Gordion Glass Vessels

This volume is a study of the ancient glass vessels from 70 years of excavation at Gordion in central Anatolia. The corpus of vessel glass, currently numbering over 1,800 fragments, is extraordinary in that it includes exceptional examples of vessels from excavated contexts ranging in date from the Iron Age to the Roman period and representing every major glass forming technology of the ancient world. Few sites have produced so many significant glass vessels of consistently high quality, dating from an extended period of time. Among these finds are several categories of glass that are either unparalleled elsewhere, of earlier date than comparable material, or unusually concentrated at Gordion.

This body of material currently stands alone in Anatolia, a region from which comparable finds are so far elusive, especially for the pre-Roman period. Several of the Gordion finds have the potential to rewrite aspects of what we know about the production of glass in the 1st millennium BCE, extending the record of consumption and, perhaps, production earlier and farther north in the Iron Age, and farther east in the Classical and Hellenistic periods than previously thought.