Five millennia ago, glass production began in

Western Asia. For the first millennium and a

half, small objects predominantly for personal

ornaments were fashioned at infrequent and

irregular intervals. Raw primary glass has been

found as early as the Akkadian period. The

knowledge and understanding of this material

is indicated by its identification in texts, first

Sumerian and then Akkadian.

Technological breakthroughs in the glass

workshops in mid-second millennium BCE led

to the creation of the first glass vessels and

allowed the industry to become established in

its own right. Now, for the first time, craftsmen

were exploiting the particular properties of

glass: a change particularly well illustrated by

the new process of coiling viscous glass round a

core to make vessels. The sixteenth-century

core-forming technique was to remain the

foremost method for the manufacture of

vessels for the next 1500 years. Vessels, but

especially plaques, amulets and medallions,

were also manufactured in open and closed

molds. In the fifteenth century the first

polychrome vessels and inlays made of mosaic

glass were produced. Treatises on glass-making

appear with instructions on its manufacture.

Glass workshops become active in the Levant in

the late Middle Bronze Age. At this juncture,

the craft of glass-making was defused and its

artisans and glass ingots were exported beyond

the borders of western Asia into Egypt and the

Aegean.

After a gap of time, the Mesopotamian glass

industry underwent a renaissance during the

ninth century BCE followed by the foundation

of two key glassmaking traditions in Syria and

Phoenicia. These centuries saw further

technological improvements such as influence

of chemical additives to produce translucent

and transparent glass. Phoenician glass artisans

were renowned for the production of pendants

in various shapes: human and demon heads,

ram's heads, birds, and bunches of grapes.

These objects were manufactured both in the

Levant and by their Punic colony Carthage in

North Africa. Although examples have been

found on all the coasts of the Mediterranean,

the majority have been found in its Eastern

reaches and in Carthage itself. Others have

turned up in areas as far afield as Europe, the

Black Sea region, and northern Asia.

Evidence of an active Middle Elamite local glass

industry of later fourteenth and thirteenth

centuries BCE was revealed in Khuzistan, Iran.

Under the Achaemenid dynasty (550-330 BCE),

Persian glass emerged from Persian workshops

and became internationally popular

throughout the empire and beyond its

frontiers. The greenish or colorless glass with

cut decoration was highly prized throughout

Western Asia and the Mediterranean. This

tradition continued and under the Sassanian

dynasty (226-642 CE), eastern glassware

reached the Roman west and the Far East

Orient.

In the first century BCE and after, the most

innovative center of glass production in

Western Asia was Jerusalem where glass-

blowing was invented.  This was the last major

change in glassmaking until the nineteenth

century CE. The Judean glass workers were

active in Jerusalem through the seventh

centuries of Roman administration. The

continuous Jewish involvement in glass-

working even after the Roman era is also clear,

however, particularly in Jerusalem.