Fragment of a Glass Vessel with Festoon Decoration

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Fragment of a Glass Vessel with Festoon Decoration

Place of OriginEgypt

Date18th Dynasty (1550-1292 BCE), about 1400-1350 BCE

Dimensions2 x 3/4 x 1/8 in. (5.1 x 1.9 x 0.4 cm)

MediumCore-formed; applied marvered threads.

ClassificationGlass

Credit LineGift of Caroline Ransom Williams

Object number

1938.76

Not on View

DescriptionA curved body fragment of an ovoid vessel, likely an alabastron. The body is composed of opaque medium blue glass. It is decorated with marvered threads of opaque yellow and opaque white glass. The yellow threads cover the body in a tooled festoon pattern, while a narrow white thread appears in a similar festoon pattern near the bottom of the fragment.

Label TextThis small, vibrant blue fragment witnesses the very beginning of glass vessel production. Made in Egypt over 3,000 years ago, it was created not by blowing glass—a technique invented much later—but by winding molten glass threads around a core of clay and dung. The potter then trailed yellow and white glass over the blue body and combed them into this festive "festoon" pattern. This object was donated to TMA by Caroline Ransom Williams, a pioneering American Egyptologist, Toledo native, and the first woman in the United States to earn a PhD in Egyptology, whose scholarship and curatorial work helped shape the museum’s early collection of Egyptian antiquities.Published ReferencesGrose, David F., Early Ancient Glass: Core-Formed, Rod-Formed, and Cast Vessels and Objects from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Roman Empire, 1600 B.C. to A.D. 50, New York, Hudson Hills Press in association with the Toledo Museum of Art, 1989, catalog no. 14, p. 63, repr. (col.) p. 43.