gmshedd

Thanks for the MFA info. I'll check to see what they have.

jlpservicesinc, thank you adding to the conversation. I added some comments that may, or may not, be of interest, beneath your comments above. Do you remember the name of museum where the Egyptian items were displayed?

It may have been Akhenaten, originally called Amenhotep IV. He became monotheistic and made everyone become so as well. After he died, they reverted to polytheism and eventually erased his name, and that of his son, Tutankhamun (King Tut) from the list of pharaohs. If it was from the era of Akhenaten, then that would be from the last third of 14th century BC, which was about 1300 years before the advent of glass blowing. The thermal conductivity of copper is more than 6 times higher than that of iron--about 400 W/m-K for copper vs. about 60 W/m-K for iron. Perhaps enough to make a difference.

I think it's possible that someone would have tried copper pipe for glassblowing, but as someone pointed out earlier, a copper pipe would have been a bit uncomfortable to use because of its high thermal conductivity. Do you remember anything about when it was used?

When I follow the link to the Roman_Ghirshman wikipedia page, I find no mention of glass, although all but one of the cited articles on that page are in French language journals, so I might be missing something. I also find, at the top of that page, just beneath his name, Page issues-This article needs additional citations for verification (December 2009). When I follow the link to hyperlinked Chogha Zanbil page, the only mention of glass is as "ornaments of faïence and glass." All of Ghirshman's articles referenced on this page are in French, except a 1961 Scientific American article. When I reread the Glassblowing wikipedia page, the only text regarding Ghirshman's finds of glass is that which you originally quoted above, which is supported by two references (18 and 19). 19 is written in Persian, and 18 is in Encyclopaedia Iranica. So there may be two references, one written in Persian, and the other probably written in French, that back up the assertion in the quoted sentence that the glass bottles that Ghirshman found when he excavated a 2nd millennium BC site in Iran in the 1930's constitute conclusive evidence that glassblowing was invented in the 2nd millenium BC. The same Wikipedia article that makes this assertion, then almost immediately contradicts what it just said by also asserting that "The invention of glassblowing coincided with the establishment of the Roman Empire in the 1st century BC." Obviously, both assertions cannot be true. Personally, I hesitate to place much faith in a fact that comes from a self-contradicting Wikipedia article that can only be verified if I can find, and then read, two obscure references that are written in Persian, and, most likely, French, especially when I find no mention of this 2nd millenium BC version of the invention of glassblowing in any other book or article I've read on the history of glass and glassblowing. As I said in a previous comment, I tend to doubt accepted dogma, so maybe Elam was the birthplace of glassblowing, but it will take more than one sentence in a sloppily-written Wikipedia article to convince me.

I don't find the quote above at the link provided, but I do find it in the Glassblowing page on Wikipedia, under History: Origins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glassblowing). Six sentences after the sentence you quote, the section labeled "In the Roman Empire" begins with this sentence: "The invention of glassblowing coincided with the establishment of the Roman Empire in the 1st century BC." It is this later period that is generally accepted in the glass history books as the time when glassblowing was invented. I can certainly understand the confusion based on how the Wikipedia page is written.

If you mean by reference, who has said there were iron blowpipes around 1st century AD? Karol Wight in Molten Color: Glassmaking in Antiquity (2011) p. 53, and many other authors, as well. Within glass books it's so commonly repeated, almost word for word, that I began to wonder if everyone was just copying the first person to assert it as fact, without really thinking about it--that's what brought me here. As for the dimensions of the original iron blowpipes, I can't be certain, but current blowpipes are about 3/4" x ~5 feet. The length is a matter of being long enough to be away from the heat. I thought a cruder forged iron pipe would probably have a larger diameter.

More incredible More incredible to me than Tut's meteoric blade (other-worldly though it may be) were the hundreds of feet of copper pipe that were (supposedly) found in the tomb of King Sahure, the second King of Egypt's 5th Dynasty, who ruled from 2517 to 2505 B.C. Perhaps we crossed paths at Sullivan Park.

Is there a book or a reference you can point to that has an example of blown glass from ~1500 BCE? The curators at the glass museum where I work would be very interested. The oldest pieces in our museum date to the 15th century BC, but the earliest blown-glass pieces we have are from the first century BC or AD (I'd have to look it up).

Although there are quite a few glass artifacts from as long ago as the 15th century BCE, these were made by core-forming, fusing, casting, and mold-pressing. There are also some pieces of unworked-glass that predate 2000 BCE, but no worked objects that I'm aware of. The earliest blown glass artifacts (inflated by blowing through a tube) are widely accepted by glass history scholars to be from the 1st century BCE. They were actually formed by inflating the melted end of a glass tube, by blowing into the other end. I agree with you that there were probably clay blowpipes in the earliest days of glassblowing, but the advantages of iron pipes are considerable, so when they became available, they would have been preferred. A group of glass-blowers tested the clay pipe hypothesis back in the 1990's and concluded that glassblowing with clay pipes was possible, but that they weren't very strong transverse to the long dimension of the pipe.

Very true. Thank whoever for the iron blowpipe! It may be interesting to those who work iron, that some of the tools a glassblower uses to shape glass are flammable--made of fruitwood (because it's close-grained) and even folded-up newspaper, although in both cases there is a lot of water involved too!

Good point, although I suppose that if there wasn't any such thing as iron, some bright boy might have tried to use some ceramic insulators around the copper pipe, or a ceramic section in the middle, between two sections of copper pipe. However, copper melts below 2000F, so it would be very touchy to use in a glass furnace. Melted glass is commonly kept at 2100F these days to maintain a consistency like honey, although 1st century AD furnaces could have been very different. Modern blowpipes are low conductivity stainless, so they conduct even less heat than iron. Still, glassblowers use pipe coolers (water troughs) if they work on a piece long enough.

You are so right! I just finished watching the Colonial Williamsburg video on YouTube when you posted this. Thank you. Yeah, I am a docent there and was doubting what people who specialize in glass had to say about iron blowpipes--that's why I came here, and I got my answer in less than an hour!. The earliest iron blowpipes (found at glassmaking sites in Spain) are from around the 4th century AD, so I was thinking it was a stretch to say that iron blowpipes had been universally adopted for glassblowing within a century of its invention in the mid first century BC. Furthermore, it seemed unlikely that people who already had pipes made out of lead, and, to a lesser extent, copper would bother making pipes out of iron. But now that I've seen the gunsmithing video I am no longer skeptical about whether a first century blacksmith could make a blowpipe. Thanks to everyone for your replies. I now believe that 1st century AD blowpipes could have been made of iron. BTW, the estimated iron production at the height of the Roman Empire was almost 83,000 metric tonnes, and they were apparently making iron in Britain in the first century AD (https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/publication/the-roman-iron-industry-in-britain/9780752478593/)

The Iron Age began about 3000 years ago in the Middle East, so by the time of Christ, iron was well known.