I have already noticed the coincidence of the sudden development of the manufacture of glass in Egypt with the first close contact, at the period of the Eighteenth Dynasty, of the Egyptians with races already affected by Babylonian culture; and we must remember that the glass made within a few years of this first contact was never surpassed in later times. Nor must we overlook the classical tradition concerning the invention of glass handed down to us by Pliny and other writers. According to this tradition, glass was first made by Phœnician traders on the coast of Syria. Here, at any rate, the three great requisites for the manufacture were at hand—a pure silica in the convenient form of a white sand, alkali either from the ashes of marine plants or from adjacent salt deposits, and finally, an abundant supply of fuel. And yet, for the present, all that can be said is that we must associate all the early glass that has been found in other countries than Egypt with the trading peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean, whether Pelasgians, Carians, or Phœnicians. To a similar source we may refer the rare glass beads found in tombs of the bronze period in Western Europe, as well perhaps as the scanty specimens of glass that have come from Assyria and Persia. To these last we will now turn. Of glass of undoubted Assyrian origin, by far the most important example known to us is the little barrel-shaped vase with stunted handles found so many years ago by the late Sir Henry Layard in the ruins of Kouyunjik. This little vessel, after many vicissitudes, has found its way into the British Museum. It is three and a quarter inches in height, and is formed of a glass that is perfectly white and nearly transparent; it still remains, indeed, our earliest example of such glass. The date is fixed to the latter part of the seventh century B.C., by an inscription cut in cuneiform characters containing the name of Sargon, together with his titles as king of Assyria; on it is also engraved the figure of a lion. Layard speaks of this vase as being shaped and hollowed on a turner’s lathe after being ‘_blown in one solid piece_’ (_Nineveh and Babylon_, 1853)—a curious expression for one who interested himself so much in the manufacture of glass! We may, perhaps, regard it as having been carved like an object of rock crystal out of a solid piece of glass. We know of nothing like it from Egypt, but then the Egyptians had no love for transparent, colourless materials; from an early time, as we have seen, they had covered their beads of rock crystal with a blue glaze (cf. p. 20). Here I may add that the other specimens of glass discovered by Layard at Nineveh have no claim to so early a date. Among them, however, were two bowls of great interest, formed of a _vetro di trina_ or ‘lace glass,’ with very fine meshes. These are now in the Assyrian Department of the British Museum. Some almost identical bowls from the late Greek tombs of