Aspects of the Production of Cobalt‐blue Glass in Egypt

Cobalt‐blue glass of the Near and Middle Eastern Late Bronze Age has long been recognized as compositionally distinct from other contemporary glasses (Sayre 1967; Lilyquist et al. 1993). It has been suggested recently by Shortland and Tite (2000) that this chemical distinction reflects the use of Egyptian raw materials for making these glasses, different from those used to make glass in Mesopotamia, or its manufacture by Mesopotamian workmen, possibly in Egypt. This assumed that cobalt‐bearing alum from the Western Oases and mineral natron from the Wadi Natrun were used for the cobalt‐blue glass, while the other, probably Mesopotamian, glasses were made using plant ash as the main alkali source. This note discusses some technical aspects of the possible ways in which the cobalt could have been added to the glass, and how this relates to the likely raw glass used in its making. Combining earlier suggestions by Noll (1981) and Brill in Lilyquist et al. (1993), an alternative explanation of the chemical characteristics is suggested, maintaining that all the glasses under discussion were made using plant ash. Differences in alkali concentrations probably reflect different soil and plant chemistries, and the colorant was probably added to the glass after being precipitated from the alum as a complex cobalt aluminium hydroxide.     

La métropolisation à l’aune de la ‘loi’ taille/rang : Le cas Canadien, 1971–2001

Metropolization and the rank/size ’law‘: the Canadian case, 1971–2001 There is currently considerable interest in the process of metropolization. One of the consequences of this process, observed by numerous researchers, is the slower growth and even decline of small and medium cities. From a theoretical point of view, this process is compatible with endogenous growth theory: metropolitan areas offer economic actors certain key factors (access to information, to global networks, etc.) that smaller cities cannot. Concurrently, however, there is a resurgence of interest in Zipf's law and, more generally, in the stability of urban hierarchies. These two bodies of work appear to be in contradiction. However, using Canadian data from 1971 to 2001, we show that whilst metropolization is indeed occurring, this is not necessarily incompatible with a regular urban hierarchy. Indeed, if it is assumed that Zipf's rank‐size rule applies to urban systems in stable socio‐economic contexts, and that this regularity can be disrupted by fundamental social and economic changes, then the current wave of metropolization can be interpreted as a re‐ordering of cities in the face of the major social and economic changes of the 1980s and 1990s, which may eventually lead to a new equilibrium compatible with Zipf's law.