Buildings erected using preformed, shaped bricks of dried mud date back to around 7500 B.C.E. Examples have been found by archeologists in Cayonu in the upper Tigris Valley and close to Diyarbakirin southeast Anatolia, both in modern-day Turkey.
More recent bricks, dating from between 7000 and 6400 B.C.E., have been found in Jericho in the Jordan Valley and in Catalhoyuk, again in Turkey. These early bricks were made of mud molded by hand and then left out to dry and harden in the sun. The bricks were then laid into walls using a simple mud mortar. Mud is an exceptionally good material for building in dry climates: it is readily available wherever agriculture is practiced, it may be dug from riverbeds, and it has good structural and thermal qualities.
Some years later, mud bricks were shaped in wooden molds, enabling a form of organized mass production to take place. This became important, as bricks were increasingly used to build not only small-scale houses, farms, granaries, and other farm structures, but whole villages and later towns and cities, including their large palaces, temples, and other state and public buildings.
Wherever stone was unavailable, or in short supply, the humble mud brick took its place. Mud bricks were used throughout the Near East, as well as by the civilizations of Egypt and the Indus Valley, where the bricks were standardized in size, in the ratio of four units long to two units wide and one unit deep. This simple but effective building material was paramount until the first kiln-fired bricks were developed in Mesopotamia during the third millennium B.C.E.
