The Archaeology of Midas and the Phrygians: Recent Work At Gordion

8 Glass Vessels from Gordion: Trade and Influence Along the Royal Road

The glass vessels recovered from fifty years of archaeological investigation at Gordion make up one of the most extensive bodies of early luxury glassware from datable contexts. This remarkable body of material, long under-appreciated outside the world of ancient glass studies, illuminates significant aspects of the commercial, technological, and cultural interchange between East and West Asia in the 1st millennium BC. Several of these finds hint forcefully at a tradition of glass production in Asia Minor, possibly Phrygia itself, from as early as the 8th century BC. The Gordion corpus currently comprises over 500 diagnostic fragments of glass ranging in date from as early as the mid-8th century BC to early Roman imperial times. All the major glass forming technologies known from the ancient world are represented: molding, core-forming, and blowing. Molding and core forming were the earliest glass vessel-forming technologies and the most important until the advent of glass blowing in the mid-1st century BC. These early, laborintensive techniques produced luxury trade wares, primarily unguent bottles and table wares, in limited quantities, for elite patrons. Ancient Gordion in this period lay in the contact zone between the civilizations of the Near East and the Mediterranean. This chapter focuses on the ways in which finds at Gordion from two specific early glass-forming industries— the manufacture of vessels on a core and the production of colorless molded vessels—shed light both on key periods in the evolution of glass production in the ancient world and on the economic and cultural relationship of Gordion to other Near Eastern states and to the Greek world in the 1st millennium BC. A full study of the glass vessel finds from Gordion is currently in preparation. EARLY CORE-FORMED VESSELS Gordion has yielded over 170 fragments from glass vessels made by the core process. Core-forming, the earliest glass technology devised exclusively for the production of glass vessels, first appeared around 1500 BC in northern Mesopotamia. In this method, a core composed of a combination of clay, mud, sand, and an organic binder was affixed to the end of a metal rod and shaped into the form of the inside of the body of the vessel. Molten glass was either wound or dipped onto the core and was smoothed evenly over it by repeated reheating and rolling on a stone slab in a process called marvering. Decoration was 8 GLASS VESSELS FROM GORDION Trade and Influence Along the Royal Road JANET DUNCAN JONES THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MIDAS AND THE PHRYGIANS 102 added by trailing threads of contrasting colors around the body, marvering them, and combing them into a pattern, most commonly zigzag, festoon, or feather patterns. Rims, handles, and bases were applied separately after reheating. The rod was removed and the vessel cooled slowly (annealed) to prevent stress cracking. Finally, the core was scraped out, leaving a rough interior surface. This technique produced small, sturdy, thick-walled bottles. Ancient coreformed vessels are often well preserved or broken into large pieces that preserve a sizable portion of the vessel profile. The shape of a vessel depended upon the period in which the vessel was produced. The early (2nd millennium BC) coreforming workshops of Mesopotamia produced small pear-shaped (piriform) and globular bottles (Fig. 8-1). Mesopotamian workshops of the 1st millennium BC produced pointed and cylindrical bottles as well. In the Mediterranean, the earliest two phases of production fashioned core-formed vessels in smaller versions of Greek ceramic shapes. Figure 8-1 Wide-bodied core-formed alabastron. Collection of the Corning Museum of Glass, acc. no. 59.1.65. Height 16.8 cm. Photo permission of museum. 103 Two types of core-formed vessels from Gordion point toward key moments in the diffusion of glass-making technology from Mesopotamia into the Mediterranean world. The earliest core-formed vessel found at Gordion is a wide-bodied alabastron with yellow festoon thread decoration on a dark blue body (Pl. 4). The vessel, neither entirely Mesopotamian nor entirely Mediterranean in type, seems to represent a transitional type. It has the wide body profile of a Mesopotamian alabastron, but the handles and rim are closer to styles that later emerged in Mediterranean glass production. The vessel appears to capture the period in the 7th century BC when the core-forming technique first appeared in the west and just before the halt of Mesopotamian production. Murray McClellan...