Ancient Roman Levant Aqua Glass Drinking Bowl, Hollow Rolled Rim

Eastern Mediterranean, Judaea, Roman period. A free-blown cup of translucent blue-green glass, its hemispherical body rising to a broad, outsplayed rim folded outward and downward into a hollow tubular collar. This rolled edge was the finish Roman glassworkers favored over a cut rim. The walls are thin and slightly asymmetrical, with faint rotary traces from working on the blowpipe, and the glass keeps the natural blue-green tint that iron in the sand produced. Burial has left patches of silvery iridescence and earthen encrustation across the rim and upper body. Cups of this shape were ordinary drinking vessels on tables across the Roman Levant, where blown glass became a common alternative to ceramic tableware. Accompanied by a custom display stand. Glassblowing was invented in the Syro-Palestinian region around the middle of the 1st century BCE, and within two generations it had transformed the vessel economy of the entire Roman world. What had been a luxury material shaped laboriously by core-forming or casting became, with the blowpipe, fast and cheap enough for daily use. Judaea sat at the heart of this revolution: workshops in and around Jerusalem and along the coast produced plain blue-green tablewares by the thousand, and the recovery of glassblowing debris from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem in deposits of the mid-1st century BCE remains among the earliest physical evidence for the technique anywhere. The blue-green cast is not a deliberate color but the residue of iron impurities in the sand, left uncorrected in utilitarian wares; decolorized or intentionally tinted glass commanded a premium. The silvery bloom is a weathering product, formed as alkalis leach from the surface during burial and leave behind microscopically thin lamellae that refract light. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 205130

Estimate:£224.25

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