A Sumerian Palace and the "A" cemetery at Kish, Mesopotamia

THE SUMERIAN PALACE AT MOUND "A," KISH 107
The bricks are all made in an open frame mould, such as is in use at the
present day both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt. The depth of the mould averages
3.50 cm, and that it was made of wood is shown by the markings left in many
cases on the sides of the bricks. The mould seems to have been laid on the ground,
and the clay then placed in it. The surplus material was then patted into a
rounded mass instead of being struck off with the edge of the palm of the hand.
The ground upon which the bricks were moulded does not seem to have been
especially selected, for pieces of pottery and other rubbish were in many cases
left sticking in the base of the brick, or have left their imprint.
Mud mortar alone was used for the purpose of cementing sun-dried bricks
together, and it was nearly always of a better quality than the mud composing
the bricks themselves. The bricks are invariably laid with their convex surface
upward, except in those cases where they were laid on their edges. The mortar
seems to have been applied with the hands, not with any special kind of tool, for it
is always very compact with no crevices or fissures."
The use of mortar of the same substance as that of which the bricks were
made caused the wall to become practically one solid mass of mud with the pres-
sure from above. It has accordingly proved difficult to extract bricks from the
wall for measurement. A section through such a wall clearly shows light gray
courses of bricks set in a matrix of mortar of either the same color or, if a more
tenacious clay was used, a light chocolate.
In the majority of instances bricks were laid flat with courses arranged in
alternate headers and stretchers. In parts of the same wall, however, it is possible
to find considerable sections where all headers were used or all stretchers. Indeed,
there does not appear to have been any fixed rule, either for the arrangement of
the bricks in the faces of a wall or the filling inside. A fairly common method of
laying bricks seen elsewhere in Kish, but not actually in the palace, was to set
them upon their longer edges, either bolt upright or at an angle; and, laid thus,
they give the appearance of a chevron design. But the practice of laying the
bricks obliquely all in one direction was not uncommon in the palace, and an
example is illustrated in Plate XXXII, Fig. 2. It should be clearly understood
that the builders of the palace never laid bricks on their edges for the sake of
ornamentation. Every wall of the palace was heavily plastered with mud, and
then plastered again with a white stucco.
The stucco used for whitening walls was exactly the same as the juss that is
used at the present day in Mesopotamia, which is made by burning gypsum. The
latter is found in great quantities at Iskanderieh, south of Baghdad, and also
close to Samarra, where it can be picked up on the surface of the ground, and is
also quarried. A number of pieces of the rock, some over a metre long, from
which the stucco was made, were found just beneath the surface of the ground
outside the outer wall of the palace in a position which suggested that they had
fallen from the building itself. There is evidence from other parts of Kish that
this schistose rock, besides being burnt for plaster, was used for the lintels of
narrow doorways and as door-sills.