Ivory-work resembles basketry in that it was brought quickly to perfection, but, unlike basketry, it began and has continued as a luxury craft. In Egypt, Phoenicia, Crete, and Greece alike, it was used especially for decorative knife-handles, toilet articles, and statuettes, and in furniture for panels, as at the tomb of Tutankhamen, though we also hear of Solomon's 'great throne of ivory' and the luxurious ivory beds denounced by the prophets. Ivory combs and inlaid trinket-boxes were made in Syria 3,000 years ago, much as they are made today, while no modern hand has surpassed the skillfulness of certain small Cretan figures.

The methods of the craft were clearly handed down from father to son. This was the case even in modern times, when the first exploration of the Ivory Coast, west of what is now Ghana, by the seamen of Dieppe gave that port an ivory-carving industry which endured for 500 years. Ivory panels were commonly attached to a wooden base by small tenons, which were fastened in a mortise with a pin, and were often marked on the back to facilitate assembly. The pins themselves were usually of ivory, as they still are, because metal tends to corrode and so cause stains. The work was apparently done with small saws, chisels, and drills which had bits of a type still used to place the pegs for piano-strings. A simple form of lathe assisted ivory-working in Asia, but it was the Romans who first employed the file. The high cost of the material encouraged careful workmanship, jointing of small pieces to make composite figures, and the plugging of flaws.

The supply of wood was not restricted in anything like the same degree as that of ivory, but accurate work was not possible without close-grained timber such as was not to be found in quantity in Egypt. Cedar, cypress, and yew were therefore common Egyptian imports from Syria and the Lebanon, while the timber tribute paid by the Sudan gives us the name of ebony, which is Egyptian. With this limitation, we may say that wood-working as understood today was practiced from the time when copper tools were introduced into Egypt, about 4000 years B.C.; the standards reached by the Egyptians were not equaled by Europeans until the Renaissance.

Important works of art in wood seem to have been designed either by priests or by other educated persons attached to the court. But the craftsmen appear to have had a many-sided skill in carpentry, joinery, and inlaying ( Fig. 26 ). Pull-saws and bow-drills were used, and the final smoothing was done with sandstone rubbers. In the earliest times parts of furniture were fastened together by lashing with thongs, but by about 2000 B.C. the methods of making a joint were very far advanced. The glue of 1600 B.C. resembles that of the present day, and was presumably made similarly by boiling down bones, skins, and hooves of animals. The tomb of Tutankhamen displays such refinements as pegs capped with granulated gold buttons, which were used decoratively to fasten an ivory veneer to a casket; veneering was much practiced to economize in the more valuable woods.

The development of fine wood-work among the Egyptians seems to have proceeded from statuary to the making of strong-boxes and chests; for these purposes the reeds in many ways employed were obviously unsuitable. With an interest in furniture came the problem of devising bed- and chair-frames to take the strain of a separately woven mattress or seat. Apart from furniture, there was also the exacting task of making corn measures, held together by hoops of bent wood. A royal tomb dating from about 2690 B.C. shows us a craftsmanship that was already traditional. A thousand years later, the royal tombs of Egypt yield us amazing coffins of cedar wood, carved to a uniform thickness of 1 1 / 2 in., which not only show the human form on the outside, but have every contour repeated on the inside in reverse form with complete exactitude. A little later we have such astonishing, if florid, triumphs as the deeply carved furniture of Tutankhamen, including an ebony bed, shaped to allow for sagging of the woven mattress, which has not warped appreciably in all the intervening centuries.

Paleolithic man used the skins of the animals he killed, or whose bodies he found, for clothing and, to some extent, for tents and containers. But we do not know when man first learned to make durable leather by scraping and treating the skins with fats or in other ways, which gave him a ready-made equivalent of a textile material that had also some of the qualities of pottery. There is plenty of archaeological evidence for the early use of skin-scrapers of bone and stone, but the desirability of preserving only the central layer--as distinct from the epidermis, to which the hair or wool is attached, and the layer of fat or flesh below--would be learned only over a long period of time, and to find a satisfactory method of preserving it would take even longer. The Eskimos still cure their skins by smoking them, and it is said that the teeth of their women are often worn to the gums in the preliminary task of chewing the skin so as to soften it beforehand. Other primitive methods of preservation are salting, sun-drying, and the working of fats into the tightly-stretched hide, a method described in the Iliad. Tawing was a method widely used in ancient Egypt, and still important in the Middle Ages, which involved the application of alum, often combined with salt, to produce a stiff white leather which was then worked over a curved frame to soften it. The most important process, however, employs tannin, and is thought to have originated from the steeping of skins in forest pools, or from the practice of vegetable dyeing; the main source was oak bark or oak galls. The tanning was done by soaking the skins in a series of pits or vats, the oldest, and therefore the weakest, liquor being used first; in ancient times the whole process might take fifteen months.

Finishing processes were of three kinds. For durability, sole leather was hammered, and harness-leather curried--that is to say, impregnated with grease while still damp after tanning. For appearance, goatskin was rubbed to produce what we call morocco leather, and the same process produced the creasing of willow calf. For coloring, there was the red produced from the insects of the kermes oak, black from copperas, and the use of many vegetable dyes.

From the Mesolithic stage onwards, leather played an enormous part in the ancient economy. Leather of varying degrees of hardness and suppleness served many of the purposes to which pottery and textiles were later adapted. The leather bucket of the type still used in the shaduf, the stitched leather play-ball, the dagger-sheath, the leather jerkin, and many types of glove, sandal, and shoe illustrate a continuity reaching to our own times, which was perhaps greater with leather-working than with any other important handicraft. A Greek bowl shows us a shoe-maker of the sixth century B.C. cutting his leather: the half-moon knife which he is using had been in use in Egypt a thousand years before; a knife of identical pattern is to be seen in the hands of the shoe-maker of today. Down to 1900 at least, the saddler's was another very conservative leatherworking trade of fundamental importance to society.

Glass is a rigid non-crystalline substance, suitable for many of the uses of pottery but having the special quality of transparency or at least translucency. Its earliest use was for the glazing--that is, coating with glass--of other objects, while in more recent times it has provided windows, mirrors, and the essential parts of optical instruments. Glass was generally made by heating a clean mixture of soda, lime, and sand (or ground flint) until it fused into a vitreous fluid, requiring to be slowly cooled or annealed to prevent cracking and crystallization. The history of glass resembles that of leather inasmuch as the best processes and products of antiquity were not substantially improved upon until quite recent days. The glazing of soap-stone beads dates in Egypt from about 4000 B.C., and the making of small solid glass objects, which may be regarded as imitations of precious stones, dates from about 2500 B.C. both in Egypt and in Mesopotamia. Glass vessels, however, do not make their appearance before about 1500 B.C., while the technique of glass-blowing, which we tend to think of as the fundamental process of glass manufacture, was new, but spreading very rapidly, at the dawn of the Christian era.

Glaze was composed of the same constituents as ancient glass, but with a larger proportion of sand and a smaller proportion of lime. It was usually applied as a moist powder and then fired. For glass-making proper we have very little evidence as to how the two basic processes --the heating and raking of the raw materials to get rid of some of the gas and to mix them effectively, known as fritting, and the process of melting and annealing--were conducted originally. Soda-glass becomes fluid at about 1,000 degrees C., which can be achieved with a charcoal fire and is, we have noted, the maximum temperature attained by ancient potters. Potash-glass, then less common, melts at a rather lower temperature. With either type, bubbles of gas often remained because the available heat had been insufficient to expel them, and the glass might also crystallize and become brittle if the cooling in the annealing oven were not slow enough. Glass made from pure soda, lime, and sand is colorless, but is colored by even small traces of certain mineral impurities--a fact of which advantage was taken from an early date: copper, for example, gives a deep blue-green. Most sands contain compounds of iron, which impart a greenish-brown color to glass; the fine colorless glasses of antiquity, especially those of Alexandria, must have been made by using pure silver sands.

The first glass objects, including some quite elaborate figurines, were shaped in clay moulds, while seals and even larger articles were made by grinding or carving the glass, treated as if it were stone. But the general practice for making a glass vessel was to dip a core of sand, tied up in a cloth bag, into a crucible of molten glass, roll it into shape on a stone bench, perhaps add blobs and rings of different colored glass to the outside for decoration, and to pour away the sand from the finished vessel when cold. This last technique probably grew out of the practice of making glass beads by surrounding a wire core with viscous glass, withdrawing the wire when the glass had cooled, and cutting the product into appropriate sections.

Such was the glass-making technique of the second millennium B.C. By about 1350 B.C. Egypt had factories producing glass in quantity; the art was spread, no doubt by migratory workers, all over the Near East, but has left no traces north or west of Greece. After an apparent interruption which lasted for some 400 years, glass vessels become common again in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., when they were brought by Phoenician traders to the Atlantic coast, while the making of glass beads spread across Europe, perhaps even as far as Britain. . .

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