2025 Poster Session

The Presentation discusses a special case of an archaeological glass object from the early Islamic era that was extracted from the excavations of the American Research Center in Fustat, Egypt, in 1966 and is currently in the storerooms of the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo.

The glass dish appears to be made up of two layers of glass, but this is not true. However, this appearance required studying the reason, and we find that the glass object has glass corrosion and that part of the glass layer has fallen off and is missing, which makes the shape of the object appear to be made up of two layers of glass.

When we see the shape of the glass corrosion on the object, we find that it is consistent, except for some places on the object that appear black as spots. This necessitated a study to identify the reason for the difference in the shape and color of these places. SEM with EDX were used to identify this reason and to study the components of the glass dish. A USB Digital Microscope was also used to examine the surface of the glass dish, including the glass corrosion, as well as the places of the fallen parts on the dish, which confirms the presence of fallen parts of a layer of glass.

When the glass dish was discovered in the excavations of the American Research Center in the late twentieth century, it was found to be broken to many parts and there is a missing part, so it was previously restored. However, recently, parts of the creature were found to be separated from the previous conservation, and there was a space between its assembled parts. UV photography was used to identify previous conservations, as well as a sample was taken from the material of the previous assembly and analyzed using ATR analysis, and it was identified. The previous assembly was disassembled and reassembled the object, the previous yellowed consolidation material was cleaned and removed, a consolidation material was applied to the corrosion glass parts of the object, and Paraloid was used for the consolidation, and the glass plate was preserved in a storage box that was specially made for it from acid-free cardboard.

The glass of the dish is transparent and has decorations, and therefore these decorations do not appear clearly except at specific lighting angles. These decorations were identified specifically and drawn using Adobe Illustrator, and the shape of the decorations for the missing part was also imagined.

It is worth noting that this archaeological glass dish was participated in one of the temporary museum exhibitions after it was studied and restored.