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Bronze Age: and Early Urban Cultures

The document summarizes the development of early urban cultures and building technologies along major river valleys between the Bronze Age and early urban periods. It describes how the first cities used mud bricks and corbel vaults made from locally available materials like clay and limestone. It then discusses how fired bricks and true arches emerged in Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE, enabling the construction of large symbolic buildings like ziggurats. Developments in bronze and later iron technology led to improvements in woodworking through the use of metal tools, supporting new timber framing techniques in forested regions of Europe.

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Vide Mirza Faillasuf
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120 views3 pages

Bronze Age: and Early Urban Cultures

The document summarizes the development of early urban cultures and building technologies along major river valleys between the Bronze Age and early urban periods. It describes how the first cities used mud bricks and corbel vaults made from locally available materials like clay and limestone. It then discusses how fired bricks and true arches emerged in Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE, enabling the construction of large symbolic buildings like ziggurats. Developments in bronze and later iron technology led to improvements in woodworking through the use of metal tools, supporting new timber framing techniques in forested regions of Europe.

Uploaded by

Vide Mirza Faillasuf
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Bronze Age and early urban cultures

It was the cultures of the great river valleys—including the Nile, the Tigris
and Euphrates, the Indus, and the Huang Ho—with their intensive
agriculture based on irrigation—that developed the first communitieslarge enough
to be called cities. These cities were built with a new building technology, based
on the clay available on the riverbanks. The packed clay walls of earlier times were
replaced by those constructed of prefabricated units: mud bricks. This represented
a major conceptualchange from the free forms of packed clay to the geometric
modulation imposed by the rectangular brick, and the building plans too became
strictly rectangular.
Bricks were made from mud and straw formed in a four-sided wooden
frame, which was removed after evaporation had sufficiently hardened the
contents. The bricks were then thoroughly dried in the sun. The straw acted as
reinforcing to hold the brick together when the inevitable shrinkage cracks
appeared during the drying process. The bricks were laid in walls with wet
mud mortar or sometimes bitumen to join them together; openings were apparently
supported by wooden lintels. In the warm, dry climates of the river valleys,
weathering action was not a major problem, and the mud bricks were left exposed
or covered with a layer of mud plaster. The roofs of these early urban buildings
have disappeared, but it seems likely that they were supported by timber beams
and were mostly flat, since there is little rainfall in these areas. Such mud brick
or adobe construction is still widely used in the Middle East, Africa, Asia,
and Latin America.
Later, about 3000 BCE in Mesopotamia, the first fired bricks appeared.
Ceramic pottery had been developing in these cultures for some time, and the
techniques of kiln-firing were applied to bricks, which were made of the same clay.
Because of their cost in labour and fuel, fired bricks were used at first only in areas
of greater wear, such as pavements or the tops of walls subject to weathering. They
were used not only in buildings but also to build sewers to drain wastewater from
cities. It is in the roofs of these underground drains that the first surviving
true arches in brick are found, a humble beginning for what would become a major
structural form. Corbel vaults and domes made of limestone rubble appeared at
about the same time in Mesopotamian tombs (Figure 1). Corbel vaults are
constructed of rows of masonry placed so that each row projects slightly beyond
the one below, the two opposite walls thus meeting at the top. The arch and the
vault may have been used in the roofs and floors of other buildings, but no
examples have survived from this period. The well-developed masonry technology
of Mesopotamia was used to build large structures of great masses of brick, such as
the temple at Tepe Gawra and the ziggurats at Ur and Borsippa (Birs Nimrud),
which were up to 26 metres (87 feet) high. These symbolic buildings marked the
beginnings of architecture in this culture.

Brick walls and corbel vault at the entrance to the tomb chamber of Ur-nammu in the royal mausoleum at Ur,
late 3rd millennium [Link] Fotoarchiv, Munich
The development of bronze, and later iron, technology in this period led to
the making of metal tools for working wood, such as axes and saws. Less effort
was thus required to fell and work large trees. This led in turn to new
developments in building technics; timbers were cut and shaped extensively,
hewed into square posts, sawed into planks, and split into shingles. Log
cabin construction appeared in the forested areas of Europe, and timber
framing became more sophisticated. Although the excavated remains are
fragmentary, undoubtedly major advances were made in timber technology in this
period; some of the products, such as the sawed plank and the shingle, are still used
today.

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