Sun-dried bricks

Bricks are the oldest manufactured building material in use. Sun-dried bricks were manufactured as eady as 6000 BC, and fired bricks were used during the Middle Ages. Today s bricks differ very Htde except in the efficiency of manufacture they ate stiU made from clay or shale, a clay-based sedimentary rock that is kiln-fired. 

Digging, collecting, and mixing the raw materials and then molding and drying the shaped mud are the main stages involved in making sun-dried brick. The dug-out clay, sometimes exposed for some time to the atmosphere... 

Babylonian Pottery.—In their construction from sun-dried bricks almost identical with those that wore... 

Evidence indicates that the ancient people of India from as early as 4000 BC were well acquainted with the production of building materials such as lime and plaster. By using crude equipment they fashioned the materials they needed, some of which have lasted until the present day. Present-day methods used in India probably resemble those used in ancient times. In the production of bricks, it is still not uncommon to find that sun-dried bricks are heaped or stacked in piles alternating with coal and arranged in the form of a beehive oven for firing. 

BC houses are built in Jericho which have a stone foundation, and half meter thick walls built from sun-dried bricks... 

Although sun-dried clay vessels had probably existed for some time, the introduction of fired ceramic pots, created by baking clay in hot ashes, appeared around 20,000 B.C.E. The fired pot was stronger and less porous than pots made of dried clay. Pots could be used for storage, cooking, and even holding fire. So useful were ceramic pots and jars that they were, along with clay bricks, the first mass-produced objects. 

A BRICK or building material of sun dried CLAY or earth and straw. A structure made of adobe BRICKS. 

Adobe brick n. Large, roughly molded, sun dried clay brick of varying sizes. 

Adobe. Mud used in tropical countries for making sun-dried (unfired) bricks the term is also applied to the bricks themselves. 

The predominance of different building materials and their associated technologies at different times seem to have both reflected and affected contemporary conditions. In the Middle East brick-making developed from sun-dried to fired to glazed to... 

Much later, around 7500 BC, man discovered the possibility of extracting new materials from the earth, such as mud, which could be transformed by blending it with straw and sun drying. Later, c.5000 BC, bricks started to be made in kilns, giving rise to one of the strongest and cheapest building materials. 

Starch (Greek, amylon, Latin, amylum), is said by Dios-corides and Pliny to be made from wheat, the best coming from Egypt and Crete. It was prepared by soaking the grain in water about five times until thoroughly softened, the water finally drawn off and the wheat trodden out. The starch thus separated is washed, sieved and dried in the sun on new bricks. It must be dried quickly as when wet it soon sours. 

Later man started to build with blocks of dried clay. The first (baked) bricks were found in and near the area which is now called the Middle East. Catal Hiiyiik used to be a city on the Anatolia plateau in the centre of Turkey. According to archeologists it probably dates from approximately 8300 BC. For reasons as yet unknown the city was abandoned at around 5600 BC. Its houses had cornerposts of wood and cross beams. The rest of the wall consisted of loam bricks. However, loam has the annoying property that it disintegrates easily in a humid atmosphere. For that reason the houses needed to be repaired after every rainy season. At approximately 8000 BC a people in Jericho built round houses of hand-made loam bricks which were dried in the sun. Around 7500 BC people already knew how to make mortar. They probably heated limestone and mixed the thus formed burned lime with sand and water. In that case the following reactions occur ... 

Starch,—The earliest preparation of starch was no doubt made from wheat, and was called amylum by the Greeks, since it was not obtained by grinding in a mill as flour is. Dioscorides states that the best kind of starch flour is obtained from Cretan or ICgyptian wheat. The grain was steeped hi water to soften it, and then kneaded and washed with water. The husks were next sieved out, aud the deposited starch dried ou bricks in the sun, since if left moist it soon became sour. Pliny (lib. xviii. c. 7) gives a. similar account, and states that starch was discovered at Chios. 

Adobe A brick made of earth and straw and dried by the sun. 

The idea that, if a single available material cannot fulfill a set of desired properties, then a mixture or a compound of that material with another one might be satisfactory is likely as old as mankind. Adobe, likely the oldest building material, is made by blending sand, clay, water and some kind of fibrous material like straw or sticks, then molding the mixture into bricks and drying in the sun. It is surely one of the oldest examples of reinforcement of a "plastic" material, moist clay, with natural fibers that was already in use in the Late Bronze Age, nearly everywhere in the Middle East, North Africa, South Europe and southwestern North America. In a sense, the basic principle of reinforcement, i.e., to have a stiffer dispersed material to support the load transmitted by a softer matrix, is already in the adobe brick. Therefore, the "discovery" of natural rubber reinforcement by fine powdered materials, namely carbon black, in the dawn of the twentieth century surely proceeded from the same idea. 

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