A relief from the tomb of Rekhmire at Thebes depicts workers in various stages of the process. Some are drawing water to mix with soil in order to make mud. Others are forming bricks in wooden molds and setting them out to dry in the sun. Still others are stacking the bricks and carrying them to a building-site.2 Straw was essential to the whole process because it reinforced the clay and helped each brick stay intact. In one papyrus an official filed the following complaint against his superiors: “I am staying at Kenkenento, unequipped, and there are neither men to make bricks nor straw in the neighborhood.”

Late nineteenth-century excavations at Tell el-Maskhutah (which some consider to be the city of Pithom mentioned in Exodus 1:11) revealed buildings made of brick without straw. One archaeologist commented, “I carefully examined round the chamber walls, and I noticed that some of the corners of the brickwork throughout were built of bricks without straw. I do not remember to have met anywhere in Egypt bricks so made.”9 These bricks may or may not have been made by the Israelites.