Standardized fired brick
Ladrillo cocido estandarizado
- Date
- c. 2600 BCE · confidence high
- Place
- Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, Pakistan; Ur and Uruk, Iraq
- Credited to
- Indus Valley Civilisation; Sumerians (selective use)
- Field
- Matter & energy
What it is
Kiln-fired clay brick with fixed 1:2:4 proportions across all Indus cities, resistant to water and monsoon flooding, unlike sun-dried mudbrick. Mesopotamia reserved it, owing to its fuel cost, for cladding, drains and ziggurats.
Isolated fired bricks already appear in Neolithic Mesopotamia and China; the Indus is the first to use it as the main construction material.
What it led to
- Durable sewers, wells, baths and river retaining walls
- Architectural modularity and calculation of materials by unit, the basis of building contracts
- Intensive forest exploitation for kilns, a possible factor in Indus environmental degradation
Built on
- Updraught pottery kilnc. 6000 BCE
- Moulded mudbrick
Made possible
- True arch and brick vaultc. 3000 BCE
- Glazed tile and glazed potteryc. 2650 BCE
- Grid-planned cityc. 2600 BCE
- Urban drainage and brick-lined wellsc. 2600 BCE
- Public bath (Great Bath)c. 2500 BCE
- Urban sewer system and flush latrinec. 2500 BCE
- Lothal dockyardc. 2400 BCE
- Lothal graduated ivory scalec. 2300 BCE
- Zigguratc. 2100 BCE
- Cloaca Maxima (urban sewer)c. 600 BCE
- Hypocaustc. 100 BCE
- Jetavanaramaya brick stupac. 273-301