Perfect transparency was considered as a defect, they were merely translucent; this we learn not merely from Pliny, but from the following epigram of Martial: Nos bibimus vitro, tu murra, Pontice: quare?
Prodat perspicuus ne duo vina calix.
Some specimens, and they were the most valued, exhibited a play of colour like the rainbow: Pliny says they were very commonly spotted with “sales, verrucæque non eminentes, sed ut in corpore etiam plerumque sessiles.” This, no doubt, refers to foreign bodies, such as grains of pyrites, antimony, galena, &c., which were often scattered through the substances of which the vessels were made.
Such are all the facts respecting the vasa murrhina to be found in the writings of the ancients; they all apply to fluor spar, and to nothing else; but to it they apply so accurately as to leave little doubt that they were in reality vessels of fluor spar, similar to those at present made in Derbyshire.81
The artificial vasa murrhina made at Thebes, in Egypt, were doubtless of glass, coloured to imitate fluor spar as much as possible, and having the semi-transparency which distinguishes that mineral. The imitations being imperfect, these factitious vessels were not much prized nor sought after by the Romans, they were rather distributed among the Arabians and Ethiopians, who were supplied with glass from Egypt.
Rock crystal is compared by Pliny with the stone from which the vasa murrhina were made; the former, in his opinion, had been coagulated by cold, the latter by heat. Though the ancients, as we have seen, were acquainted with the method of colouring glass, yet they prized colourless glass highest on account of its resemblance to rock crystal; cups of it, in Pliny’s time, had supplanted those of silver and gold; Nero gave for a crystal cup 150,000 sistertii, or 625l.
V.—DYEING AND CALICO-PRINTING.
Very little has been handed down by the ancients respecting the processes of dyeing. It is evident, from Pliny, that they were acquainted with madder, and that preparations of iron were used in the black dyes. The most celebrated dye of all, the purple, was discovered by the Tyrians about fifteen centuries before the Christian era. This colour was given by various kinds of shellfish which inhabit the Mediterranean. Pliny divides them into two genera; the first, comprehending the smaller species, he called buccinum, from their resemblance to a hunting-horn; the second, included those called purpura: Fabius Columna thinks that these were distinguished also by the name of murex.
These shellfish yielded liquor of different shades of colour; they were often mixed in various proportions to produce particular shades of colour. One, or at most two drops of this liquor were obtained from each fish, by extracting and opening a little reservoir placed in the throat. To avoid this trouble, the smaller species were generally bruised whole, in a mortar; this was also frequently done with the large, though the other liquids of the fish must have in some degree injured the colour. The liquor, when extracted, was mixed with a considerable quantity of salt to keep it from putrifying; it was then diluted with five or six times as much water, and kept moderately hot in leaden or tin vessels, for eight or ten days, during which the liquor was often skimmed to separate all the impurities. After this, the wool to be dyed, being first well washed, was immersed and kept therein for five hours; then taken out, cooled, and again immersed, and continued in the liquor till all the colour was exhausted.82
To produce particular shades of colour, carbonate of soda, urine, and a marine plant called fucus, were occasionally added: one of these colours was a very dark reddish violet—“Nigrantis rosæ colore sublucens.”83 But the most esteemed, and that in which the Tyrians particularly excelled, resembled coagulated blood—“laus ei summa in colore sanguinis concreti, nigricans aspectu, idemque suspectu refulgens.”84
Pliny says that the Tyrians first dyed their wool in the liquor of the purpura, and afterwards in that of the buccinum; and it is obvious from Moses that this purple was known to the Egyptians in his time.85 Wool which had received this double Tyrian dye (dia bapha) was so very costly that, in the reign of Augustus, it sold for about 36l. the pound. But lest this should not be sufficient to exclude all from the use of it but those invested with the very highest dignities of the state, laws were made inflicting severe penalties, and even death, upon all who should presume to wear it under the dignity of an emperor. The art of dyeing this colour came at length to be practised by a few individuals only, appointed by the emperors, and having been interrupted about the beginning of the twelfth century all knowledge of it died away, and during several ages this celebrated dye was considered and lamented as an irrecoverable loss.86 How it was afterwards recovered and made known by Mr. Cole, of Bristol, M. Jussieu, M. Reaumur, and M. Duhamel, would lead us too far from our present object, were we to relate it: those who are interested in the subject will find an historical detail in Bancroft’s work on Permanent Colours, just referred to.
There is reason to suspect that the Hebrew word translated fine linen in the Old Testament, and so celebrated as a production of Egypt, was in reality cotton, and not linen. From a curious passage in Pliny, there is reason to believe that the Egyptians in his time, and probably long before, were acquainted with the method of calico-printing, such as is still practised in India and the east. The following is a literal translation of the passage in question:
“There exists in Egypt a wonderful method of dyeing. The white cloth is stained in various places, not with dye stuffs, but with substances which have the property of absorbing (fixing) colours, these applications are not visible upon the cloth; but when they are dipped into a hot caldron of the dye they are drawn out an instant after dyed. The remarkable circumstance is, that though there be only one dye in the vat, yet different colours appear upon the cloth; nor can the colour be afterwards removed.”87
It is evident enough that these substances applied were different mordants which served to fix the dye upon the cloth; the nature of these mordants cannot be discovered, as nothing specific seems to have been known to Pliny. The modern mordants are solutions of alumina; of the oxide of tin, oxide of iron, oxide of lead, &c.: and doubtless these, or something equivalent to these, were the substances employed by the ancients. The purple dye required no mordant, it fixed itself to the cloth in consequence of the chemical affinity which existed between them. Whether indigo was used by the ancients as a dye does not appear, but there can be no doubt, at least, that its use was known to the Indians at a very remote period.
From these facts, few as they are, there can be little doubt that dyeing, and even calico-printing, had made considerable progress among the ancients; and this could not have taken place without a considerable knowledge of colouring matters, and of the mordants by which these colouring matters were fixed. These facts, however, were probably but imperfectly understood, and could not be the means of furnishing the ancients with any accurate chemical knowledge.
VI.—SOAP.
Soap, which constitutes so important and indispensable an article in the domestic economy of the moderns, was quite unknown to the ancient inhabitants of Asia, and even of Greece. No allusion to it occurs in the Old Testament. In Homer, we find Nausicaa, the daughter of the King of the Phæacians, using nothing but water to wash her nuptial garments:
They seek the cisterns where Phæacian dames
Wash their fair garments in the limped streams;
Where gathering into depth from falling rills,
The lucid wave a spacious bason fills.
The mules unharness’d range beside the main,
Or crop