Allegorical Type Celebrating Tyre’s Glassmaking Industry

CNG 100, Lot: 1752. Estimate $750. Sold for $2300. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

PHOENICIA, Tyre. Philip I. AD 244-249. Æ (28mm, 20.13 g, 6h). Laureate, draped, and cuirassed bust right / Personification of the Cendevian marshes standing facing, head left, holding long reed and pouring sand over dam; at feet, half-length figure of river-god Belus swimming left; murex in upper left field. Rouvier 2450; BMC –. VF, earthen green patina, light pitting on obverse. Extremely rare.

Tyre was famous for its purple die (extracted from the murex) as well as for its glassmaking, and Phoenicia itself was widely credited in antiquity as the birthplace of glass production. Although now known to be false, this sentiment was echoed as late as the seventh century AD by Isidore of Seville, at which time Tyre was still a major producer of glass:

In a part of Syria which is called Phoenicia, there is a swamp close to Judaea, around the base of Mt. Carmel, from which the Bellus River arises...whose sands are purified from contamination by the torrent's flow. The story is that here a ship of natron [i.e., sodium carbonate] merchants had been shipwrecked; when they were scattered about on the shore preparing food and no stones were at hand for propping up their pots, they brought lumps of natron from the ship. The sand of the shore became mixed with the burning natron and translucent streams of a new liquid flowed forth: and this was the origin of glass. (Isidore of Seville, Etymologies XVI.16)