The colour, the thickness of the glass and the style of cutting are typical of the Iranian glass houses of the 5/6th centuries. The usual form of drinking vessel was the heavy hemispherical beaker carved with rows of concave roundels. While the stem goblet was fairly common in Classical Antiquity from the 4th century onwards the form is rarely found in Sasanian Iran. One example is a stem cup with relief-carved facetts ( Fukai, S., Study of Iranian Art and Archaelogy: Glassware and Metalwork, Tokyo, 1968, pl. 23, fig. 27). The form was adopted early in the Islamic period in Egypt and Syria as a drinking vessel ( Jenkins, M., Islamic Glass, A Brief History, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1986, pl. 16) and as a lamp (Pinder Wilson, R.H. and Scanlon, G., "Glass Finds from Fustat 1965-71", Journal of Glass Studies, XV, 1973, p. 22, figs. 20 and 21). Our stem-cup is of Persian origin and transitional between the Sasanian and early Islamic periods.