In Egypt during the Ptolemaic period (330–305 bc) Alexandria came to the fore in glassmaking. By about the 1st century bc, which saw the beginnings of glass as known today, it had become preeminent in certain glass techniques. Alexandria inherited and perfected the manipulation of coloured glass rods to make composite canes, which, when cut across, revealed a design (mosaic glass). Slices from such canes could be arranged side by side to produce repetitive patterns. When, as often happens, the cane slices show starry or flowerlike designs, the resultant glass is called millefiori (“thousand flowers”). An Alexandrian technical speciality more important for the future, however, was molding, glass being pressed into, or powdered glass melted in, a mold. A combination of this process with the millefiori technique produced bowls with variegated designs in infinite variety. Sometimes glass of various colours was irregularly compounded to give the effect of a natural veined stone; occasionally enclosures of gold leaf in the glass simulated the glitter of natural pyrites (aventurine glass). Bowls were often finished around the rim with a cordon made of a clear glass thread twisted with one of opaque white. Sometimes such cable threads were themselves coiled round and round from a centre to make a bowl of lacy appearance, with the opaque white glass threads apparently set in a clear colourless matrix.

All these pieces might be finished with a fire polish by returning them to the furnace, but many mold-pressed glasses were, in fact, given a rotary polish, either by means of a spinning wheel fed with abrasives or by a process similar to lathe turning, in which the object spins and the tool is stationary. Similar equipment probably produced the numerous pieces that give every appearance of having been cut from a solid block of glass or at least from a thick, mold-pressed blank. Such pieces (usually flat dishes or two-handled cups) follow the contemporary forms of pottery and metalwork. Wheel engraving appears to have become an Alexandrian specialty around the 1st century bc and probably continued so throughout the two succeeding centuries. Alexandrian wheel engravers produced not only massive cut shapes, but also intaglio (incised) and relief surface decoration, the latter by laboriously grinding back the surface of the glass to form a background for the design. Simple motifs such as lotus buds or lotus flowers were produced in this way and occasionally more elaborate figural compositions were also done. Other specialties attributed to Alexandria were enamel painting (pigments mixed with a glassy flux were fused to the surface of the glass vessel by a separate firing) and an extraordinary technique of sandwiching a gold leaf etched with a design between two layers of clear glass.

The most important innovation in the whole history of glass manufacture was blowing. Perhaps by a stroke of pure inventive genius it was perceived that glass on the end of a hollow metal tube could be blown into a mold as easily as it had theretofore been pressed in. The next stage was to use molds for forms, such as flasks, that could not be made by pressing. Finally, it was realized that the glass bulb on the end of the blowpipe could be shaped freehand to any form desired, and handles, feet, and decorative elements could be added at will. This liberating discovery, probably made during the 1st century bc, gave rise to the astonishing growth of the glass industry in Roman imperial times. In addition to the luxury vessels of types already described, which were produced with an elaboration of skill that astonishes and often baffles the modern technician, commercial containers in great variety were mass-produced in common greenish glass on a scale that was not matched until the 19th century.

The discovery of glass blowing may well be credited to the Syrian glassworkers, since the first mold-blown glasses bear the signatures of Syrian masters and since the readily ductile Syrian soda glass was especially apt for this purpose. Syrian glassworkers, however, seem to have migrated wherever demand promised a ready market, and some masters of mold blowing appear to have moved to Italy early in the 1st century ad; in the course of that century Italy became an important glass-producing area. Glass engraving especially seems to have flourished there and particularly one form of the art—grinding through an opaque white layer to a darker ground (cameo glass). The most famous example of this exacting technique is the Portland vase, in the British Museum, London. The capacity of the Italian glass craftsman to surpass all earlier masters in work of the most complex character is seen in the so-called cage cups (diatreta), on which the design—usually a mesh of circles that touch one another, with or without a convivial inscription—is so undercut that it stands completely free of the body of the vessel, except for an occasional supporting strut. These cups were made perhaps at Aquileia and date from the 3rd and 4th centuries.

Parallel to the pottery industry, glassmaking spread from Italy to northern Gaul, in particular to the valleys of the Rhône and the Rhine. In Britain the industry was probably not of great importance. The Rhineland, however, became one of the great glassmaking areas of the Roman world (partly, it is thought, because of successive migrations of Near Eastern workers) and, although Rhenish glass is always recognizably Roman, several types of decorated glass were specialities of the district. Glasses decorated in serpentine patterns by threads trailed on and then pressed flat and notched are perhaps the most important and typical (Schlangenfadengläser). A considerable school of glass engraving also seems to have flourished, probably around Cologne. Although some engraving shows an impoverished linear style eked out by lines scratched with a hard stone point, some is executed by means of wheels sufficiently thick to permit rounded cuts corresponding to the modelling of the human figure, and simulating it when the piece is seen against the light. Both types of decoration flourished in the 3rd and 4th centuries.

In Egypt in the later centuries of the Roman epoch glass was in frequent use for tableware, but artistic standards were not high. Plain dishes, cups, bowls, and lamps are characteristic; the glass of such tablewares ranges from an almost colourless “metal” (basic glass) of good quality to a greenish brownish substance full of bubbles and impurities. Decoration in this late period is mainly restricted to a few rough-cut lines, an occasional group of coloured glass blobs on the lamps, or a zigzag trail of glass thread running between the lip and the shoulder of a vase. In Syria during the same period, however, this trailing technique, which was particularly suitable to the ductile Syrian material, was carried to extreme lengths—threads circling the body or neck of a vessel, a profusion of zigzags, and fantastically worked handles.

With the breakdown of the Roman Empire, glassmaking fared differently in different parts of the world. In the East, urban life continued relatively undisturbed, and glassmaking evolved in an unbroken progress into Islāmic times. In the northern provinces, however, glassmaking became an affair of small, often isolated, glasshouses working in the forests that supplied them with fuel. Relatively simple shapes were made of an impure greenish or yellowish material, and decoration was restricted to simple trails of thread. Considerable virtuosity, however, was displayed from c. 500 onward in the manufacture of the elaborate and fantastic Rüsselbecher (“elephant’s trunk, or claw beaker”) on which two superimposed rows of hollow, trunklike protrusions curve down to rejoin the wall of the vessel above a small button foot.

In the East, Syria appears to have continued its predilection for trailed and applied ornamentation. In Egypt the art of glass suffered a catastrophic decline; only small rough vessels of impure green or blue material were manufactured.