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Little is known about the first attempts to make glass. The Roman historian Pliny attributed it to Phoenician sailors. He recounted how they landed on a beach, propped a cooking pot on some blocks of natron(an alkali; a natural occurring evaporate form of soda found around the shores of lakes in the Wadi Natroun, Egypt--used in the mummification process in ancient Egypt ) they were carrying as cargo, and made a fire over which to cook a meal. To their surprise, the sand beneath the fire melted and ran in a liquid stream that later cooled and hardened into glass. That said, no one really knows how glass came to be made. It is thought that the ability to make glass developed over a long period of time from experiments with a mixture of silica-sand (ground quartz pebbles) and an alkali binder fused on the surface. The material called faience had been used for well over a thousand years to make small decorative objects such as beads and amulets. Although it existed as an ignored, accidental byproduct of copper smelting, true glass probably was first made in western Asia, perhaps Mesopotamia, at least 40 centuries ago. Perhaps early development began with potters firing their wares. Could the first glass have been colorful, hard, shiny decoration fused to a clay pot's surface in the heat of the furnace? No one knows. It was later discovered that if the material were thick enough, it would stand by itself. Pieces of solid glass could then be ground to shape by grinding it with stones, or sand and water, to produce vessels.
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