Slaking Lime for Restoration and Conservation of Historical Buildings and Materials, Criticism of an Arabic Historical Manuscripts

Abstract

Slaking lime is an important and effective process for preparing mortars in conservation of historical buildings and archaeological artifacts based on lime. The lime mortars have been widely used since the Roman era, and lime became one of the important materials for conservation and restoration process to keep the authenticity of the historical materials and sustainability. In many cases, some conservators use black and white cement separately or mix with lime in conservation and restoration, or mix gypsum with lime. They think that will improve the strength of mortars, but all those procedures give bad results on the properties of the mortars, and cause irreversible deterioration for historical materials in both layers and surfaces. Through the mentioned problems, we should go back to historical documents to identify the best method for slaking process to get best results in any intervention needs lime mortars. So we depend on three historical resources from 13th A. H century the first historical manuscript message in architecture) preserved in king Saud university No.3392 without any previous criticism, the second European historical book entitled all kinds of Roman cement) translated to Arabic in 1829 AD, the third Arabic book entitled Summary of ideas in architecture), those resources presented all methods of slaking to give information for researchers to evaluate slaking process after experimental studies which depend on several factors, the main target of the research is to provide conservators with information about slaking process for preparing mortars with good properties in all conservation interventions in artefacts and historical buildings.