I found this story interesting because it shows that branding is something that is a recent development it’s been around for centuries. HIghlighted today is a story from Gizmodo about how a glassblower in the 1st Century branded his glass-works…
Ennion made me. Those were the words molded on glass vases and jars that survived centuries of dust, change, and trauma all over the classical world. But who was Ennion? And how, in the early years of the world, did his glassware become so famous?
We don’t know much about him: He was a craftsman in modern-day Lebanon, and a revolutionary one at that. Ennion was the first (known) glassmaker to blow glass into a mold, forming the molten glass into fine decorative details and unusual shapes. This was unheard of, and it made Ennion into a commercial phenomenon in the Roman world. His work has been discovered all over Europe and the Middle East, from “Israel to Spain,” according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose exhibition about Ennion runs until April this year. There are even fake copies of his work made by other shops.
This just goes to show that many things that we think are recent inventions go back to the earliest time of humankind.
