Manual of Egyptian Archaeology and Guide to the Study of Antiquities in Egypt | Page 6

rows at
a little distance apart, to dry in the sun (fig. I). A careful brickmaker
will leave them thus for half a day, or even for a whole day, after which
the bricks are piled in stacks in such wise that the air can circulate
freely among them; and so they remain for a week or two before they
are used. More frequently, however, they are exposed for only a few
hours to the heat of the sun, and the building is begun while they are
yet damp. The mud, however, is so tenacious that, notwithstanding this
carelessness, they are not readily put out of shape. The outer faces of
the bricks become disintegrated by the action of the weather, but those
in the inner part of the wall remain intact, and are still separable. A
good modern workman will easily mould a thousand bricks a day, and
after a week's practice he may turn out 1,200, 1,500, or even 1,800. The
ancient workmen, whose appliances in no wise differed from those of
the present day, produced equally satisfactory results. The dimensions
they generally adopted were 8.7 x 4.3 x 5.5 inches for ordinary bricks,
or 15.0 x 7.1 x 5.5 for a larger size (Note 3), though both larger and

smaller are often met with in the ruins. Bricks issued from the royal
workshops were sometimes stamped with the cartouches of the
reigning monarch; while those made in private factories bore on the
side a trade mark in red ochre, a squeeze of the moulder's fingers, or the
stamp of the maker. By far the greater number have, however, no
distinctive mark. Burnt bricks were not often used before the Roman
period (Note 4), nor tiles, either flat or curved. Glazed bricks appear to
have been the fashion in the Delta. The finest specimen that I have seen,
namely, one in the Gizeh Museum, is inscribed in black ink with the
cartouches of Rameses III. The glaze of this brick is green, but other
fragments are coloured blue, red, yellow, or white.
The nature of the soil does not allow of deep foundations. It consists of
a thin bed of made earth, which, except in large towns, never reaches
any degree of thickness; below this comes a very dense humus,
permeated by slender veins of sand; and below this again--at the level
of infiltration-- comes a bed of mud, more or less soft, according to the
season. The native builders of the present day are content to remove
only the made earth, and lay their foundations on the primeval soil; or,
if that lies too deep, they stop at a yard or so below the surface. The old
Egyptians did likewise; and I have never seen any ancient house of
which the foundations were more than four feet deep. Even this is
exceptional, the depth in most cases being not more than two feet. They
very often did not trouble themselves to cut trenches at all; they merely
levelled the space intended to be covered, and, having probably
watered it to settle the soil, they at once laid the bricks upon the surface.
When the house was finished, the scraps of mortar, the broken bricks,
and all the accumulated refuse of the work, made a bed of eight inches
or a foot in depth, and the base of the wall thus buried served instead of
a foundation. When the new house rose on the ruins of an older one
decayed by time or ruined by accident, the builders did not even take
the trouble to raze the old walls to the ground. Levelling the surface of
the ruins, they-built upon them at a level a few feet higher than before:
thus each town stands upon one or several artificial mounds, the tops of
which may occasionally rise to a height of from sixty to eighty feet
above the surrounding country. The Greek historians attributed these
artificial mounds to the wisdom of the kings, and especially to Sesostris,
who, as they supposed, wished to raise the towns above the inundation.

Some modern writers have even described the process, which they
explain thus:--A cellular framework of brick walls, like a huge
chess-board, formed the substructure, the cells being next filled in with
earth, and the houses built upon this immense platform (Note 5).
[Illustration: Fig. 2.--Ancient house with vaulted floors, against the
northern wall of the great temple of Medinet Habù]
[Illustration: Fig. 3.--Plan of three-quarters of the town of Hat-Hotep-
Ûsertesen (Kahûn), built for the accommodation of the officials and
workmen employed in connection with the pyramid of Ûsertesen II. at
Illahûn. The workmen's quarters are principally on the west, and
separated from the eastern part of the town by a thick wall. At the
south-west corner, outside the town, stood