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.
The technical complexities involved in making fired bricks may explain why one of the first recorded instances of pieces of fired clay, used as a protective covering for mud-brick walls at the Sumerian city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia in 3600- 3200 B.C., did not involve bricks but small clay cones. Uruk was one of Mesopotamia’s first cities and had an important temple complex at its center known as the Eanna precinct. Here was found the Limestone Temple, which was connected to a second temple via a courtyard. In this courtyard was a terrace with massive pillars made of mud and bundled reeds. To protect them from weathering, thousands of nail-shaped ceramic cones were pushed into an outer bed of clay. The cones have flat tops and were painted red, white, or black and arranged in such a way that they formed geometric patterns. What is so significant about this is that here we find, perhaps for the first time, fired clay as a practical protection against the environmental effects of rain and wind, safeguarding the columns from deterioration as well as creating an ornamental surface decoration.
Over time fired bricks also came to be used in Uruk as a building material and for decorative purposes. An example is the temple of Inanna, the goddess of fertility, built by the king Karaindash at the end of the fourteenth century B.C. The exterior of the temple was constructed of fired bricks with alternating projections (structures extending from the temple) and recessions (hollow areas). In the recessions were brick statues of gods holding vessels from which flowed streams of water.
Assyrian kings used fired bricks for the construction of ziggurats (a series of rectangular terraces of decreasing size), palaces, and gateways. Some fine examples have survived from the city of Nimrud in northern Mesopotamia, where in the ninth century B.C. temples and palaces were decorated with fired bricks during the reigns of the Neo-Assyrian kings Ashumasirpal II (883- 859 B.C.) and Shalmaneser III (859- -840 B.C.). A glazed tile was found at Nimrud at one of the palaces, which shows a king attended by servants and bodyguards, and probably represents Ashumasirpal II, who rebuilt Nimrud during his reign. Similar compositions of Assyrian kings attended by their servants can also be found on stone-relief carvings of that time.
Bricks with cuneiform script provide important written information about the history of the period. Cuneiform is the oldest known form of writing and dates from around 3200 B.C. Text was imprinted with a small stick or reed pen into the soft clay, which was then left to harden in the sun, or sometimes fired to become a permanent record of the royal, religious, military, or economic history of the various Mesopotamian kingdoms. Cuneiform became the basis for all subsequent Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian writing. It was frequently used to record royal deeds, as on the clay tablets excavated at the ziggurat attached to the temple of the god Ninurta, a prominent building in Nimrud.
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297篇Brick Technology in Mesopotamia
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