December 5, 2018

Glassware

By Stuart Munro-Hay

It may be imagined that the more expensive imported wines and the better-quality local mead were consumed from some of the vessels included among the rich range of glassware found at Aksum (Morrison in Munro-Hay 1989) and Matara (Anfray 1968: fig. 16). This was probably mostly imported, though some types may have been made locally; as previously noted, there was an unusual incidence of exotically-colored or decorated glass from the Aksum excavations, representing types unknown elsewhere at the moment. Glass from habitation sites is generally very fragmentary, but is naturally best preserved in tomb deposits. A set of stem goblets decorated with a swagged design and smaller beakers with restricted necks were found together in one tomb, with the owner’s best crockery and sets of iron tools (Chittick 1974: pl. XIVa). Since such glass seems to indicate a quite luxurious level of living, perhaps the tomb-owner was a prosperous merchant. In another tomb, much richer, possibly even royal, was found a large purple stem goblet, a purple flask with a long neck, and fragments of an engraved glass bowl with an inscription in Greek (Chittick 1974: fig. 22).

Glass lamps, presumably oil-fed, together with the bronze chains which would have suspended them, came from one of the mansions. It is unlikely that glassware, at least imported glassware, percolated very far down the social ladder, as it was not only brought down the Red Sea from Egypt or Syria, or perhaps in some cases from Persia to the east, but then transported by land into the interior of the country by the merchant caravans. This troublesome journey must have made it an expensive commodity by the time it arrived at Aksum. The Periplus (Huntingford 1980: 21) mentions several sorts of glass as being imported into Aksum from the Roman world. One, imitating a type called murrhine, may have been colored glass resembling agate or similar semi-precious stones (Schoff 1912: 24, 68), or perhaps murrhine describes a type of mosaic glass made by the so-called millefiore or mosaic-glass technique in which slices from rods of colored glass, forming faces and other patterns, were fused together. Examples of this glass, apparently not made after about the end of the 1st century AD, have been found at Aksum (Morrison, in Munro-Hay 1989).

Illustration 61. Mosaic or millefiore glass fragments, dating to a relatively early period (1st century BC – 1st century AD), came from the Aksum excavations.

Some of the jewelry worn by the Aksumites was of glass, chiefly bangles, and beads. One necklace, its beads found scattered across the chambers of the Tomb of the Brick Arches, consisted of glass globes overlaid with thin gold leaf, in turn, covered with a thin layer of glass. Ear-plugs and possible gaming pieces have also been identified from among a large number of glass items excavated.