“Another brick in the wall” or how to build an Ancient Egyptian house

In an attempt to answer many practical questions related to mudbrick production, this paper sets forth an experimental approach relevant to the technique used in Late Pre- and Early Dynastic Egypt. The paper surveys possible sources of information on the ancient technique and previous experimental approaches. Then, it presents the experiment methodology and the resulting observations and calculations, which were later used as a standard for simulations of time and workload needed to construct particular types of structures excavated in Tell el-Farkha. Our most important observations are the widely underestimated stage of seasoning, the problem of accessibility of space for brick drying, transportation of ready-to-use bricks to the construction site and calculations we made based on numbers obtained during the experimental brick production. Our simulations show that building monumental structures needed communal effort, while household structures could have been built by the people who intended to use them for their own needs