Condition
Broken spout, preserved body iridescent from weathering.
Description
Fire-polished, rounded rim; slightly flaring upper part; cylindrical body, tapering toward the convex bottom; a scar of a solid pontil (W. 1 cm) at the center. An applied spout at the upper part of the body appears to be a continuous mass of glass internally. The spout was curved toward the bottom of the bowl.
Comments and Comparanda
Glass bleeding cups were in use from the Roman period through the Byzantine era. Mentioned by the fourth-century CE Greek physician Oribasius—and, according to information repeated in the seventh century, by the great Byzantine physician Paulus Aegineta—glass bleeding cups were useful because physicians check the volume of blood they were letting (Antonaras, Anastassios. 2010. “Early Christian and Byzantine Glass Vessels: Forms and Uses.” In Byzanz—das Römerreich im Mittelalter 1: Welt der Ideen, Welt der Dinge, ed. Falko Daim and Joerg Drauschke, 383–430. Monographien des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums 84. Mainz: Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum., pp. 389–390). During the same period they were widely used in Islamic lands, as they still are today in traditional medicine in eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern lands (Lamm, Carl Johan. 1930. Mittelalterliche Gläser und Steinschnittarbeiten aus dem Nahen Osten, I–II. Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst 5. Berlin: D. Reimer., p. 33, plates 2:13–14; Lane, Arthur. 1937. “Medieval Finds at Al Mina in North Syria.” Archaeologia 87: 19–78., p. 66, fig. 10T; Hasson, Rachel. 1979. Early Islamic Glass: L. A. Mayer Memorial Institute for Islamic Art. Jerusalem: L. A. Mayer Memorial Institute for Islamic Art., p. 5, fig. 1–2; Oliver, Andrew, Jr. 1980. Ancient Glass in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh. Pittsbourgh, PA: Carnegie Institute., p. 142, no. 246; Abdullaev, K. A., E. V. Rtveladze, and Galina Vasilievna Shishkina, eds. 1991. Culture and Art of Ancient Uzbekistan, exh. cat. Moscow: Vneshtorgizdat., p. 152, no. 642; Kröger, Jens. 1995. Nishapur: Glass of the Early Islamic Period. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art., pp. 186–188, nos. 239–243, esp. 239–240; Carboni, Stefano. 2001. Glass from Islamic Lands: The Al-Sabah Collection. London: Thames & Hudson., pp. 144–145, cat. nos. 34b, c; Scanlon, George T., and Ralph H. Pinder-Wilson. 2001. Fustat Glass of the Early Islamic Period: Finds Excavated by the American Research Center in Egypt, 1964–1980. London: Altajir World of Islam Trust., pp. 56–59, nos. 29a–g, fig. 29, from an eighth–ninth-century context). What distinguishes bleeding cups from the relatively similar alembic cups is that the body is cylindrical and not so much conical, and that the spout, in order to facilitate the physician’s maneuvering, is turned toward the bottom of the vessel, rather than toward the opening. There is one case where bleeding cups were unearthed in an alchemist’s workshop in conjunction with spheroconical clay vessels, and assumed altogether to comprise alembics, but that should be considered as a solution driven by lack of actual alembic’s domes or by a special distilling technique or product (Valiulina, Svetlana Ivorievna. 2005. Steklo Volzhskiy Bulgarii po materiala Biliarskovo gorodischa. Kazan: Kazanskiy (Privolzhskiy) Federal’nyy Universitet., pp. 44–47, figs. 15–17, 41 from twelfth–thirteenth-century contexts).
Provenance
1979, Edwin A. Lipps, 1922–1988 (Pacific Palisades, California), donated to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1979
Bibliography
Unpublished
Exhibitions
None