light made solid

Here's an interesting item in the news today that relates to the history of glass. A site was found in Egypt where glass may have been manufactured from raw materials as early as 1250 BC. The process they likely used is described as:

Glass was made using finely crushed quartz powder which was melted with other materials inside the ceramic crucibles, which then were broken to get the glass out, they reported.

The glass ingots "would then have been transported to other, artistic workshops where they were re-melted and worked into objects," Pusch and Rehren reported.

Most of the glass is said to have been red in color because of copper used in the mixing process, although some was blue or colorless. Historians believe that glass was an important and valuable export from Egypt to the rest of the ancient world. They've also discovered other interesting glass finds, such as an ancient shipwreck bearing glass ingots off the coast of Turkey.