The Ulu Burun Glass Ingots, Cylindrical Vessels and Egyptian Glass

Abstract

This paper examines a possible Egyptian origin for the glass ingots discovered in the Ulu Burun shipwreck off the Turkish coast and seeks to relate them to cylindrical vessels believed to be ingot moulds from Tell el-Amarna. A preliminary distinction between types of Ulu Burun ingot is also suggested and a comparison made between the ingot moulds from Amarna and those from Qantir.

Evidence for the trade of Mesopotamian and Egyptian glass to Mycenaean Greece

“…Out of the finds recovered from the ship, approximately 175 glass ingots colored blue, turquoise, purple, and amber were identified (Pulak, 2001). In particular, the blue ingots colored with cobalt were found to match the exact discoid shape of moulds excavated from the glass-making factories at Amarna, Egypt (Bass, 1987;Nicholson et al, 1997). This evidence suggests a possible foreign exchange of glass between the Mycenaeans and Egyptians.…”

The use of technical ceramics in early Egyptian glass-making

“…Current knowledge is that LBA primary glass-making at the Egyptian sites of Qantir and Amarna took place in ceramic vessels including re-used domestic pottery in Qantir (Rehren and Pusch, 2005;Pusch and Rehren, 2007a,b) and purpose-built crucibles in Qantir and Amarna (Rehren, 1997;Nicholson et al, 1997;Rehren and Pusch, 1997), fusing the raw materials at temperatures of around 900e1100 C. This produced first so-called semi-finished, that is incompletely molten and uncoloured glass (Smirniou and Rehren, 2011), and in a second step intensely coloured cylindrical glass ingots which were then passed on to secondary workshops (e.g. Pulak, 2008) for the production of finished objects, while the used vessels and crucibles were discarded.…”

The provenance of some glass ingots from the Uluburun shipwreck

“…The debate was reinvigorated in the mid 1990s upon the discovery at Amarna of what was believed to be one of the first glass making factories in Egypt (Nicholson, 1995), and the discovery of glass production, of a slightly later date, at Qantir (Rehren and Pusch, 1997;Nicholson et al, 1997;Rehren and Pusch, 2005;Jackson, 2005). Petrie (1894: 25) already believed that Amarna was a production centre but because the locations of the workshops he described there were not properly noted, his findings have been questioned.…”