When the Mormon pioneers entered Utah, life was anything but
easy, and they had to make due with whatever they had available. One pioneer
told Orson Hyde, “I labored hard under the pangs of hunger to put up a little
adobie cabin and prepare to live, and at the same time my wife and children,
pale with want, were ranging the hills and benches to find thistles and roots
to eat, which we boiled in the milk of the remaining cows the wolves had not
eaten.”[1]
Sun dried mud brick, adobe, was the preferred building material. It was even
suggested that the Salt Lake Temple be built “of the stone that is got in the
Red Bute Kanyon, or of adobies, or of the best stone we can find in these
mountains.”[2]
The term adobe is
particularly associated with the southwestern United States, and came from the
region of Mexico and Central America. Though mud brick is common in the
southwest from prehistoric times, the origin of the term is Spanish, adobe.
The Spanish term, however, is not native to Spanish and
first appears in the thirteenth century, when Spain was part of Fatimid Spain.
It comes from Arabic, al-ṭūb “bricks.”[3]
The Coptic term derives from earlier Egyptian ḏb.t “brick” and goes all the way
back to the beginning of Egyptian history. The bricks themselves began to be
used in the Naqada I period,[4]
and were used for most forms of non-monumental architecture throughout Egyptian
history. In Exodus, the main building material was mud brick (Exodus 1:14;
5:7-19).
Both the Children of Israel before their Exodus and the
Mormon pioneers after their Exodus built their dwellings of the same material
and used the same word for it.
[1]
Orson Hyde, 24 September 1853, Journal of
Discourses, 2:114.
[2]
Heber C. Kimball, 9 October 1852, Journal
of Discourses, 1:160.
[3]
Hans Wehr, Arabic-English Dictionary
(), 571.
[4]
Dieter Arnold, The Encyclopedia of
Ancient Egyptian Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2003), 34.
