hose built with crude bricks. The ordinary
Egyptian brick is a mere oblong block of mud mixed with chopped straw and a
little sand, and dried in the sun. At a spot where they are about to build,
one man is told off to break up the ground; others carry the clods, and
pile them in a heap, while others again mix them with water, knead the clay
with their feet, and reduce it to a homogeneous paste. This paste, when
sufficiently worked (Note 2), is pressed by the head workman in moulds made
of hard wood, while an assistant carries away the bricks as fast as they
are shaped, and lays them out in 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,