408. Flask

Condition

Intact; iridescent weathering all over the body.

Description

Cracked-off rim; short, narrow, cylindrical neck; sloping shoulder; cylindrical body tapering toward the convex bottom. No pontil mark visible on the bottom. On the upper body there is a pinched fold, probably a repair of a tear in the vessel’s thin wall that was pressed shut by the glassblower while he was still forming the hot and malleable material into a vessel.

Comments and Comparanda

This vessel belongs to a well-known form of quite tall and slender flasks, always with cracked-off, upright rim and very thin walls, mostly made with dark blue glass, occasionally with one flattened side. They are found in tenth-century contexts, and they may have survived up to the early eleventh century CE. Due to the extremely wide distribution of the finds it has been proposed that they were produced at several sites, but the fact that they are always made of the same dark blue glass, with the same typological characteristics, indicates that they were more probably produced at one site, probably in Egypt, as the large numbers of finds from that region would indicate (Foy 2020, pp. 105–106).

The wide array of find sites throughout the Muslim world has recently been collated by Danièle Foy in discussing the finds from Sabra al-Mansuriyya, Tunisia (Foy 2020, pp. 105–106, 109–110, nos. 184–190), including the following: Iraq (Lamm 1928, p. 27, no. 105); Iran (Kervran 1984, fig. 7, no. 19); Nishapur, Iran (Kröger 1995, pp. 74–75); Kush (Worrell and Price 2003, p. 246, fig. 8); Al-Mabiyat, Hijaz (Gilmore et al. 1985, plate 104, no. 33); the coast of Yemen (Foy 2015, pp. 350–351, nos. 183–185); Manda on the East African coast (Morrison 1984, p. 172, fig. 139); Al Mina, Syria (Lane 1937, p. 65, fig. 10:C); Fustat, Egypt (Shindo 1992, p. 597, nos. 1–19; Shindo 2000, fig. 6, no. 9); Tebtunis, Fayum (Foy 2001, nos. 118, 146, 151); Sina, Raya (Shindo 2003, p. 180); Palestine (Brosh 2003, p. 348, no. 459); Caesarea (Pollak 2003, fig. 3, no. 45); Tiberias, Israel (Lester 2003, fig. 2, no. 18); Ramla (Gorin-Rosen 2010, pp. 227–228); Sumatra (Guillot 2003, p. 239, no. 14). In addition, several examples are known from museum collections: the Corning Museum of Glass (55.1.12: Whitehouse 2014, p. 46, no. 663, allegedly acquired in Lebanon = Glass from the Ancient World 1957, p. 235, no. 461); Kunstpalast Düsseldorf (P. 1973-39: von Saldern 1974, p. 243, no. 382); Newark Museum (50.1823: Auth 1976, p. 166, no. 222); L. A. Mayer Memorial Institute for Islamic Art, Jerusalem (G 37: Hasson 1979, pp. 5 and 35, no. 3); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (von Saldern 1980b, p. 186, no. 191).

Provenance

1979, Edwin A. Lipps, 1922–1988 (Pacific Palisades, California), donated to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1979

Bibliography

Unpublished

Exhibitions

None