From the Levant to a Moscow Museum: Mould-Blown Flasks in the State Historical Museum: Archaeological Attribution and Collection History

<jats:p>The State Historical Museum (Moscow) houses, among its collections, cultural treasures that arrived in the USSR as compensatory restitution from Germany. Among them are three glass flasks, which are examined in this article. Judging by the inscriptions on the surviving labels, the hexagonal bottles came from Jerusalem (one from the Temple Series) and Kerch (one from the Dionysiac Series). Thus, the first vessel adds to the corpus of Temple Series flasks found in the Syro-Palestinian region and, more specifically, in Jerusalem, and the second adds to the very small corpus of hexagonal flasks found in the Northern Black Sea region, which includes only three other vessels: one flask of the Dionysiac Series from Nymphaeum and two flasks of the Temple Series from Panticapaeum and Gorgippia. The provenance of the bicephalic flask is unknown. However, it is interesting as a representative specimen of a flask blown in a mould of a much later generation. The large number of finds of such vessels testifies to their widespread popularity in the 3rd—5th centuries. They were apparently produced by many workshops that made moulds by taking impressions of the vessels at their disposal. The flask is made of glass of Levantine origin. Some features of its chemical composition suggest that it cannot predate the fourth century AD.</jats:p>