Stone construction in Like the other great river valley cultures.... stone frame

Stone construction in Like the other great river valley cultures, Egypt built its cities with mud brick; fired brick did not appear there until Roman times. But the extracting, moving, and working of stone was a costly process, and the quarrying of stone was a state monopoly. Within the long tradition of brick masonry, stone construction appeared abruptly, with little transition. The walls have convoluted surfaces, which recall the mastaba tombs, with dummy doors, and there are even whole dummy buildings of solid stone. After the first appearance of small stones at ?aqqarah, their size began to increase until they attained the cyclopean scale usually associated with Egyptian masonry at about the time of the building of the . In spite of the heavy loads that stone structures created, foundations were of a surprisingly shoddy and improvised character, made of small blocks of poor quality stone. The stones were usually laid with a bed of mortar made of gypsum, sand, and water, ! which perhaps acted more as a lubricant to push the stone into place than as a bonding agent. But they also represent a dead end in massive stone construction, which soon moved in the direction of lighter and more flexible stone frames and the creation of larger interior spaces. The free-standing stone column supporting stone beams appeared for the first time in the royal temples associated with the pyramids of about 2600 . In these structures the abstract notion of the timber frames of the early royal buildings was translated into stone. For this reason, stone works well for columns, which could be made very highfor example, 24 metres (80 feet) in the great at Karnak. But stone lintels spanning between columns are limited by the tension they develop on their bottom surfaces; their maximum span is perhaps 5 metres (16 feet). So, perhaps with the image of the timber building frame still strong in their minds, the Egyptian masons were content to explore the limitations of the! analogous stone frame in a series of great temples built duri! ng the New Kingdom (15391075 ) at Karnak and Luxor, culminating in the elegant loggias of Queen Hatshepsut's temple at . stone frame