Wattle & Daub

Most of the first substantial houses were built out of wattle and daub.

A very rough timber frame was built using naturally round timbers, or timber that had been adzed square. Then thin branches known as wattles were woven in and out of the posts, horizontally and close together.

Trees such as Acacias provided long, straight branches which were ideal for the wattles and, in fact, the acacia became known as the Wattle Tree.

Then mud was pressed, or daubed, onto the wattle fabric, with one man standing inside and another outside of the wall, each pressing the mud towards each other. It was that simple!

Ancient Egyptians

Without doubt, the first truly great builders lived in the East. People living near the Tigris and Eupharates rivers in Assyria and Babylon built huge cities with temples called Ziggurats on sacred mud-brick platforms.

The Pyramids of nearby Egypt were built from about 2,700 to 2,500 BC on the West Bank of the Nile River near Cairo.

They are the oldest surviving members of the ancient wonders. Of the ten pyramids at Giza, the first and largest was erected for the Pharoah Khufu, to "keep his body safe forever".

The tomb rises up to 459 ft (having probably lost 30 feet more off the top through erosion), covering 13 acres.

Historians believe it took 100,000 labourers (mostly farmers who couldn't work when the Nile flooded their land between July and October) 20 years to build, using copper tools and an incredible 2.3 million blocks.

On the Greek island of Crete, people in the city of Knossos had invented plumbing, a complicated series of underground stone channels to carry sewage and waste water away from their King's palace.

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