They very often did not trouble themselves to cut trenches at all; they merely levelled the space intended to be covered, and, having probably watered it to settle the soil, they at once laid the bricks upon the surface.

When the house was finished, the scraps of mortar, the broken bricks, and all the accumulated refuse of the work, made a bed of eight inches or a foot in depth, and the base of the wall thus buried served instead of a foundation.

When the new house rose on the ruins of an older one decayed by time or ruined by accident, the builders did not even take the trouble to raze the old walls to the ground.

Levelling the surface of the ruins, they-built upon them at a level a few feet higher than before: thus each town stands upon one or several artificial mounds, the tops of which may occasionally rise to a height of from sixty to eighty feet above the surrounding country.

The Greek historians attributed these artificial mounds to the wisdom of the kings, and especially to Sesostris, who, as they supposed, wished to raise the towns above the inundation.