Iraqi Glass? UPDATED.

On the second floor of our riad is this very pretty massreiya. Behind the carved plaster in our massreiya is some very beautiful coloured glass. The local people call it "Iraqi glass". Does anyone know the history behind this name?




The makers of lanterns also describe the glass as "Iraqi". Maybe it is simply glass made in Iraq or the style of glass has than name, maybe?

My thanks to Kalila for her comments to this post and the link to glass history. According to the ancient-Roman historian Pliny (AD 23-79), Phoenician merchants transporting stone actually discovered glass (or rather became aware of its existence accidentally) in the region of Syria around 5000 BC. Pliny tells how the merchants, after landing, rested cooking pots on blocks of nitrate placed by their fire. With the intense heat of the fire, the blocks eventually melted and mixed with the sand of the beach to form an opaque liquid.

The earliest man-made glass objects, mainly non-transparent glass beads, are thought to date back to around 3500 BC, with finds in Egypt and Eastern Mesopotamia. In the third millennium, in central Mesopotamia, the basic raw materials of glass were being used principally to produce glazes on pots and vases. The discovery may have been coincidental, with calciferous sand finding its way into an overheated kiln and combining with soda to form a coloured glaze on the ceramics. It was then, above all, Phoenician merchants and sailors who spread this new art along the coasts of the Mediterranean.

The oldest fragments of glass vases (evidence of the origins of the hollow glass industry), however, date back to the 16th century BC and were found in Mesopotamia.



Tags: Morocco, Fès, travel, Fez,