An Egyptian Glass Vessel in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Abstract

LOOKING THROUGH the great number of late sandcore vessels in the Greek and Roman Department of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I came across a sand-core vessel purely Egyptian in character (Figure i). The pear-shaped vessel is made of translucent, copper blue glass and decorated with white and yellow thread designs. Its height is 8.II cm., the maximum diameter of the rim 4.0 cm., and the maximum diameter of the body 5.65 cm. A piece including parts of rim, neck, and shoulder was chipped off and has been put back in place. The vessel was bequeathed to the Museum by E. C. Moore in I891.' ^ Egyptian sand-core vessels are known with certainty ^ to have been produced from the early fifteenth century until the tenth century B.C.2 Almost four hundred of these glowingly colored and delicately adorned vessels have been preserved as well as innumerable fragments. As far as we know, it was not before the sixth century B.C. that the sand-core technique was revived and a slightly different thread ornamentation became popular in the Mediterranean region.3 The so-called late