Composition and texture of a set of marvered glass vessels from 12th century ad Braničevo, Serbia
Abstract
Strongly coloured glass vessels decorated with marvered threads of white
glass are a wide-spread and popular, but rarely studied group of high-quality
glassware of medieval Islamic origin. Relatively little is known about the
composition and production places of these vessels, and their chronological
range is not very well defined, as many of the published finds lack
contextual evidence. Here, we present detailed chemical and microstructural
data on a set of well-dated purple glass vessels decorated with white
threads, excavated at the Mali Grad site in Braničevo, Serbia, in an
archaeological context dated to the middle/second half of the 12th century
AD. The set comprises at least sixteen different vessels, manufactured from
two different batches of probably Levantine plant-ash glass coloured by
manganese oxide. Significantly, the results demonstrate that these batches
are correlated to particular vessel shapes. The base glass of the white
thread...s is comparable to that of the purple vessel glass, but instead of
being coloured by added manganese oxide, it contains considerable amounts of
tin and lead oxides which provide the effect of opacity and white colour. No
difference in composition can be seen between the white glass threads used to
decorate the vessels from the two different manganese-coloured batches, thus
indicating a likely common production origin of the whole set.
Keywords:
Islamic glass / Marvering / Braničevo / Serbia / 12th century / LA-ICPMS analysis / SEM imaging / pXRFSource:
Starinar, 2018, 68, 125-149Publisher:
- Arheološki institut, Beograd