Between Science & the Senses

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Project Information

About

This project investigates Mesopotamian glassmaking recipes in order to unravel the early history of chemistry. Dating from around 1500–600 BCE, these texts are in difficult cuneiform script with specialized terms, which has led to them being largely overlooked. Combining new linguistic analysis with experimental archaeology, this project will re-interpret a selection of glass recipes and reproduce them for the first time since antiquity. This hands-on approach to history can tell us about how people worked with tools to transform materials, the role of sensory experience in these processes and other details that bring ancient science and craftsmanship to life.

Overview

The Mesopotamian glass recipes—written in the Akkadian language and inscribed in cuneiform script on clay tablets—provide step-by-step instructions for making variously colored and textured vitreous substances. Rich in detail about ingredients, tools, techniques and material transformations, these texts are a crucial yet underexplored source for the early history of practical chemistry.

However, as they are written in difficult to decipher cuneiform signs using technical jargon, it is not always possible to interpret them clearly. The aim of “Between Science and the Senses” is to gain new insights into how Mesopotamian craftspeople understood the properties and qualities of natural materials, and how they encoded this empirical knowledge in written form.

This aim will be reached by philologically analyzing and experimentally replicating a selection of glassmaking recipes from this civilization dating from ca. 1500-600 BCE.

Research Questions

To what extent do these recipes reflect knowledge about on-the-ground glassmaking techniques, and to what extent are they products of a written tradition that is disconnected from the actual practices of these crafts?

Is the technical language of the glass recipes specific to this corpus or is it shared across other Akkadian procedural texts (e.g., medical and perfume recipes)?

Stories