Hittite First Vaults

First Known Vaults in History

The earliest known vaults thus far date back to the 16th century BC. However, some similarities have been found between the Hittite and Mycenaean construction techniques. Yet the Hittite corbelled vaults are earlier by about 300 years.

In architecture, a vault is a self-supporting arched form, usually made of stone or brick, serving to cover a space with a ceiling or roof.

The simplest kind of vault is the barrel vault (also called a wagon or tunnel vault), which is generally semicircular in shape. It is a continuous arch, the length being greater than its diameter (the arch has a strong load-bearing capacity and provides stability).

As in building an arch, a temporary support is needed while rings of voussoirs are constructed and the rings placed in position. Until the topmost voussoir, the keystone, is positioned, the vault is not self-supporting. Where timber is easily obtained, this temporary support is provided by centering consisting of a framed truss with a semicircular or segmental head, which supports the voussoirs until the ring of the whole arch is completed.

With a barrel vault, the centering can then be shifted on to support the next rings. The parts of a vault exert lateral thrust that requires a counter resistance. When vaults are built underground, the ground gives all the resistance required. However, when the vault is built above ground, various replacements are employed to supply the needed resistance. An example is the thicker walls used in the case of barrel or continuous vaults. Buttresses are used to supply resistance when intersecting vaults are employed.

There are about 47 different vault types, of those:

Domed Vault

Amongst the earliest known examples of vaulting is the neolithic village of Khirokitia in Cyprus. Dating from ca. 6000 BC, the circular buildings supported beehive shaped corbel domed vaults of unfired mud-bricks represent the first evidence for settlements with an upper floor. Similar Beehive tombs, called tholoi, exist in Crete and Northern Iraq. Their construction differs from that at Khirokitia in that most appear partially buried and make provision for a dromos entry (walkway to a tomb).

Pitched brick Barrel Vault

Pitched-brick vaults are named for their construction, the bricks are installed vertically (not radially) and are leaning (pitched) at an angle: This allows their construction to be completed without the use of centering. Examples have been found in archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia dating to the 2nd and 3rd millennium BC which were set in gypsum mortar.

Barrel Vault

A barrel vault is the simplest form of a vault and resembles a barrel or tunnel cut lengthwise in half. The effect is that of a structure composed of continuous semicircular or pointed sections.

The earliest known examples of barrel vaults were built by the Sumerians, possibly under the ziggurat at Nippur in Babylonia, which was built of fired bricks cemented with clay mortar.

The earliest barrel vaults in ancient Egypt are thought to be those in the granaries built by the 19th dynasty Pharaoh Ramesses II, the ruins of which are behind the Ramesseum, at Thebes. Assyrian palaces used pitched-brick vaults, made with sun-dried mudbricks, for gates, subterranean graves and drains.

Groin Vault

So far, all the vaults mentioned have been barrel vaults, which, when not built underground, required continuous walls of great thickness to resist their thrust; the earliest example of the next variety, the intersecting barrel vault, is said to be over a small hall at Pergamum, in Asia Minor, but its first employment over halls of great dimensions is due to the Romans.

Rib Vault

Reference is made to the rib vault in Roman works, where the intersecting barrel vaults were not of the same diameter. Their construction must at all times have been somewhat difficult, but where the barrel vaulting was carried round over the choir aisle and was intersected (as in St Bartholomew-the-Great in Smithfield, London) by semicones instead of cylinders

Fan Vault

The fan vault would seem to have owed its origin to the employment of centerings of one curve for all the ribs, instead of having separate centerings for the transverse, diagonal wall and intermediate ribs; it was facilitated also by the introduction of the four-centred arch, because the lower portion of the arch formed part of the fan, or conoid, and the upper part could be extended at pleasure with a greater radius across the vault.

Byzantine Vaults and Domes

The vault of the Basilica of Maxentius, completed by Constantine, was the last great work carried out in Rome before its fall, and two centuries pass before the next important development is found in the Church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) at Constantinople.

Romanesque Vaults and Domes

The Romans were first to fully appreciate the advantages of the arch, the vault and the dome.

Although the dome constitutes the principal characteristic of the Byzantine church, throughout Asia Minor are numerous examples in which the naves are vaulted with the semi-circular barrel vault, and this is the type of vault found throughout the south of France in the 11th and 12th centuries, the only change being the occasional substitution of the pointed barrel vault, adopted not only on account of its exerting a less thrust, but because, as pointed out by Fergusson (vol. ii. p. 46), the roofing tiles were laid directly on the vault and a less amount of filling in at the top was required.

Gothic Vaults and Domes

One of the most interesting examples of the fan vault is that over the staircase leading to the hall of Christ Church, Oxford, and here the complete conoid is displayed in its centre carried on a central column.

Renaissance Vaulting and Faux-Vaulting

It is important to note that Roman vaults, like those of the Pantheon, and Byzantine vaults, like those at Hagia Sophia, were not protected from above, the European architects of the middle-Ages protected their vaults with wooden roofs. In other words, one will not see a Gothic vault from the outside.

The reasons for this development are hypothetical, but the fact that the roofed basilica form preceded the era when vaults began to be made is certainly of consideration. In other words, the traditional image of a roof took precedence over the vault.

India Vaults

There are two distinctive "other ribbed vaults" (called "Karbandi" in Persian) in India which form no part of the development of European vaults, but are too remarkable to be passed over; one carries the central dome of the Jumma Musjid at Bijapur (1559 AD); and the other is Gol Gumbaz, the tomb of Muhammad Adil Shah II (1626-1660 AD) in the same town.

Modern Vaults

The 20th century saw great advances in reinforced concrete design. The advent of shell construction and the better mathematical understanding of hyperbolic paraboloids allowed very thin, strong vaults to be constructed with previously unseen shapes.

Swedish Mathematician Decartes had discovered proof that the Hittites had used these mathematics before the Geeks to whom hyperbolic paraboloids were credited.

The Hittites were building corbelled vaults already by the 16th Century BC, which is around 300 years earlier than in the Argolid in Greece. Although it was long believed that the Etruscans in Italy invented the simple barrel arch and Pergamons in Greece invented the vault (adjacent arches which are assembled side by side), which has an even greater load bearing capacity and whose structure is also suited to support large roofs.

Food for thought!