Glassmaking in the early Islamic world

By the tenth century CE the ancient glassmaking industry and its markets had been utterly transformed: production of natron-type glass in the traditional centres of the Levant and Egypt had ceased, new recipes based on plant ash had emerged in the Islamic world, and primary production centres had multiplied while shrinking in scale. ¹ Glass nonetheless remained part of daily life, at least in wealthy homes and palaces, and was used for prestigious architectural decoration such as the mosaics and glass inlays of Samarra. ¹

The Arab conquest of the seventh century did not at first demonstrably upset production in Egypt and the Levant, but it changed consumption at the other end of the Mediterranean, where glass became a relatively rare commodity in al-Andalus by the eighth century. ¹ Nadine Schibille argues that geopolitical developments ultimately produced more or less independent local glassmaking traditions. ¹

Schibille ties the industry's changes to new capitals: Umayyad Damascus imported large consignments of mosaic tesserae for the Great Umayyad Mosque and palaces, and at al-Raqqa, after it became the caliphal residence in 796, two plant-ash glass groups were produced side by side, probably by glassworkers brought from Mesopotamia. ^{3 4} Al-Ya'qubi relates that al-Mu'tasim gathered craftsmen, glassworkers among them, from Basra and sent them to Samarra. ⁵ In al-Andalus, earlier still, lead glass was invented from metallurgical waste around Córdoba. ^{6 7}

The author thinks the main difference between the traditional centres of Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia and the marginal zones of Central Asia, Iberia and Sicily lay in the scale of production and the reach of distribution, the former producing far more until at least the eleventh century. ⁴ Among the most precisely dated witnesses to Egyptian glassmaking are glass weights. ⁸