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This journal is a log of all the warm glass projects I will be doing

Now on to the secret instructions






As early as 3,300 years ago, secret "instructions" for furnace building and glassmaking in Mesopotamia were written on clay tablets in a cuneiform script. These instructions were copied and recopied over the centuries. Furnace-building instructions from that time period have not been discovered. The cuneiform tablet pictured on the left of this page is probably about 2,700 years old. Typical instructions for glassmaking follow:

When you set up the foundation of a good furnace to make glass, you first search in a favorable month for a day of good omen, and only then can you set up the foundation of the furnace. As soon as you have finished building the furnace you go and place Kubu-images there. No insider or stranger should enter the building; an unclean person must not even pass in front of the images. You regularly perform libation offerings before them. On the day when you plan to make (glass), you make a sheep sacrifice before the Kubu-images (religions statues); you place juniper incense on the incense burner; you pour out a libation (drink honoring a deity) of honey and liquid butter; only then can you make the fire in the hearth of the furnace and place the glass in the furnace.

The wood that you burn in the hearth of the furnace should be thick, peeled poplar wood, which has no knots, bound together with leather straps, cut in the month of the Abu (July or August). Only this wood should be in the hearth of the furnace. The persons whom you allow to come near the furnace have to be clean; only then can you allow them to come to the furnace.

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