Natron glass and the Silk Roads in the first millennium BCE
Year: 2024

Small glass objects were highly mobile in the 1st millennium BCE and can be used as a proxy for transcontinental interactions in Eurasia. The present work shows that Mediterranean natron glass objects, many of which are glass beads likely made from Levantine raw glass, had spread to East Asia, and a large number of these probably arrived in China through the Black Sea region and the Steppe around the mid-1st millennium BCE. The swift diffusion of natron glass across Eurasia reflects the evolutio