gold leaf

Ingredients

gold, manganese oxide

Preparation Steps

Original Recipe Text

The chunky gold leaf tesserae found at Samarra were constructed using a base of transparent glass with a greenish tinge (p. 7). Significant amounts of manganese oxide (1% - 2%) were added to the raw glass mixture to serve as a decolourant, neutralizing the natural iron impurities to achieve a clear substrate for the gold (p. 7).

Evidence

"all of the coloured architectural glasses such as dark purple and green drawn tesserae, chunky gold leaf tesserae and millefiori tiles (Fig 1C and S1 Table)."

Remarks

These tesserae belong to 'plant ash group 2', a Mesopotamian production group that utilized quartz-rich sand as a silica source (p. 7). This represents a more economical variant of glass production compared to the high-quality colourless glasses of 'group 1' which used crushed quartz pebbles (p. 7). The use of these reflective materials was intended to create luminous, symbolically charged walls in the Abbasid palaces (p. 2, 7).