Understanding of ancient materials

In theory, these could not fail to locate

any conspicuous architectural remains. However, today, with labor costs

enormously increased, they would be prohibitively expensive and involve a great

deal of work, which would be likely to prove pointlessly repetitive.

The truth is that the disposal of trial

excavations, their area and shape, can only be determined by practical

considerations, depending on inferences made from the conformation of the mound

itself. In addition, the nature of these can only be adequately explained by

citing a variety of practical examples, as it is intended to do in the pages,

which follow.

However, for the moment it may be well to

return to the subject of wall tracing and the understanding of ancient

materials.

In the very early stages of community life

in the Near East, walls were often built of pies, which is the equivalent of

the South American term, adobe; that is, simple clay mixed with straw and built

up in convenient lumps or slabs. After this came the almost universal use of

sun dried mud bricks, prismatic in shape but of widely varying dimensions. Mud

brick, as is now generally known, is made with the aid of a four-sided wooden

mound, having no top or bottom.

Into this, the tempered clay is dumped and

the surplus normally smoothed off with the side of the hand. The mound is then

lifted and the brick left to dry in the sun. It is this concluding process,

which sets a geographical limit to countries in which mud bricks can be used,

since cloudless skies and hot sunshine are indispensable to their manufacture.

In almost all countries of the Near East such conditions are favorable during

at least a part of the year, and up to comparatively recent times, kiln baked

bricks have consequently been considered a luxury.

It is for this reason that today, in those

countries, a proper understanding of the nature and uses of this material,

particularly in Iraq, has become as indispensable to a twentieth century

excavator as it was to the architects of antiquity. In neighboring countries where

stone is available, a wall may have stone foundations or even be built up to a

height of several feet in stone before the brick begins. In Anatolia

particularly, the structure above this may be a framework of wooden beams,

forming panels, which are filled with mud brick. In all cases the wall is

finished inside and out with a plastering of mud and straw. Outside at least,

this has to be renewed every year.