Brick Technology in Mesopotamia
One of the earliest civilizations was that of Mesopotamia (part of the present-day Middle East), including Sumer and Assyria. Some of its buildings survive to this day. Sun-dried bricks made of mud and straw were its main building materials, as river mud was found in abundance along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Here the scarcity of stone may have been an incentive to develop the technology of making oven-fired bricks to use as an alternative. To Strengthen walls made from sun-dried bricks, fired bricks began to be used as an outer protective skin for more important buildings like temples, palaces, and city walls and gates. Making fired bricks is an advanced pottery technique.I Fired bricks are solid masses of clay heated in ovens to temperatures of between 950 and 1,150 degrees Celsius, and a well-made fired brick is an extremely durable object. Like sun-dried bricks they were made in wooden molds, but for bricks with decorations special molds had to be made. Unlike the river mud used for sun-dried bricks, the clay for proper bricks needed to be carefully prepared, and the building of an oven, finding suitable fuel, and controlling oven temperatures required a professional level of skill and know-how. This is perhaps the reason why the use of fired bricks came in gradually over time.
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