Study and comparative approach to materials used in ancient Egypt and the modern era

Abstract

It is widely recognized that today people around the world still admire the Egyptian civilization and wonder how Egyptians came to manufacture mortar. The present work aims to study the construction materials that were used in ancient Egypt and their development over time. To do this, it was decided to first evaluate the physical and mechanical performances of the building materials used at that time and then try to investigate and understand the handling process as well as the construction methods adopted currently. For this, cement (NA442 CEM II/B-L 42.5 N) and local sand were replaced at different proportions with lime in the formulation of mortar, the sand used whose mixture was relative to that of the sand (0/4) and (0/1) values of 65% and 35%, respectively. A number of tests were carried out on two types of mortar prepared with two different formulations. The first formulation, which included quicklime, was subjected to a simple treatment in order to obtain aerial lime and to understand the different formulation stages that were followed in the Ancient Egyptian times. Knowing that the objective was to revive the method of manufacturing works from the ancient era, thus using a variable rate of substitution (0%, 50% to 70%) of lime, limestone and gypsum to obtain the binder by also studying the stakes of this variation on the reduction of the quantity of cement in the mortar which consisted in the preparation of fourteen test series in order to converge on the impact of the experiments sought. The second one consisted, at a later time, in preparing some series of mortar incorporating aerial lime brought from the manufacturing plant. After analyzing the prepared material, it was deemed interesting to attempt to quantitatively reconstruct the composition of the material using the Vicat test for the purpose of assessing the cement slurry setting process for stylolithic joints which, to the best of our knowledge, are very well developed only in limestones. Also noting that, the composition of the mortar and the rate of substitution evolved according to the results obtained upstream while keeping the objective of this research which was to reproduce a composition compatible with the old days.