Roofing in Egypt

Egypt has one of the longest continuous records of roof building in the world. Pharaonic builders roofed temples with massive stone slabs and stores with mud-brick barrel vaults, ordinary houses were built of Nile mud with usable flat roofs, and Nubian masons along the southern Nile kept a tradition of timber-free earth vaults and domes alive into the 20th century. Today the great majority of Egyptian households live under reinforced concrete.

Climate and hazards

Almost all of Egypt is hot desert and rain is rare in most of the country, which has allowed flat roofs of earth and masonry to dominate. The dry climate is the main reason so many ancient mud-brick buildings, including the workmen's village of Deir el-Medina and the town of Kahun, survive at all. The main roof loads are heat and sun; the scarcity of good timber has shaped roof structure throughout Egyptian history.

Roofing history

Ancient Egypt. Monumental buildings used post-and-lintel construction: their roofs were flat and made of huge stone blocks carried on the outer walls and on closely spaced columns. This is why temple halls are forests of columns. The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak has about 134 columns in 16 rows, the 12 central columns about 21 m (69 ft) tall, all supporting a stone roof. The arch was developed during the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2613-2494 BC), but monumental buildings continued to rely on stone lintels.

Mud-brick vaults. The storerooms around the Ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramesses II on the west bank at Luxor (13th century BC), are long mud-brick barrel vaults. They are true arches held by mortar alone, and the Ramesseum preserves what is cited as the oldest such arch still standing in Egypt (see Ramesseum granary vaults).

Houses. At Deir el-Medina, the village of the royal tomb builders (occupied from the reign of Thutmose I, c. 1506-1493 BC, to about 1110-1080 BC), about 68 houses of mud brick on stone foundations each had a staircase leading up to the roof. Windows were set high in the walls to keep out the glare of the sun.

Islamic and later periods. Domes and vaults of brick and stone continued in mosques, tombs and baths (see Middle Eastern domes). In the Western Desert, the fortified town of Shali in Siwa Oasis, dated to about 1203 AD, was built of kershef, a mixture of salt rock and mud, with ceilings of palm wood (see Kershef).

20th century. The architect Hassan Fathy (1900-1989) revived the Nubian vault and dome in mud brick. His village of New Gourna near Luxor, built between 1946 and 1952 to rehouse the community of Old Gourna living above the Theban tombs, made earth roofs a subject of international debate (see Hassan Fathy and New Gourna). Over the same century, reinforced concrete became the standard roof for new housing.

Traditional and vernacular roofs

• Flat roofs with stair access: as at Deir el-Medina, where every house had a staircase to the roof; in oases such as Siwa, ceilings were of palm wood.
• Nubian vaults and domes: mud-brick barrel vaults built without formwork, from the southern Nile valley (see Nubian vault).
• Kershef roofs of Siwa: salt-mud walls with palm-trunk roofs; Siwan builders soaked palm wood in salt-lake water to remove the sap that attracts insects.
• Stone and brick domes: in mosques, mausoleums and bathhouses.

Roofing today

Egypt's national statistics agency, CAPMAS, asks households about the main roof material in its Household Income, Expenditure and Consumption Survey, using the categories reinforced concrete, metal, wood, rustic mats, straw or palm fronds, carton, and none. Published weighted figures from the Harmonized Survey of Young People in Egypt (2014) household data give a picture of the mix:

Main roof material	Weighted share
Reinforced concrete	82.5%
Wood	9.9%
Straw	5.9%
Mud	0.9%
Tiles or wooden planks	0.5%
Galvanized steel	0.4%

Flat reinforced concrete slabs therefore cover roughly four in five households. Wood, straw and mud together still account for about one household in six in this survey.

Codes, standards and regulation

In New Gourna, UNESCO has identified out-of-scale reinforced-concrete buildings and lack of maintenance as threats to Fathy's earth vaults.

Notable roofs

• Hypostyle halls of Karnak and Luxor: stone-slab roofs carried on columns.
• Ramesseum storerooms: mud-brick barrel vaults of the 13th century BC.
• Deir el-Medina: ancient village houses with roof access stairs.
• Shali, Siwa: kershef fortress, restored in a project completed in 2020.
• New Gourna: Hassan Fathy's mud-brick vaults and domes, subject of a UNESCO safeguarding project launched in 2009.

Local roofing terms

• kershef (karshef): salt-rock and mud building material of Siwa.

Sources and gaps

No national roofing code was found in published sources. No information on domestic roofing manufacturers was found.

Ancient roof details come largely from encyclopedic summaries of the archaeology. The roof-material shares are from a youth survey sample as published on a data portal; a full census table on roofs from CAPMAS are not well documented in published sources.