Ancient Phoenicians and glassmaking

I didn't really know anything about the Phoenicians before this unit. We learned about two things they're famous for, their glassmaking and their purple dye (Phoenician purple or Tyrian purple)! 

I had heard, of course, about purple being the color of kings, and I knew the dye for it was really expensive. But I didn't know WHY. This article shows a man who has revived the ancient technique—which involves murex snail shells in HUGE quantities, extracting their glands, fermenting them, letting them sit in the sun for a little while but not too long, cooking them, etc.—and now I finally understand! https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/oddly-enough/tunisian-enthusiast-recreates-sea-snail-purple-dye-that-defined-ancient-royals-2022-02-08/

I also didn't know how beautiful the purple color was. You can see why it was so loved!

This picture is from that man's Facebook page—it's cool to look at his pictures and see the bottles of beautiful powdered dye, etc. That article says that it takes 119  pounds of murex shells to produce a single gram of Tyrian purple!!

The other thing the Phoenicians were famous for was glassmaking. I love glassmaking (the Museum of Glass is one of my favorite museums we've ever visited!), but didn't know anywhere local we could go to watch it. So we just watched a bunch of videos.

This one is really interesting because it shows the technique the Phoenicians used—core-formed glass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBZb2bkn4KU

This just shows the making of a glass pitcher (not core-formed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtxrtKd-Vao

This video, "Glass skills with Bill," shows how to use honey to practice the rolling technique of keeping molten glass on your rod. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz1sUH7wDvA&t=2s 

And that gave me an idea! The honey reminded me of melted sugar, or caramel. I wondered if we could use hot caramel to mimic molten glass and try some of the glassmaking techniques! Then I found a recipe for sugar glass and that seemed like it would be perfect! This is the glass they use in movies when someone has to crash through a window or something. It breaks just like glass, but without the cost (and it's not quite as sharp, so less likely to cause injury).

We tried this recipe: https://www.inthekitchenwithmatt.com/edible-sugar-glass and it was a great success! I had just been hoping to move and mold the "glass" around a little, but Daisy had the idea of trying to actually blow it with metal straws, and it worked! I couldn't believe it! The blown "glass" doesn't hold its shape; it collapses almost immediately, but we made a few balls and bubbles with it and it definitely got the idea across. Very, very fun. 

You have to be careful, because it's very hot, of course, but this was one of our favorite projects during this unit!

This is cool too—Sugar stained glass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt8PhT-DMyE&t=45s

A little handle, like you'd make on a glass pitcher

Sugar-glass bubble! This one was actually thick enough to last. It finally shattered when we poked it—it looked so cool!

Thinner glass bubbles that shrunk into themselves as soon as the girls stopped blowing

A beautiful sheet of sugar glass! The Phoenicians would have been proud.