page_title: Sasanian glass
section_title: The recipe of Sasanian glassmakers
hierarchical_section_title: Sasanian glass / The recipe of Sasanian glassmakers
caption_attribution_description: English: Sassanid glass, Azerbaijan Museum , Tabriz , Iran .
context_page_description: Sasanian Glass is the glassware produced between the 3rd and the 7th centuries AD within the limits of the Sasanian Empire of Persia, namely present-day Northern Iraq, Iran and Central Asia. This is a silica-soda-lime glass production characterized by thick glass-blown vessels relatively sober in decoration, avoiding plain colours in favour of transparency and with vessels worked in one piece without over- elaborate amendments. Thus the decoration usually consists of solid and visual motifs from the mould, with ribbed and deeply cut facets, although other techniques like trailing and applied motifs were practised.
context_section_description: Sasanian glass is a silica-soda-lime composition with high levels of K and Mg: this means the use of plant-ash as a source of soda. The Roman and the Parthian glass, on the other hand, employed mineral salts for this purpose (Freestone 2006, Mirti et al. 2009). Consequently, there is no continuation of the formula.
  Moreover, Sasanian glasses also show differences when compared with other plant-ash soda glasses.  Freestone analysis revealed that Syro-Palestinian productions were lower in Mg than Sasanian ones, and Brill (2005, 75) concluded that there is a general ‘overlapping but no close agreement’ between the Sasanian and the later Islamic glass and that the former ‘do not bear a close enough chemical resemblance to any of the particular groups of Islamic glasses’.
  In fact, the Sasanian glass is different even within itself. Three recipes have been identified for the glassmaking (Mirti et al. 2008). The first one (minoritarian) is a silica-soda-lime glass with one evaporite as a flux that mainly appears in the earliest stages of the Empire (3rd century). The second group is divided into two other subgroups, both using sodic ash but exploiting different plants. One of them is present from the beginning of the Dynasty and the other from the 4th century onwards. A crucial difference between them, apart from the one mentioned, is that the second subgroup always utilised a purer source of silica. Since this third recipe produced more transparent glass, found in more sophisticated objects than the ones worked with the other recipes (Mirti et al. 2009) this has been interpreted as an argument for the existence of diverse formulas to satisfy the demand of different qualities of glass. It is significant that, in the quest for the transparency meeting the taste of the Sasanians, purer silica was also occasionally utilised in the first subgroup.
caption: Sassanid glass bowls.
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