This glass vessel, in the form of a building column shaped like a palm tree, is a container for eyeliner or eye shadow known as kohl. The container has the same proportions as an architectural column (see fig. 1), with a slight taper from the bottom to the top, and lobes that represent eight fronds.^[1] The edges of the lobes are rimmed in yellow, and each has a strand of white glass on its underside to represent the frond’s midline rib. The rope collar binding that is represented on columns is shown here as alternating yellow and white trails of glass. The white-and-yellow festoon decoration on the container’s blue shaft may be intended to evoke the scaly, diamond-patterned bark of a palm’s trunk. The base is rimmed with white glass. The bottom is slightly rounded, so the container would not have been able to stand upright without some sort of support. The opening in the top, which is eight millimeters wide, is banded with yellow glass. The artist has succeeded in translating a large architectural feature into a miniature, whimsical, luxury item.1

Kohl containers came in many shapes, but palm columns made of glass or other materials were especially popular in the New Kingdom. More than seventy glass examples, with many variations in size and decoration on the trunk, are known. They date from the reign of Amenhotep III into the reign of Ramesses II.2

Kohl is made of ground galena or malachite. The powder, which was probably mixed with a binder, was applied around the eyes with a slender wand made of glass, metal, stone, or wood. Kohl is thought to have had an antiseptic value, and it was worn by both men and women throughout Egyptian history.
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Additional Views of Cat. 59

Manufacture

This example of a kohl container was made using the technique known as core-formed glass. The core, which would become the hollow cavity in the vessel, was made of clay and dung that were packed around a metal rod.^[2] Glass was built up around the core, either by trailing it onto the core or by rolling the core in powdered glass and marvering it (flattening it against a hard surface) until it was smooth.^[3] The decoration on the “trunk” was made by trailing thin streams of molten white and yellow glass or dragging a prefabricated glass cane around the vessel, pulling the strands with a sharp tool to create the festoon pattern and marvering it flush with the background.^[4] The “fronds” were pinched into shape with pliers.^[5] The decoration around and under the fronds and the binding collar was not marvered, creating contrasting flat and raised areas. Finally, the metal rod was removed, and the core was dug out to make the container functional.4

The palmiform columns that inspired this piece appeared first in the Old Kingdom, when some of the monumental examples reached several meters in height and were made of a single piece of granite (see fig.1). The style was only rarely encountered in the New Kingdom, which raises the question of why kohl tubes in this form date to that period. They could have been an expression of nostalgia or archaizing, or perhaps they were inspired by the old architectural forms as well as by the omnipresent palm trees of the Nile Valley. In either case, the tall, slender shape of a palm made it ideal for a container.5

Introduction of Glassworking into Egypt

The glass industry was developed in Egypt during the reign of Thutmose III (about 1450 BCE), and some of the earliest core-formed glass vessels bear his cartouche.^[6] It is thought that the Egyptians imported the knowledge of glassworking from northwest Syria, an area in which Thutmose III campaigned.^[7] Perhaps free or imprisoned artists were brought to Egypt, stimulating the industry. The value of early glass is indicated by scenes of tribute, including trays heaped with lumps of raw glass and other finished glass vessels, given by Thutmose III to the god Amun-Re at Karnak. Objects made of valuable glass were also among the prime objectives of tomb robbers.^[8] Among the Amarna Letters (the diplomatic correspondence between the pharaohs and other rulers of the Near East in the fourteenth century BCE) is a request to a Levantine ruler to send glass to Egypt, suggesting that Egypt could not produce enough for its own needs.^[9]6

The rapid rise of sophisticated glassmaking is surely due to the Egyptians’ long experience with making faience, a closely related technology that is attested in Egypt beginning in the Early Dynastic Period, if not earlier. Like glass, faience is made of a quartz sand. The main difference between the two materials is its consistency—glass is compact and of a homogenous texture because it is worked at a much higher temperature, while faience has a grainy texture made of small particles that have been fused by the heat. In contrast to glass, faience is a multilayered material consisting of a core and a glazed outer layer.^[10]7

Egyptian glass is made of quartz sand, an alkali (potash from burnt plant material) that lowered the melting temperature of quartz to a level that could be reached using the technology available to ancient craftsmen, and lime that stabilized the mixture. Using blowpipes to bring the temperature of the fire up to about 1000°C, the ingredients were melted in stone or baked-clay crucibles. The resulting glass was poured into round molds to create ingots that could be transported to workshops to be reheated and worked.8

The natural color of Egyptian glass is slightly brown or green, but through the addition of cobalt (from the western oases), copper, manganese, tin, and other substances, glassmakers were able to produce intense colors that mimicked the brightly colored semiprecious stones of Egypt (carnelian, lapis lazuli, feldspar, and turquoise), as well as obsidian and calcite. Although glass was often used in imitation of stone, it was not regarded as a cheap substitute; it was often used alongside stone as an inlay for jewelry, notably on the mask of Tutankhamun.^[11] Ancient Egyptian texts refer to glass as “stone that flows.”^[12]9

Glassworking installations have been found at the royal residences at Malkata, Tell el-Amarna, and Qantir, indicating the court’s monopoly over natural resources and its desire to have a dependable supply of glass to ornament the furniture, jewelry, and other luxury objects that were made in huge quantities during the New Kingdom. Excavations at Tell el-Amarna, in particular, have revealed the industrial-scale manufacture of glass ingots along with smaller workshops, many of them in domestic settings, where the glass ingots were made into vessels and other luxury items.^[13] Ingots of glass thought to be from Egypt were discovered in the Uluburun shipwreck (off the southwest coast of Turkey), which dates to the Amarna Period, suggesting that the industry was so advanced and large in scale that glass was exported at that time to other areas of the Mediterranean.^[14]10

Provenance

Kalebdjian Frères, Paris; sold to Azeez, Khayat, by 1928; sold to Theodore W. and Frances S. Robinson, by 1928 [correspondence in curatorial file]; given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1941.11

Publication History

Charles Fabens Kelley, “The Robinson Collection of Antique Glass,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 34, no. 5 (1940), 79 (ill.), 80.12

Geraldine J. Casper, Glass Paperweights in the Art Institute Chicago (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1991), 9 (ill.).13

Kurt T. Luckner, “Ancient Glass,” in “Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago,” special issue, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 20, no. 1 (1994): 82, fig. 58.14

Karen B. Alexander, “The New Galleries of Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago,” Minerva 5, no. 3 (May–June 1994): 35, fig. 15.15

Art Institute of Chicago: The Essential Guide, foreword by Douglas W. Druick, 4th ed. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2013), 62.
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