Ancient CyprusAncient Cyprus

Glossary Architecture and settlements

Mudbrick

Also called: mud-brick, mud brick

A building brick of clay mixed with straw or other temper, shaped in a mould or by hand and dried in the sun without firing.

Mudbrick was the everyday walling material of Cyprus from the Neolithic to the Roman period, usually laid on stone foundations that kept it dry. Neolithic builders used it with pisé for round houses; from the Early Bronze Age mould-made bricks went into rectilinear, multi-roomed houses; and Iron Age city walls often had a mudbrick upper wall on a stone base. Unfired brick slumps back into earth, so the upper walls of most buildings survive only as collapse. See architecture.

Related terms

  • Pisé

    Walling of damp earth packed or moulded in place without bricks, used in early Cyprus for walls, benches, hearths and floors.

  • Ashlar

    Masonry of stone blocks cut and dressed square, laid in regular courses with fine joints.

  • Tholos

    A round building: in Neolithic Cyprus a circular house, and in the Bronze Age Aegean and Cyprus a circular tomb with a vaulted roof.

Where it appears