This extremely rare and fine Fatimid/Mesopotamian crystal jar, (dating to ca. 800-900 A.D.) was re-used in the 12th.-13th. century A.D. as a reliquary. The cylindrical crystal vessel has ribbed bands cut to the upper body and a turned foot; the aperture sealed with a red wax-based compound. Such crystal vessels were commonly looted during the Crusades, and re-used to hold Christian relics, many of them ending up in European Cathedrals. See B.W. Robinson, Islamic Art in the Keir Collection, p.289 for further discussion of this example.
Connect With
Museum Categories
About Us
The Bristol Blue Glass Museum holds over 350 items of glass, showing the development of the manufacture of glass from ca. 1500 B.C. to the present day. It contains pieces of Egyptian, Roman, Viking, Anglo Saxon and Medieval glass, but the main interest of the collection lies in the examples of manufacture from all the principal English glass-works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
