The history of glass

The Roman historian Pliny tells us that glass was invented by the Phoenicians, who observed that by lighting a fire on the sand, the heat melted the sand to form a transparent liquid. The first vitreous mixtures appeared around the 3rd millennium BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt, lands rich in siliceous sand, the main component of glass.

The earliest glass working techniques were only suited to the production of small objects, mainly used for ritual or decorative purposes. The oldest finds we possess are Egyptian (and date from the 16th to 14th century B C.) and were made by winding vitreous threads around a core that was then destroyed, leaving the object intact.

Glass was therefore initially used as dough to model, until the first century BC. Later the blowing technique developed in Syria, Egypt and Rome, whereby air was blown into the interior of the vitreous paste. However, ancient glass was not crystalline as it is today, rather it was opaque and irregular. It was not until the 1400s that perfectly transparent glass was obtained. Following the demise of the Roman Empire (476 AD), in the western world, glass was mainly worked in England, France and Northern Europe (especially the Rhineland).

Between the 8th and 14th century, there was also a great evolution in Muslim glass fashioned using the methods practised in the Middle East. Byzantium formed an important bridge with the West for this production and also developed one of its own (of Alexandrine and Syrian taste), which also influenced the Veneto coast that it ruled until the 9th century.