04 May The History of Glass Making: Mesopotamia
The technology involved in creating beautiful clear glass shower enclosures and frameless glass railings has advanced from the earliest days of glass making.
No one is sure about who first figured out how to make glass or why they did it. “However,” as the experts at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York explain in their discussion of the origins of glassmaking, “it is generally believed that glassmaking was discovered 4,000 years ago, or more, in Mesopotamia.”
The Ancient Equivalent of Silicon Valley
If you were paying attention dur your history classes in school, you might remember that Mesopotamia is known as the Cradle of Civilization.
“In what the Greeks later called Mesopotamia, Sumerians invented new technologies and perfected the large-scale use of existing ones. In the process, they transformed how humans cultivated food, built dwellings, communicated and kept track of information and time,” the experts at History.com tell us.
In Mesopotamia as it is today, it appears that necessity was the mother of invention. A lack of natural resources forced the ancient Sumerians to get creative and, in the process, as History.com says, they “built a civilization that in some ways was the ancient equivalent of Silicon Valley.”
We don’t know what historians of the future will say when they look back on the technological innovation that has come out of Silicon Valley, but we do have historical perspective on the Sumerians of Mesopotamia. In fact, History.com quotes the late historian Samuel Noah Kramer who wrote, “The people of Sumer had an unusual flair for technological invention.”
That might be a bit of an understatement! In addition to glass, the list of inventions that came out of Mesopotamia includes, but is not limited to:
- Writing
- Chariots
- The Plow
- Metallurgy
- Mathematics
- Textile Mills
- Hydraulic Engineering
- Mass-Produced Clay Products, including Pottery and Bricks
If necessity is inspiring you to create something new – like a beautiful new bathroom featuring frameless glass shower doors – or if you would like to chat more about the history of glass, contact us.