Glass beads
Glass is an artificial material. Its ingredients are widely available in nature (mainly sand, natrium and lime), yet its production in antiquity was a difficult task. This was so because the temperatures needed to melt the ingredients exceed 1.000ο C. Glass-making technology developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the later part of the 3rd millennium BC. In the Aegean the first glass objects appeared in the 16th or 15th c. BC: they were beads made of blue opaque glass.
Glass beads with relief decoration, like the illustrated ones, became very popular in Mycenaean Greece during the 14th and 13th c. BC. They were made of “glasspaste” (a fluid – not entirely molten – material produced by heating small chunks of glass), which was given shape in stone moulds. As a rule Myceaenaen glass beads copy gold ornaments of the period. The illustrated examples are decorated with spiral relief motifs and have perforations for suspension both on the upper and lower part.
Aegean glass beads have distinct features and style, which suggest strongly that they were made locally. However, the production of raw glass is not yet attested in the prehistoric Aegean, and chemical analyses of glass objects suggest that the raw material was often imported, most probably from Egypt. It was perhaps for that reason that the production of glass objects presents a dramatic fall-off in the Aegean after the destruction of Mycenaean palaces and the cessation of commercial exchanges with the Eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC.
Unpublished
