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Brick by Brick

What did the Israelites build in Egypt?

By David A. Falk

Buildings in ancient Egypt were constructed from either stone or mudbrick. Temples were generally built with stone that was meant to last throughout the ages. Palaces, on the other hand, were built for comfort out of mudbrick, which was cool in the day and warm at night. Each type of construction was considered specialized labor; in other words, people who did one did not do the other. Contrary to popular perception, the Bible does not claim that the pyramids were built by the Israelites. Most pyramids, and certainly the famous Giza pyramids of the Old Kingdom period, were built […]

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Footnotes

1. See Robert Littman, Marta Lorenzon, and Jay Silverstein, “With & Without Straw: How Israelite Slaves Made Bricks,” BAR, March/April 2014.

Endnotes

1.
Alfred Lucas, Ancient Egyptian Materials (London: Edward Arnold Co., 1926), p. 7.

2.
Thomas Eric Peet, The Great Tomb—Robberies of the Twentieth Egyptian Dynasty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 24.

3.
Kings commonly patronized deities outside of the official cults; for example, Amenhotep III’s veneration of Sekhmet or Thutmosis IV’s veneration of Horakhte-Khepri-Re-Atum.