4 Minnesota Academy of Science 



the same mixtures of the more ancient, but of a much less 

 permanent and a softer material. These consisted mostly 

 of colored bottles which were placed in the tombs with the 

 bodies of the dead for use by the spirits of the women in 

 beautifying their faces and evidently supplied with water and 

 wine, and k the nursing bottles with liquid food for the chil- 

 dren. They are very artistically designed, rather more so 

 than the later art of the glass-maker and their lying for two 

 thousand years or more in the dust of the disintegrated roofs 

 of the tombs has made them beautifully irridescent. When 

 collections of the finest pieces are brought together they 

 present one of the finest and most beautiful displays, in many 

 respects similar in beauty and attractiveness to the collec- 

 tions of inlaid glass pieces found in the old Egyptian and 

 Babylonian tombs <and coming next in making a beautiful 

 display to a collection of the finest ornamental gems, only 

 these are on a larger scale and of greater variety of form 

 and color. 



The Phoenicians of about the time of Christ began the 

 manufacture of glass which they perhaps learned from the 

 Greeks or Syrians, and they made a glass somewhat different 

 and harder and somewhat more of an approach to the inlaid 

 glass of the ancient Egyptians. Many of these pieces are 

 found in the later tombs of Syria, made after this glass had 

 come into use. The Greeks also were glass makers, but 

 were given more to the manufacture of pottery and to model- 

 ling in clay and sculpture of marble. The Romans in the 

 second or third century before Christ developed the highest 

 and most refined and beautiful art glass that has been known 

 at any time excepting as to their not being able to produce 

 as fine a variety of inlaid glass, although their murrhine 

 glass was variegated and to some extent inlaid and made of 

 finer gems and produced far more valuable or at least higher 

 priced glass vases than have been known before or since. 

 During and just previous to the time of Nero, the greatest 

 extravagance existed, in the value put upon murrhine or gem 

 glass. History records that Petronius gave three thousand 

 talents for one cup or vase made of gems, which before his 

 death, in order to keep it from falling into the hands of Nero, 

 who it was claimed was waiting for Petronius to die, in 

 order that he might confiscate his great collection of fine 

 glass pieces, he destroyed, and the fragments of this mag- 

 nificent" vase together with all of Petronius' collection Nero 



