Andalusi lead glass (Šaqunda)

Analyses of the glass from the suburb (rabad) of Šaqunda at Córdoba revealed a local production of lead glass at the end of the eighth or in the first two decades of the ninth century, which Nadine Schibille treats as the invention of a novel technology in al-Andalus, using metallurgical waste to make lead and soda-ash lead glasses. ^{4 1}

Córdoba became the seat of government soon after the conquest and capital of the independent Umayyad emirate in 756; as its population grew the city spread to the south bank of the Guadalquivir, where Šaqunda was founded around the mid-eighth century on unoccupied land, then razed some seventy years later after the revolt of the Rabad in 818; al-Hakam I banned building there, leaving it untouched until modern times. ^{1 2}

Šaqunda yielded little glass compared with late antique and Visigothic sites, and of different kinds: large open tableware is largely replaced by unguentaria, bottles and beakers, and nine glass bangles are the oldest known Islamic glass bracelets from al-Andalus. ² About 60% is still recycled natron glass, with two Egyptian pieces; the second group is a dark yellowish-green or amber high-lead glass with about 52% lead oxide and 34% silica. ²

Schibille suggests that when power shifted from Damascus to Baghdad after the Abbasid revolution, the western Mediterranean was marginalised and short of eastern glass, which may have stimulated the invention of lead glass in Iberia under the independent Umayyad emirate. ³ Soda-ash lead glass and a local plant-ash glass industry followed. ³