Canosa, in Southern Italy, may be seen in the Glass-Room in the same Museum. The Assyrians and the Babylonians before them were, we know, from an early date past masters in the manufacture of coloured glazes. The turquoise blue glaze of their pottery and wall tiles has been handed down in these lands apparently without a break, through Persian and Sassanian times to their later Arab masters. In the Louvre are some slabs of a translucent glass of a fine turquoise tint, about three inches square, and three-quarters of an inch in thickness, which were found in Babylonia, associated apparently with objects of great age. Such masses of glass paste were perhaps manufactured as articles of commerce to be employed afterwards in the preparation of glazes.[20] Apart from these examples, the glass brought from Western Asia is of the usual later Phœnician or Roman type—‘lachrymatories’ and bowls mostly of greenish glass. It is not till we come to Sassanian times that we can find any distinctive features, and the rare specimens dating from that period will best be treated in a later chapter along with the contemporary Byzantine glass. I may mention finally that there are one or two passages in our Greek classics that may point to the use of glass by the Persians in the fifth century B.C. For instance, among other hardships suffered by the Athenian embassy to the great king—so we are told ironically by Aristophanes in his _Acharnians_—they were forced to drink from vessels of gold and from _cups of glass_, or, may be, of rock crystal (ἐξ ὑαλίνων ἐκπωμάτων). We know of no glass other than that of Roman type from the Bible lands, using that expression in the narrower sense, nor in the whole literature of the Hebrews is there, as far as I know, any definite reference to glass. The word _Zechuchoth_, which occurs in a passage of Job (xxviii. 17), is translated in the Vulgate by _vitrum_, but like the Greek ὕαλος, it may as well refer to rock crystal, or any other hard transparent substance. There is, however, a passage in Jeremiah (ii. 22) which is really of more interest to us. It begins, ‘For though thou wash thee with nitre and take thee much soap.’ From this passage we learn at least that the natron of the salt lakes was in early days applied to practical ends. This was one step to its application to the manufacture of glass. Since then the soap-boiler has often been the ally of the glass-maker. I have thought it well to bring together these few facts and theories bearing upon the early knowledge and use of glass in Western Asia, for could its early existence in these lands be once definitely established, we should be better able to fill up a gap in our history, and it would perhaps be then possible to solve that obscure problem—_When and where was the great step taken and the blowing-tube first made use of for the production of a vesicle or paraison of glass?_