Raw glass could be manipulated in a variety of

ways: worked cold; worked successively in a

combination of hot and cold states; or worked

only in a hot state above an extremely hot fire

which could be either open or closed. Glass,

because of its resemblance to semi-precious

stones, was initially manipulated by ancient

craftsmen and jewelers by using lapidary

methods including cutting, grinding, and

drilling in order to create beads, inlays, and

ornaments. But, by and large, the principal

techniques by which glass was worked in

antiquity were performed hot. The basic hot

glass manufacturing methods employed in

antiquity before the introduction of glass-

blowing presupposed the use of a mold, a core

or a coated rod. In the first century BCE, a

craftsman in Jerusalem had realized that, if you

took one of the glass tubes which for centuries

had been the stock for mass production of

beads and sealed it at one end, then blew into

it, you could create a glass bottle. Herein lay

the origins of glassblowing, the technology

that, up to recent decades, has dominated

modern glassmaking. It also was the technology

that provided Roman glass-working with its

commercial viability and allowed them to play a

primary role in the industrialization of the

glassmaking process in the Mediterranean

world. By the beginning of the second century

CE, every glass-working technique we use today

had been fully exploited by the Romans.