climate, tenth section) mentions Chinese glass. A glass vase about a foot high is preserved at Nara in Japan, and is alleged to have been placed there in the 8th century. It seems probable that this is of Chinese manufacture. A writer in the xllémoires concermmt les C/cinois (vol. ii. pp. 463 and 477), writing about 1770, says that there was then a glass-house at Peking, where every year a good number of vases were made, some requiring great labour because nothing was blown (rien n’est souffle), meaning no doubt that the ornamentation was produced not by blowing and moulding, but by cutting. This factory was, however, merely an appendage to the imperial mag- niﬁcence. The earliest articles of Chinese glass the date of which has been ascertained, which have been noticed, are some bearing the name of the emperor Kienlung (1736- 1796), one of which is in the South Kensington Museum. In the manufacture of ornamental glass the leading idea in China seems to be the imitation of natural stones. The coloured glass is usually not of one bright colour through- out, but semi-transparent and marbled ; the colours in many instances are singularly ﬁne and harmonious. As in 1770, cutting is the chief method by which ornament is produced, the vessels being blown very solid. The chief source from whence a knowledge of the art of Diffusion glass-making spread through Europe was probably Rome ; 0‘ ‘P0 in the Roman imperial period glass was undoubtedly made, not only in Italy, but also in France, in Spain, and in all probability at or near Cologne, and perhaps in other places near the Rhine. Whether refugees from Padua, Aquileia, or other Italian cities carried the art to the lagoons of Venice in the 5th century, or whether it was learnt from the Greeks of Constantinople at a much later date, has been a disputed question. It would appear not improbable that the former was the case, for it must be remembered that articles formed of glass were in the later days of Roman civilization in constant daily use, and that the making of glass was carried on, not as now in large establishments, but by artisans working on a small scale. It seems certain that some knowledge of the art was preserved in France and in art in Europe.