The colour of glass in antiquity

[Melvadius]

I don't know the precise mechanics but you really need some broken glass to form the basis of any new glass products.

 

If this is true (and I'm not saying it's not) how was the first glass made? How is the growing demand for glass met?

 

I should have made clearer in my last posting that although I didn't have the technical details at hand, in Roman Britain & indeed the Western half of the empire, most (if not all) glass was primarily made using 'cullet' (broken glass) with some additional material to bulk it out. I believe this was because the main manufacturing bases for 'new' Roman period glass were in the eastern half of the Empire so the west had to mainly rely on recycling existing glass.

 

As to your other questions Cadrail has kindly already posted an appropriate link to Wikipedia which provides a good overview of technical information on Roman glass production including the additives used to produce different colours of glass.

 

Melvadius

[Lost_Warrior]

I should have made clearer in my last posting that although I didn't have the technical details at hand, in Roman Britain & indeed the Western half of the empire, most (if not all) glass was primarily made using 'cullet' (broken glass) with some additional material to bulk it out. I believe this was because the main manufacturing bases for 'new' Roman period glass were in the eastern half of the Empire so the west had to mainly rely on recycling existing glass.

 

Ah, OK, I misunderstood. I thought you meant that they had to use broken glass, that it was somehow impossible to make new- not that those particular localities just didn't have the ability to make it themselves.

[Placida]

My photos of Roman glass

[Trethiwr]

Hi folks, really thrilled to stumble across this thread right now.

I am (as a side project to a book I am writing) curious about the whole 'ancient Britons using Woad' thing.

 

It is relevant here because, for some reason I have not managed to understand (or perhaps accept)

the Latin word Vitrum which means 'glass' has also been accepted by linguists to mean 'woad'.

 

Julius Caesar wrote about the ancient Britons using glass/woad (??) to colour themselves.

 

I read a post that said the woad translation was invented MUCH later (16th century) at a time when the British dye industry was losing out to imported indigo from the far east.

The writer thought to make it a matter of patriotism to side with woad as the favoured dye of our ancestors.

 

Clearly from all the fascinating posts and from all the glassmaking links which I have read in full, woad had nothing at all to do with the colouration of glass.

So does anybody know of any supporting evidence from antiquity of the word vitrum being used to mean woad??

 

I am also posting on a Latin language forum about the linguistic side of this.

[Melvadius]

My photos of Roman glass

 

Thanks for posting the link, that brings back memories of a hurried last minute trip a few years back into the Museum at Cologne about 5-10 minutes before it shut as we had been delayed getting to Cologne and were leaving early the next morning.

 

We literally just had time to get down and have a very quick look around the glass exhibits in the Roman sections before we were thrown out.

 

Melvadius