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AMARNA - Akhenaten's Glassmaking Recreated

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Bianca
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« on: December 14, 2007, 12:32:29 pm »










                                    Amarna - Ancient Egyptian glassmaking recreated





3000-year-old furnace rebuilt by archaeologist



The reconstructed kiln built by Dr. Paul Nicholson of Cardiff University and Dr. Caroline Jackson of Sheffield University.
 
A team led by a Cardiff University archaeologist has reconstructed a 3,000-year-old glass furnace, showing that Ancient Egyptian glassmaking methods were much more advanced than previously thought.

Dr Paul Nicholson, of the University’s School of History and Archaeology, is leader of an Egypt Exploration Society team working on the earliest fully excavated glassmaking site in the world. The site, at Amarna, on the banks of the Nile, dates back to the reign of Akhanaten (1352 - 1336 B.C.), just a few years before the rule of Tutankhamun.

It was previously thought that the Ancient Egyptians may have imported their glass from the Near East at around this time. However, the excavation team believes the evidence from Amarna shows they were making it themselves, possibly in a single stage operation. Dr Nicholson and his colleague Dr Caroline Jackson of Sheffield University demonstrated this was possible, using local sand to produce a glass ingot from their own experimental reconstruction of a furnace near the site.

The team have also discovered that the glassworks was part of an industrial complex which involved a number of other high temperature manufacturing processes. The site also contained a potter’s workshop and facilities for making blue pigment and faience - a material used in amulets and architectural inlays. The site was near one of the main temples at Amarna and may have been used to produce materials in state buildings.

Dr Nicholson, who has been working at Amarna since 1983, said: “It has been argued that the Egyptians imported their glass and worked it into the artefacts that have been discovered from this time. I believe there is now enough evidence to show that skilled craftsmen could make their own glass and were probably involved in a range of other manufacturing industries as well.”

Yahoo News


###
Dr Nicholson has now written a book detailing the discoveries made at Amarna. Entitled Brilliant Things for Akhenaten, it is published by the Egypt Exploration Society (London) and available through Oxbow Books in the UK and The David Brown Book Company in the USA.


SEE PICTURES OF THE ORIGINALS HERE:

http://atlantisonline.smfforfree2.com/index.php/topic,706.90.html





GLASS ITEMS FROM THE AMARNA PERIOD:


http://atlantisonline.smfforfree2.com/index.php/topic,706.570.html
« Last Edit: December 14, 2007, 06:12:24 pm by Bianca2001 » Report Spam   Logged

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Bianca
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« Reply #1 on: December 17, 2007, 07:00:32 am »








                                      Ancient Egyptian Industrial Complex Revealed





LiveScience.com
Fri Dec 14, 1:20 PM ET
 
Ancient Egyptians were even more inventive and productive than scholars have thought, according to new findings that depict surprisingly advanced glass-making abilities alongside an industrial complex.

The site, at Amarna, is on the banks of the Nile and dates back to the reign of Akhenaten (1352-1336 B.C.), just a few years before the rule of Tutankhamun.

Historians have said Egyptians of that time imported their glass. But a team led by archeologist Paul Nicholson of Cardiff University in Wales has reconstructed a 3,000-year-old glass furnace, showing that ancient Egyptian glassmaking methods were much more advanced than thought.

The researchers used local sand to produce a glass ingot from their own experimental reconstruction of an ancient furnace near the site.

They also discovered that the glassworks was part of an "industrial complex," as they've described it. The site contained a potter’s workshop and facilities for making blue pigment and materials used in architectural inlays.

The site was near one of the main temples at Amarna and may have been used to produce materials for state buildings, the researchers figure.

"It has been argued that the Egyptians imported their glass and worked it into the artifacts that have been discovered from this time," Nicholson said. "I believe there is now enough evidence to show that skilled craftsmen could make their own glass and were probably involved in a range of other manufacturing industries as well."

The findings, announced today, are detailed in the book "Brilliant Things for Akhenaten" (Egypt Exploration Society, 2007).


Gallery: Amazing Egyptian Discoveries
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Bianca
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« Reply #2 on: October 06, 2008, 10:20:55 am »










                               Twinkling Fractal Theory explains mysterious nature of glass 






(Nanowerk News)
Oct. 6, 2008

Archaeological evidence suggests that glass was first made in the Middle East sometime around 3000 B.C. However, almost 5,000 years later, scientists are still perplexed about how glassy materials make the transition from a molten state to a solid. Richard Wool, professor of chemical engineering at UD, thinks he has the answer. 

What distinguishes glasses from other materials is that even after hardening, they retain the molecular disorder of a liquid. In contrast, other liquids--for example, water--assume an ordered crystal pattern when they harden. Glass does not undergo such a neat phase transition; rather, the molecules simply slow down gradually until they are stuck in an odd state somewhere between a liquid and a solid. 
In a paper to be published later this year in the Journal of Polymer Science Part B: Polymer Physics, Wool documents a new conceptual approach, known as the Twinkling Fractal Theory (TFT), to understanding the nature and structure of the glass transition in amorphous materials. The theory provides a quantitative way of describing a phenomenon that was previously explained from a strictly empirical perspective. 

“The TFT enables a number of predictions of universal behavior to be made about glassy materials of all sorts, including polymers, metals and ceramics,” Wool says. 

Another difference between glasses and more conventional materials is that their transition from the liquid to the solid state does not occur at a standard temperature, like that of water to ice, but instead is rate-dependent: the more rapid the cooling, the higher the glass transition temperature. 
Wool discovered that as a liquid cools toward the glassy state, the atoms form clusters that eventually become stable and percolate near the glass transition temperature. The percolating clusters are stable fractals, or structures with irregular or fragmented shapes. 

“At the glass transition temperature, these fractals appear to twinkle in a specific frequency spectrum,” Wool says. “The twinkling frequencies determine the kinetics of the glass transition temperature and the dynamics of the glassy state.” 

The theory has been validated by experimental results reported by Nathan Israeloff, a physics professor at Northeastern University. “He was not aware of the TFT,” Wool says, “but his results fit my theory in extraordinarily explicit detail.” 

TFT was developed as an outgrowth of Wool's research on bio-based materials such as soy-based composites. “It was my need to solve issues in the development of these materials that led me to the theory,” he says. 

For now, Wool is content to view the theory as a portal into materials science and solid-state physics that others can use to go in new directions. “Acceptance will come when people recognize that it works,” he says. 

TFT has the potential to contribute to better understanding of such phenomena as fracture, aggregation and physical aging of materials. “It is also giving us new insights into the peculiarities of nanomaterials, which behave very differently from their macroscopic counterparts,” Wool says. 
Wool, who earned his doctorate at the University of Utah, joined the UD faculty in 1995. An affiliated faculty member in the Center for Composite Materials, he was recently featured on the Sundance Channel series “Big Ideas for a Small Planet.” 



Source: University of Delaware 
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