normal woman with a normal amount of hobbies

Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it.  That would leak out seemingly at random no less.  Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.

Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness.  Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation.  Also beads.  Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.

For one, the precursor to true glass was fritware (also known as faience in certain contexts), and we have a fairly sizeable body of evidence for fritware primarily being used as a decorative material, often as a substitute for ornate stones and minerals, particularly as a substitute for turquoise in Egypt.

And the earliest examples of true glass that we see are often treated the same way, like a stone. Made into beads yes, but also carved into sculptures and decorative inlays and settings.

Furthermore, the first glass vessels were usually core-formed, which means they were built by coiling heated glass around a core of sand and clay, fusing it, then scraping out the core. This fundamentally creates a porous interior surface embedded with clay and sand, retaining the same problems as unglazed clay vessels in terms of sanitation, albeit not quite as severely.

And notice how I said unglazed, glazing techniques for pottery were developed at around the same time as the very earliest examples of simple glass objects. Glazing provides all the sanitary benefits of glass, while requiring significantly less labor, significantly less fuel, and significantly cheaper materials than glass, in a medium that is also less likely to break. Glass for most of its early history was Incredibly expensive to produce, and it’s not until around the 1st century BCE that that development of glassblowing makes glassware cheap enough to compete with clay goods (and even then, we continue to see plenty of clay, stone, and metal vessels persist).

From the evidence we have, it seems much more likely that the driving force for the development of glassworking in its early history was for its aesthetic and decorative value. Which makes sense, humans like when things look pretty.

And while this wasn’t said here, I feel the need to address it since it’s absolutely everywhere elsewhere in the reblogs of this post: No, glass is not a superviscous or supercooled fluid. It does not flow appreciably on any observable timescales, and plenty of unambiguously solid materials flow to the same or greater degree than it (we are talking nanometers at Most over billions of years, this does not a liquid make)

- cheerful chatter with vegetable market people so that they give you twice the amount of potatoes you asked for.