brick huts. Each hut, or room, opened onto a central court-
yard where most of the home’s activities took place. Kush was
founded around 900 b.c.e., and for some two hundred years,
brick was the favored building material for palaces, temples,
and other important buildings.
Th e Kushites were heavily infl uenced by the Egyptians,
and one Egyptian building device in particular facilitated a
shift to using stone for major construction. Th is device was
the shadoof, a long, wooden pole that pivoted on a post near
its middle. Heavy stone blocks would be placed in a basket
that hung from ropes at one end, and a counterweight was
placed on the other end to swing the basket upward. Th e sha-
doof had its limits: It could not lift stones that weighed several
tons, like those found in monumental Egyptian structures,
but it could lift stones weighing hundreds of pounds. It is still
in use in eastern Africa.
Sandstone was favored in Kushite buildings. Th e Kush-
ites were skilled rock carvers. Th ey imitated Egyptian tech-
niques using wooden mallets and metal chisels to carve
pillars and decorations on walls. Th ey hollowed out impres-
sive cisterns, tanks cut out of rock to hold water. Th e most
famous structures in Kush are the pyramids where kings
and members of the royal family were buried. While they
are not as large as many Egyptian pyramids, they do some-
times top one hundred feet in height. To achieve this height,
ramps made of piled rubble were built perpendicular to one
side of a pyramid, and rectangular stones were dragged up
to within several feet of where they were to be set and then
hauled the rest of the way by a shadoof. It is not clear wheth-
er the stones were fully dressed before or aft er they were set
in place, but given the evenness of the slopes of the sides
of these pyramids, the dressing was probably completed af-
terward. Although special care was taken in the building
of tombs for royalty, good workmanship was shown in the
graves of ordinary people also. Th ese graves were lined with
bricks, and a shelf was built within the graves on which the
corpses were placed.
Th e Kushites took great pains in the making of their
doors. Ancient visitors described wooden doors that were
carved with images of gods, kings, and their people. Palace
doors were made of ebony inlaid with ivory. Gold foil was
applied by hammering it onto images on the doors. Gold was
also used for images on walls and pillars, making the walk
along a corridor to the palace doors one of constant glitter.
For over a thousand years, the people of Kush built im-
pressive structures, but sometime before 350 c.e. their govern-
ment collapsed, probably from a combination of overgrazing
the land, loss of trade contacts with Europe and the Near
East, relentless raiding by desert nomads, and pressure from
Axum, a city in northern Ethiopia that had developed into
a kingdom. Axum was infl uenced by African, Near Eastern,
and Indian cultures, because it was a focus of trade between
Africa and Asia. Th e Axumites lived in communities built
of brick and stone. Th eir houses were blends of infl uences,
oft en featuring columns like those found in southern India.
When using stone, they built their walls with uncut rock with
dressed and smoothed rocks for doorways.EGYPT
BY KIRK H. BEETZ
Th e earliest Egyptians were probably subsistence farmers who
were squeezed into the region of the Nile River as the sur-
rounding deserts expanded during a long period of climate
change. Th eir homes were probably huts made of dried mud.
By the end of the Predynastic Period in about 3000 b.c.e.,
geography and climate had left Egypt with four abundant
building materials: mud, reeds, straw, and stone. It is likely
that Egyptians also built structures of wood, but these seem
to have been primarily temporary buildings set up for special
events and then taken down. For most of its history Egypt
needed to import wood for large construction projects from
Nubia and farther south as well as from the Levant.
Th e manufacture of mud bricks is described in the book
of Exodus in the Bible, and the process changed little during
ancient Egypt’s long history: Mud was tamped into rectangu-
lar molds and left out in the sun to dry. To make the bricks
more cohesive, chopped straw was oft en added. Th e result
was a building block that could be made in large quantities
quickly. Its disadvantage was that it wore out quickly; rains
and winds could destroy a building of mud brick in a couple
of decades. More durable than sun-dried bricks were fi red
bricks. At fi rst the bricks were roasted in open fi res, but this
made for uneven baking. Tougher, more enduring building
blocks were produced when eventually kilns were built for
fi ring them. Until the era of Djoser, king from about 2630 to
about 2610 b.c.e., mud bricks were Egypt’s primary building
material whether for small homes or massive public works;
even obelisks were originally stout piles of mud bricks. As late
as the New Kingdom of 1550–1070 b.c.e., mud bricks were
still used for building the tombs of most commoners.
Th e fi rst Egyptian stone construction known is a fl oor of
granite for a tomb at Abydos, about 100 miles north of Th e-
bes, probably for a king of the Second Dynasty (2770–2649
b.c.e.). Even though there were supplies of limestone nearby,
the granite had been shipped down the Nile for the purpose.
Th e stone blocks were not well dressed, only roughly squared,
and they were poorly fi tted together. A revolution in building
with stone began with Djoser’s tomb at Saqqara. At fi rst it was
going to be a typical mastaba, or underground tomb carved
down into rock and topped with a square masonry platform.
Sometime during its building, Djoser or his chief architect,
Imhotep, decided to expand the structure above the ground.
First a step that was lower than the walls of the mastaba was
built around it, and then smaller mastabas were built on top
of one another, forming steps that may have represented a
ladder for ascending to heaven. Th ese were built with local
limestone, roughly dressed and coated with fi nely smoothed
limestone blocks from Tura, an ancient site for quarrying
thought to have had the fi nest stone. Th e stones were not the152 building techniques and materials: Egypt