Glass was often the preferred material for storing expensive oils, perfumes, and medicines because it was not porous. The small body and mouth of the vessels allowed the user to carefully pour and control the amount of liquid dispensed. By the 1st century AD, the technique of glass-blowing had revolutionised the art of glass-making. The new technique allowed craftsmen to use smaller amounts of glass for each vessel and obtain much thinner walls, so enabling the creation of small medicine, incense, and perfume containers in new forms. Firstly, many Roman glass vessels were modelled in bluish-green translucent colour, which resulted from the iron oxide present in the silica or the sand. However other metal oxides were added to the glass to give it different bright colours, like in the case of this yellow jar, where antimony and lead would have been added to the molten glass in order to obtain the desired colour.
To find out more about Roman glass please see our relevant blog post: Collecting Roman Glass.
