Billy Walsh, age 14, of Mobile, Alabama for his question:

How did the Bible people make bricks from straw?

In between its wise words, the Bible often gives us fascinating pictures of life in early times. There are many hints as to how the people lived 5,000 years ago on the banks of the eternal Nile. And old tombs, pictures and written papyruses help us make the picture complete.

The ancient Pharaoh, we are told, forced his captives to make bricks for him. The bricks, we can be fairly sure, were made of soft clay, maybe baked in ovens, but more likely just dried in the sun. The pueblos of the early western Indians were also made of sun dried clay bricks. So are the adobe buildings of our southwest.

It is interesting to know that people have been making adobe buildings for so long, but we are not much surprised. It is natural, to suppose that plenty of soft clay was to be found on the banks of the muddy Nile even 5000 years ago.

Then we learn that the busy builders had been using straw to make their bricks. After all, there is no straw in the adobe bricks made by our Indians, Maybe they used the straw to mat the clay more firmly. Not at all. Actually those busy toilers were chemists as well as builders, though they may not have known it.

The clay used for making bricks and pottery is really finely ground rock. Wind and weather, earthquake and flood, have pounded the tough and ancient rocks into fine, smooth particles. Some beds of clay need only water to become plastic and moldable. They are pressed into shape while damp. The moisture is then dried out either by sun or oven and the object keeps its hard shape.

Some beds of clay, however, refuse to be molded with dust plain water. Their particles collect in crumbs and lumps and the mass cannot be shaped smoothly. Nowadays, when this happens, a very weak solution alkali of caustic is used to water the clay. The chemical goes to work at once and smooths out the lumps in the clay.

And those ancient Egyptians used what they had at hand to bring about the self same chemical process. Somehow they learned that certain vegetable extracts would smooth out the lumps in the ro ugh clay. They soaked the stems, or straws of certain plants in water and , used it to moisten their clay. This is one of the earliest chemical processes of this sort that we know of. And it happened in long ago Bible days on the banks of the muddy Nile.