materialsGlassnazar boncuğu

The eye bead is the oldest thing here. Written documentation and extant beads date from as early as the 16th century BCE, and the design spread with glassmaking itself — Mesopotamia to Egypt, Carthage to Greece, Phoenicia to Persia, and right through the Roman imperial period. The account of the evil eye puts the same turn slightly differently: after glass-bead production got going around the eastern Mediterranean about 1500 BCE, blue-and-white concentric eye beads spread among Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Ottomans.

Egypt supplies the join. Beginning in the thirteenth century BCE, glass beads bearing eye-like spots were strung on necklaces together with wedjat amulets, and that pairing may be the origin of the modern nazar. Wedjat amulets themselves were cut in faience, glass, gold and semiprecious stones such as lapis lazuli, so the same drawer holds the drawn eye and the spotted bead side by side.

Glass and faience are cousins, not twins, and the British Museum's collection note is the clearest statement of the difference: glazed composition is related to glass, but glass is formed by completely fusing the ingredients in a liquid melted at high temperature, while Egyptian faience is a quartz body only partly fused and considerably more porous than glass proper.

Glass turns up where you would not look for it. Pazuzu heads were made chiefly of terracotta but also of bronze, iron, gold, glass and bone. At the Hermitage plantation in Nashville, Tennessee, archaeologists found hexagonal glass beads used by enslaved African Americans for fertility and other spiritual purposes, alongside blue beads, mojo hands and lucky roots in a slave cabin. English witch bottles start as salt-glazed stoneware and end as glass: the later ones are glass bottles and small glass vials, and the one dug from a threshold in Cornwall and shown on Antiques Roadshow in 2016 was glass.

Inference — glass is the reason this atlas can draw a timeline for the eye and cannot draw one for thread. Nothing about a bead is more durable than a stitch except the material. Where a tradition used both, the glass is what survived to be counted.

Melted, gathered on a rod, and dotted while soft: concentric circles or a teardrop in dark blue, white, light blue and black, sometimes rimmed in yellow or gold. Turkish sellers give the ingredients as part of the claim, not as a manufacturing note: "The bead is made of a mixture of molten glass, iron, copper, water, and salt, ingredients that are thought to shield people from evil."

Traditional production of the nazar boncuğu is now carried on at Nazarköy in Kemalpaşa, in İzmir province, using a few simple hand tools and mostly blue and white glass, and the Cultural Research Foundation runs research, documentation and documentary film work on it. Everywhere else the bead is factory output, sold by the tray at the Grand Bazaar, at Monastiraki, in airport shops and on phone cases. Whether a moulded bead is the same object as a lampworked one is argued by sellers and buyers alike; this record describes both the same way.