Hilary Cool wasn't looking for anything unusual when she opened her archive last summer. She was sorting through old unpublished glass reports when one drawing stopped her.
The previous year, Cool had spent time working on Roman glass from Sudan and Egypt and had grown familiar with a particular kind of bottle. When she reached the Tanner Row files, from a York site she had cataloged decades earlier, one object suddenly looked different.
A small glass flask excavated from Tanner Row in York between 1983 and 1984 was initially thought to be a Roman unguent bottle, the kind used to hold perfumes, oils, and other liquids. But writing in the journal Britannia, Cool, a specialist in Roman small finds and vessel glass, now argues it was not a perfume flask at all, but a kohl bottle.
For millennia, people in Egypt and Sudan lined their eyes with kohl, a dark cosmetic stored in a very different kind of container. Archaeologists usually find these bottles in Egypt and Nubia, which makes the York example stand out. Cool notes that, to her knowledge, no glass kohl bottle had previously been identified among the vessel glass of Roman Britain.
The bottle came from a late second- to early third-century context, making it roughly 1,800 years old. Its presence in York may suggest that someone with Egyptian connections lived in the city at the edge of the Roman Empire.
“Glancing at the drawings, I had a ‘good heavens, it is a kohl bottle’ moment,” Cool told Discover.
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An Egyptian Kohl Bottle Found in Roman York
Remnants of a class kohl bottle, likely from Egypt, that was uncovered in Roman York.
(Image Courtesy of Hilary CooL/COOL 2026)
The difference between a kohl bottle and an ordinary unguent flask is subtle from the outside but clearer inside. Standard Roman perfume bottles usually had rounded, expanded reservoirs to hold liquid. Kohl bottles had narrow, cylindrical reservoirs because the makeup was stored in solid form and applied with a stick, which was also used to prepare it.
The Tanner Row bottle had that same narrow interior, unlike most unguent bottles found in York from the late second and third centuries. What once looked like a distorted perfume flask now looks much more like an Egyptian container.
Cool said the realization came down partly to timing. When she first cataloged the Tanner Row glass, she was not yet familiar with Egyptian material.
“By last summer, I was so familiar with the Egyptian glass that it immediately seemed a possibility. It is the working of serendipity — things came together,” she shared with Discover.
Who Brought It to York?
The bottle likely arrived in York as a personal possession rather than as a traded item. Kohl bottles rarely traveled beyond Egypt and Nubia, making regular trade in kohl an unlikely explanation. Instead, someone probably carried it with them.
The find came from deposits that also contained military debris, possibly discarded from the legionary fortress across the river. That context leaves open the possibility that the owner was connected to the army.
Roman York was not an isolated northern outpost. Its military community connected it to the wider empire, and by the early third century, Emperor Septimius Severus had brought his imperial court to the city. Other evidence, including a temple dedication to Serapis and North African-style pottery, points to people and influences arriving from beyond Britain.
Kohl was not only a women’s cosmetic in Egypt. Men used it as well, and the number of kohl bottles found in rubbish dumps outside Roman forts in Egypt suggests soldiers wore it too.
“People — reenactors, etc. — don’t normally think of Roman soldiers wandering around wearing eyeliner,” Cool told Discover. “This little bottle suggests they should widen their horizons!”
The Tanner Row flask may therefore preserve a surprisingly personal detail from Roman Britain. Among the people moving through York may have been someone who carried an Egyptian grooming habit all the way to northern Britain.
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Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from a study published in Britannia: An Egyptian at York?
- This article references information from York Archaeology Research: A Kohl Bottle from Tanner Row?
