The origins of glass blowing begins with the Assyrians. About 1000 BC.

The glass blowing lore is that the Assyrians were traders plying the Mediterranean and ran into some harsh weather one night.

The wind was so strong that they intentionally beached their boat on a sandy North African beach. They were carrying a load of soda bricks from a trading partner. The wind was so strong that they couldn't keep their fire lit to keep warm. They stacked up a ring of the soda bricks as a windbreak around the fire.

No, this isn’t where the glass blowing started. However, the fire was built on a sandy beach that combined with howling wind and soda bricks.

When the Assyrians woke the next morning their soda bricks were melted and the wood ash from their fire combined with the silica in the beach sand at blast furnace temperatures they found a solid layer of glass where their fire once was. Up until this point the only glass yet made was when lightning stuck sand usually in the desert. The Assyrians took their new found product back home to try and duplicate it. Was this the start of Glass Blowing? Well not just yet. While the technique of glass blowing was left for a later time, this augured the start of glass production which eventually led to the fine art of Glass Blowing. It was not until around the end of the 1st century BC in the Eastern Mediterranean, that a new method, glass blowing would revolutionise glass production.