THE UNDULATING WALLS OF ANCIENT EGYPT: STRUCTURAL,

LOGISTICAL AND POLITICAL CHALLENGES OF A LARGE-SCALE

BUILDING PROGRAM
Max Johann Beiersdorf

Keywords
Ancient Egypt, Enclosure walls, Mud brick architecture, Building Archaeology,
Reconstructing Architecture, Structural analysis and the development of structural forms,
Interdisciplinarity, Experimental Modelling
Abstract
The undulating mud brick walls of Ancient Egypt date from times between the fourth
century BC and the years of Roman rule. They were built to protect the country’s most
important temples, and their constructional features and enormous dimensions make them
an exception among ancient mud brick wall constructions. They differ from conventional mud
brick walls in that they have sections with concave and convex brick courses (fig. 1) and do not
employ any mortar within the walls, except the outer facade.

Figure 1: Undulating mud brick wall of the Hathor temple in Dendera.

Although the monumental temples of this period have continuously been the subject of
research, the exterior walls that were built of mud bricks have only rarely been the focus of
scientific studies. Auguste Choisy (1841–1909), a French engineer and historian of
architecture, was one of the first to attempt an explanation for the undulating appearance of
the walls. He ruled out that the wavy shape of the walls is the result of brickwork settlings due
to a weak or wet subsoil. Instead, Choisy suggested that it prevented the panels from shifting.
In his opinion, the organization of a construction site could be crucially optimized by this
technique. Structural assessment of the undulating design has been a major theme of research
from the late 19th to the middle of the 20th century. This changed from 1962, when Paul
Barguet established his doctrine that the characteristic undulating form is an allusion to the
primeval ocean Nun, the origin of all life. In terms of an architectural semantics, Egyptologists'
research has since then mainly focussed on the ancient perception of the buildings and in
doing so suspects that there is a reference between the characteristic appearance of the walls
and the ancient Egyptian mythology. Aspects in terms of historical building research as well as
the structural analysis were, in contrast, much less examined and mostly only studied on the
basis of selected findings.

Contrasting with this, however, a dissertation at the Chair of Construction History and
Structural Preservation, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg (Prof. Dr.-Ing. Werner Lorenz), postulates a
primarily constructional explanation. As part of the project, numerous undulating walls were
studied and documented during several fieldwork campaigns in cooperation with the German
Archaeological Institute (Dr.-Ing. Felix Arnold) and the University of Leipzig (PD Dr. Dietrich
Raue) since 2011. In the course of this work the enclosure walls of Heliopolis and Elephantine
could be examined in more detail and provided insights into the relationship between design
and technological advantages.

The PhD project focuses on two main aspects of the walls. First, there is to be an
investigation of the extent to which the characteristic undulating form of the walls can be
explained by the process of their construction. Although omitting the mortar inside the walls
certainly speeded up the work, at the same time, however, it weakened the masonry bond.
The thesis put forward is that this disadvantage was supposed to be compensated for by
forming concave and convex segments (fig. 2). The second focus of the study is the structural
analysis of a finished undulating wall. The individual bricks of a concave segment slide toward
the middle, and so shearing apart of the segments corners is prevented. On the other hand,
the convex segments exert pressure on the adjacent concave segments. This stress state
probably lent the walls greater stability despite the lack of mortar.

Figure 2: Reconstruction of the undulating enclosure wall of the Atum-Re temple in Heliopolis, 4th century BC.
 The talk itself will be dealing with the different methodological approaches on
investigating the undulating walls of Ancient Egypt. The late period enclosure wall of the
temple Atum-Re at Heliopolis, which used to be the largest temple complex of Ancient Egypt,
has been investigated during several archaeological fieldwork campaigns. Measuring and
documenting a part of the wall in detail led to new insights on technical aspects of the wall.
By applying methods of the construction history, like combining models of structural
behaviour and load paths with studies of the construction process, new perceptions were
gained during the work. Unresolved questions of a technical nature have been investigated
with the help of an experimental model of a certain wall. The enclosure wall of Elephantine
has been partly reconstructed in scale 1:10 (fig. 3). The results of this experimental experiment
will be presented at the workshop.

Figure 3: Wooden model of the undulating enclosure wall of the temple of Chnum on Elephantine island, scale 1:10.

Having a closer look at the history of the Late Period, especially the numerous conflicts
between Egypt and its neighbours, the presentation will deal with the question of whether
those massive walls were built to protect the Egyptian temples from foreign attacks or might
have had a higher symbolical meaning. By considering an interdisciplinary approach to this
investigation, I am convinced that only a holistically conclusion will get close to the nature of
the biggest ever built mud brick walls in Ancient Egypt, which have been preserved right up to
the present day.