Egyptian Construction Methods

 In some ways, Egypt has not really changed since ancient times.  We are getting a practical lesson in this on site right now.   In the Old Kingdom area, we needed to move a wall by about two meters to make room for the work to proceed, as the wall built by the SCA was too close to where we work.  Over the last week, our workers have been demolishing the old wall, and in the last few days they have begun building the new one.  You can even see the stub of the old wall still there- much like the ancients, Egyptians will just reduce a wall to the height it needs to be to not cause a problem, and then start their new building.  (Though, I should note that in our case the wall stub is holding up the archaeological materials we are excavating from collapsing, so it still provides a function for now at least). 

To build the new wall, the first thing they did was dig a foundation trench, and then they placed a few layers of bricks within covered with muna.  Muna is a material made of dirt, water, and animal refuse (in our case, donkey poo).  You can see the workers preparing the muna in the big built up pit in the foreground.   The guy in there keeps mixing the muna with a hoe so that it doesn’t dry out, adding water occasionally.   The ceramicists and epigraphers work downwind of this area and have described the smell as "pungent".  Now that they are actually building the wall up, the muna functions like mortar as they lay the bricks.  In a country with very little rain, this building method works very well.  Many buildings don’t even use nice bricks like we are using here- often they use mudbricks just like the ancients.  Mudbricks are basically mud and a temper material (straw, sand, stone, etc.) formed in a wooden mold and left out to dry.   It’s a very cheap way to build, and the buildings are actually quite comfortable to live in- they deal better with the hot temperatures than the concrete buildings anyways!