Bottles

As Wednesday is my usual day for the DGP blog and this Wednesday is Christmas Day I’m betting that at sometime during the day most of us will have come across bottles of all shapes and sizes but what were the origins of these containers?

Mesopotamia. Where else. The discovery of the oldest known glass bottle in 1925 provides a window into the early origins of glassmaking. It was discovered in Uruk, which in around 3,700 BCE was a busy city-state. The bottle itself is small, less than 5 inches tall, with thick uneven walls indicating it was free-blown by someone learning the craft. Analysis shows the glass contains high levels of silica, lime, and alkali, revealing the basic recipe used over 5,000 years ago. Traces of wine residues confirm it once held a precious liquid.

Roman Glass History Museum

Similar techniques were used until the Romans pioneered the technique of glassblowing around the first century BCE. Glassblowing made the mass production of a variety of glass bottles possible. If you want to know more about glassblowing I highly recommend a trip to the World of Glass in St Helens. The process is mesmerising.However, even with relatively high mass production, the cost of glass bottles meant that most wine was contained in animal skin or leather. However, by the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution represented a shift in this as glass bottles were put into production via semi-automatic machines. This allows containers to be mass produced. Additionally, the ease of manufacturing meant that different styles, finishes and shapes could be trialled allowing companies to start the comparing the quality of storage and chosen glass bottles.The earliest perfume bottles date to around 1000 BCE in ancient Egypt. These perfume bottles were made from glass, alabaster, gold or ceramic. These perfume bottles were sophisticatedly designed and prized highly.Here are a few, I think, interesting facts about bottles:

the oldest known message in a bottle

The oldest message in a bottle ever found was 131 years and 223 days old when it was discovered on Jan. 21, 2018, at Wedge Island, Australia. A German ship captain threw a gin bottle overboard on June 12, 1886 with a message written in ink, that contained the ship's coordinates and details, including departure and arrival times. The note requested the finder deliver the note to the nearest German Embassy.
The Carmona glass urn is a first-century CE find that contains intact wine. The urn was discovered in 2019 in Carmona, Spain during excavations of the city's western Roman necropolis. Analysis of the urn's contents five years after its discovery demonstrated the contents to be the oldest surviving wine in the world. This surpasses the previous record holder, the Speyer wine bottle, discovered in 1867, by three centuries.

Carmona wine vessel

According to the Guinness Book of Records the largest collection of beer bottles belongs to Ron Werner (USA) and consists of 25,866 individual beer bottles in Carnation, Washington, USA. Ron started his collection at the age of 14. On average, a 1,000 beer bottles are added to the collection every year.Some of the info above is from Vitalie Trestianu, Southern Jar Company.And locally the Harris Museum holds the largest scent bottle collection in Britain. These were collected by Mrs. Ideonea French, who was a collector since her early teens, but began a passion for collection after the death of her son in action in 1941 in North Africa. Mrs. French explored antique shops and dusty junk shops and her home became rather like a museum, with the collection displayed in glass cases in every room. Upon her death, Mrs. French wished not to split up the collection and the Harris received the entire collection.

Harris Museum scent bottle collection

Back in 2011 a friend had been to the event below and asked me to write a poem about it.An Evening of Celebration and Entertainment
where a fiddler tails
the white sheet and skull
of Fari Lywd
as she snacks if she can
whatever’s left from
bottles of wine and beer
and whatever is on the plates
of an alloy of Brass
and Wenceslas
and Christmas fare
Fari or Mari
the gray mare won’t care
in English yn Cymraeg
as long as mince pies
are there for the taking
from the tables
of Pagan and Christian
and non- Christian folk
gathered in rounds
at this time and again
of singers and songs
that carol the half light
of winter’s turn
in the merry solstice
and merry Christmas in
Amgueddfa Ceredigion MuseumThanks for reading. Merry Christmas, Terry Q. Email ThisBlogThis!Share to XShare to Facebook