The Glassblower of Garin
After the Hellenistic period, in 69 BC, Erzurum acquired new masters: the Romans. They established themselves on the Armenian Highland and turned it into a frontier zone of their eastern policy.
The city, known then as Karin—or Garin—held an important place at the crossing of the roads from Cappadocia into Armenia and from the northern Black Sea coast down into Mesopotamia. The region entered Rome’s orbit after the wars against Mithridates and Tigranes, and thereafter became one of the key strong points in the east.
A bottle with a face
The Romans left behind not only fortifications and roads but the objects of daily life. Here is a glass unguentarium in the form of a head. The anthropomorphic shape makes it particularly expressive.
Vessels of this kind held perfumes, oils or cosmetics, and served as grave goods, or as containers for the scents that accompanied the soul into the next world. They are found across the whole empire, from Britain to Egypt.
A word you use every day
Unguentarium comes from Latin unguentum, an ointment, from the verb unguere, “to anoint, to smear with oil.” And that verb has been extraordinarily productive in English.
Unguent is the direct descendant. Ointment is the same word arriving through French. Unctuous—of a clergyman or a salesman—is what happens when you apply the metaphor to a manner rather than to skin: oily. And to anoint a king is to perform, with considerable ceremony, exactly the operation this bottle was designed to supply.
Which puts a small Roman scent flask at the head of a distinguished family. Coronations, salves for chapped hands and insincere compliments all turn out to be the same activity, etymologically speaking.
Glass as an imperial technology
Glass in the Roman world became a symbol of civilisation: light, transparent, elegant, it bound distant provinces into a single cultural fabric.
There is a reason for its sudden ubiquity. Glassblowing was invented somewhere on the Syro-Palestinian coast around the middle of the first century BC, and it changed everything: a craftsman with a blowpipe could turn out in an hour what had previously taken days of grinding and casting. Glass went, within a generation or two, from a luxury for palaces to the Roman equivalent of the plastic bottle—cheap, everywhere, and thrown away without a thought.
At the top of the range, however, it was still doing things that are difficult to explain even now. Anyone in London can go and look at the Lycurgus Cup in the British Museum: fourth-century Roman glass which appears jade green when lit from the front and wine red when lit from behind, an effect produced by gold and silver particles a few dozen nanometres across. Nobody knows whether the Romans understood what they had done or simply got lucky with a batch.
So Roman culture reached Erzurum by roads and armies, by trade and by craft. But Rome was not eternal either. On its eastern edge, here in Karin, there would later arise the Byzantine city of Theodosiopolis—and the story of the place would take a new turn.
