The glass blowers of Sarafand

The village of Sarafand sits on the Lebanese coast between Sidon and Tyre, on ground that was once the ancient Phoenician city of Sarepta. Excavations conducted here in the 1970s uncovered a workshop containing furnace installations, crucibles, and the fused remains of raw sand and glass — evidence that glassblowing, or at least glass production in its pre-blown form, was practiced here more than three thousand years ago.

The Phoenicians did not invent glass. That distinction belongs to Mesopotamia, and before it to Egypt. What the Phoenicians invented — or refined to the point of transformation — was the commercial instinct for glass. They discovered that a particular silica-rich sand found along the shores of the Nahr al-Awwaj south of Beirut produced glass of exceptional clarity when fused with natron. They bottled perfume and traded kohl in glass flasks that have since been found as far as Spain and England.

Core-forming — the earliest technique for making glass vessels — required wrapping molten glass around a clay core, then peeling the core away once the glass cooled. The unguentaria and amphoriskoi from this period are identifiable by their trailed decorations: threads of contrasting glass wound around the body while still soft. Many of the finest examples in museum collections worldwide originate from Phoenician sites; a number have passed through the Lebanese art market, where they represent some of the most delicate objects ever handled.

Today, in the workshops that still operate in Sarafand, the furnaces run on gas rather than driftwood, and the techniques have been simplified for production. But the basic act is unchanged: molten glass gathered on an iron pipe, a breath, a rotation, and a form emerging from heat. The local glassblowers make vessels in shapes that echo, consciously or not, the unguentaria of their predecessors — narrow-necked, delicately balanced, made for the hand.

Collecting ancient Levantine glass requires specific knowledge of iridescent patina — the same patience that applies to coins. Over centuries, ancient glass develops a shimmering surface — silver, gold, pale green — from the slow interaction of silica, minerals, and moisture. This iridescence is time made visible. Modern fakes can be patinated chemically, but the result is uniform, lacking the prismatic depth of genuine age. If the iridescence catches the light from one angle and disappears from another, it is usually real.