From Luxury Product to Mass Commodity: Glass Production and Consumption in the Hellenistic World.

Abstract

In the second and early first millennium BCE, glass was exclusively a luxury product employed by high status elites, but by the Roman period, glass wares were regularly used as everyday objects. This dramatic change in the scale and context of glass use has long been attributed to the revolutionary invention of glass blowing in the first century BCE and its subsequent spread during the early Roman empire. This dissertation argues that the conceptual and functional origins of glass as a common, everyday product occurred earlier, during the late Hellenistic period, when producers and consumers began to treat glass tablewares and small objects as quotidian, mass-produced commodities rather than luxuries reserved for rhetorical manipulation by elites.

This dissertation compiles previously published information on glass objects from archaeological contexts dated from c. 350-50 BCE in the Mediterranean basin, Black Sea, and Western Asia in order to demonstrate a dramatic rise in the quantity of glass available to consumers and its integration into urban and domestic life over the course of the Hellenistic period. In most regions, consumption of luxury glass products continued unabated from the first millennium BCE into the Roman period. However, within the eastern Mediterranean and Syro-Palestine, an expanding number of glass workshops served local consumer markets, and consumers began to adopt glass tablewares, adornment, gaming pieces, and tools for household use.

This change in glass production and consumption occurred within a broader political, economic, and cultural environment in which increasing wealth was vested in the hands of aggrandizing middle elites. As the hegemonic control of Hellenistic empires waned in the late second and early first centuries BCE, ambitious and moderately wealthy individuals engaged in elite identity practices involving glasswares, including conspicuous consumption and elaborate drinking and dining. Producers responded to growing consumer demand by exploiting natural resources to manufacture raw glass, simplifying manufacturing processes, and opening new workshops, which trained more workers and reached additional markets. Such experimental and entrepreneurial workshop behavior facilitated the technological innovation of glass blowing by which glass was fully transformed from a luxury product into a mass commodity.