Archaeologists rebuild Egypt’s 3,000-year-old glass furnace

LONDON: A team of archaeologists has rebuilt an ancient glass furnace using local sand near an excavated site in Egypt following the same methods used by Egyptians some 3,000 years ago. It was previously thought that the ancient Egyptians might have imported their glass from the Near East during that time.

But with reconstructing the glass furnace, the excavation team led by Cardiff University professor Paul Nicholson proved that the ancient Egyptians were not importing glass, rather they were making it by themselves using local sand.

Nicholson is the leader of an Egypt Exploration Society team working on the world’s earliest glassmaking site located on the banks of the Nile at Amarna in the modern Egyptian province of Minya, some 312 km south of the Egyptian

capital Cairo.The site dates back to the reign of Akhanaten (1352 BC to 1336 BC), just a few years before the rule of
Tutankhamun.

The team also discovered that the glassmaking workshop was part of an industrial complex that involved a number of other high temperature manufacturing processes. The site might have been used to produce materials for constructing state buildings.

The site also contained a potter’s workshop and facilities for making blue pigment and faience — a material used in amulets and architectural inlays.

“It has been argued that the Egyptians imported their glass and worked it into the artefacts that have been discovered from this time,” said Nicholson, who has been working at Amarna since 1983.

“I believe there is now enough evidence to show that skilled craftsmen could make their own glass and were probably involved in a range of other manufacturing industries as well,” he added.