Category: Civil Engineering

Introduction Brick is the oldest manufactured building material, invented almost 10,000 years ago. Its simplicity, strength, and durability led to extensive use and gave it a dominant place in history alongside stone. Rubble stone and mud bricks, as small, easily handled materials, could be stacked and shaped to form enclosures of simple or complex design. Hand-shaped, sun-dried bricks, reinforced with such diverse materials as straw and dung, were so effective that kiln-fired bricks did not appear until the third millennium B.C., long after the art of pottery had demonstrated the…