Young Blonde Girl On The Old Brick Wall

Examples of the civilizations who used mud brick are the ancient Egyptians and the Indus Valley Civilization, where it was used exclusively. In particular, it is evident from the ruins of Buhen, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa.
The first sun-dried bricks were made in Mesopotamia (what is now Iraq), in the ancient city of Ur in about 4000 BC, although the arch used for drying the bricks was not actually found.
The Romans made use of fired bricks, and the Roman legions, which operated mobile kilns, introduced bricks to many parts of the empire. Roman bricks are often stamped with the mark of the legion that supervised their production. The use of bricks in southern and western Germany, for example, can be traced back to traditions already described by the Roman architect Vitruvius.
In pre-modern China, brick-making was the job of a lowly and unskilled artisan, but a kiln master was respected as a step above the former. Early traces of bricks were found in a ruin site in Xi'an in 2009 dated back about 3800 years ago. Before this discovery, it is widely believed that bricks appeared about 3000 years ago in the Western Zhou dynasty since the earliest bricks were found in Western Zhou ruins. These bricks are the earliest bricks discovered that were made by a fired process. Early descriptions of the production process and glazing techniques used for bricks can be found in the Song Dynasty carpenter's manual Yingzao Fashi, published in 1103 by the government official Li Jie, who was put in charge of overseeing public works for the central government's construction agency. The historian Timothy Brook writes of the production process in Ming Dynasty China (aided with visual illustrations from the Tiangong Kaiwu encyclopedic text published in 1637):