English translation of the Chinese publication Si chou zhi lu shang de gu dai bo li yan jiu, proceedings of the 2004 Urumqi Symposium on Ancient Glass in Northern China and the 2005 Shanghai International Workshop of Archaeology of Glass, with the addition of some new information and six previously unpublished papers presented at the International Congress on Glass held in Kyoto, Japan in 2004.
A detailed interdisciplinary exploration of ancient glass, examining why and how glass was invented and various contexts of its subsequent development and use.
This volume presents the history of glass shown through 400 works ranging from ancient times to the new technological applications. Rarities and masterpieces of glass art from important Italian and foreign, public and private collections of antique, modern and contemporary glass are shown.
No Sasanian glass collection of comparable size and variety has yet been published, and thus the objects at Corning provide a starting point for anyone who wishes to study the glass made in the Sasanian Empire.
This Encyclopedia begins with an introduction summarizing itsscope and content. Glassmaking; Structure of Glass, GlassPhysics,Transport Properties, Chemistry of Glass, Glass and Light,Inorganic Glass Families, Organic Glasses, Glass and theEnvironment, Historical and Economical Aspect of Glassmaking,History of Glass, Glass and Art, and outlinepossible newdevelopments and uses as presented by the best known people in thefield (C.A. Angell, for example). Sections and chapters arearranged in a logical order to ensure overall consistency and avoiduseless repetitions. All sections are introduced by a briefintroduction and attractive illustration. Newly investigatedtopics will be addresses, with the goal of ensuring that thisEncyclopedia remains a reference work for years to come.
This volume explores glass composition and production from the mid-second to mid-first millennia BC, the first thousand years of glass-making. Multi-element analyses of 132 glasses from Pella in Jordan, and Nuzi and Nimrud in Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia) produce new and important data that provide insights into the earliest glass production.
This edited volume offers archaeologists and archaeometrists the latest technical information, the fundamentals of provenance studies, instrumentation used in these investigations, and strategies for the dating and interpretation of archaeological materials in glass studies. The contributors discuss recent advances in obsidian hydration dating, secondary ion mass spectrometry, and infrared photoacoustic spectroscopy, focusing on the application of these technologies to a variety of glass forms and incorporating studies that look at the social and economic strategies of past cultures. With examples from Greece, the Middle East, Italy, Peru, Bolivia, Russia, Africa, and the Pacific region, provenance studies look at regional patterns of glass acquisition, production, and exchange, providing examples that use one or more instrumental methods to characterize materials from ancient societies. Extensive figures and tables included.
This book examines the history of glass in Iron Age Mesopotamia and neighbouring regions (1000–539 BCE). This is the first monograph to cover this region and period comprehensively and in detail and thus fills a significant gap in glass research.
Picture, if you can, a world without glass. There would be no microscopes or telescopes, no sciences of microbiology or astronomy. People with poor vision would grope in the shadows, and planes, cars, and even electricity probably wouldn't exist. Artists would draw without the benefit of three-dimensional perspective, and ships would still be steered by what stars navigators could see through the naked eye. In Glass: A World History, Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin tell the fascinating story of how glass has revolutionized the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Starting ten thousand years ago with its invention in the Near East, Macfarlane and Martin trace the history of glass and its uses from the ancient civilizations of India, China, and Rome through western Europe during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution, and finally up to the present day. The authors argue that glass played a key role not just in transforming humanity's relationship with the natural world, but also in the divergent courses of Eastern and Western civilizations. While all the societies that used glass first focused on its beauty in jewelry and other ornaments, and some later made it into bottles and other containers, only western Europeans further developed the use of glass for precise optics, mirrors, and windows. These technological innovations in glass, in turn, provided the foundations for European domination of the world in the several centuries following the Scientific Revolution. Clear, compelling, and quite provocative, Glass is an amazing biography of an equally amazing subject, a subject that has been central to every aspect of human history, from art and science to technology and medicine.
