MUSKI GLASS
Egypt has a long history of glassmaking (dating back over 3,500 years). Several burial sites provide the earliest proof of glass manufacture, revealing techniques and objects that connect ancient artisans to later traditions.
Today, hand-blown Muski glass continues that practice. Egyptian Muski glass (named after the market street known as Sharia Al Muski) goes back to the 14th century and is still being produced by local craftsmen.
Photograph by William Herman Rau, c. 1903, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.
It is made from recycled glass and is often characterised by imperfections - bubbles, small cracks and subtle variations in colour - and blown by hand into drinking glasses, vases and plates, or moulded into beads and sheets for decorative and utilitarian uses.
“…I believed that the colors of the glassware depended on the color of the broken glass used for recycling. It is not always so. It is only the brown glass that is used as it is. Usually they add a little white glass to make it lighter, honey (assali) colored…Take the purple (ennabi), for instance. It is a mixture of white glass and manganese...While they buy the manganese, they do not buy oxide of copper. They make it themselves the old, traditional way, by heating copper rods and dipping them in water. Rashad picked up a can of water with several copper dos in it. He took one out and I saw a kind of reddish rust accumulated at its end. “We pass it through a tamiya (sieve)”, he said, “and we add salt. I learned it from my father.””
“White transparent liquid glass mixed with copper oxide produces dark blue (kohli) glass. Green liquid glass, usually obtained from Stella bottles, mixed with 20% or 30% copper oxide makes a grassy green. The turquoise is basically made in the same way as purple, that is, by mixing white glass with manganese, but with one exception: the white glass is obtained from Old Spice after-shave lotion.” - Cairo Muski Glass-blowers: from Cairo Today, by Maria L. Brill, Photos by Ola Seif.
Two handblown green glass dishes from Muski, Egypt.
Circa 1960-1970.