There remain two fields in which Mesopotamian examples have produced results more important than those we have discussed so far. They are architecture and writing. With the First Dynasty, monumental brick architecture makes its appearance in a form, both as regards material and plan, which recalls the Protoliterate temples of Mesopotamia.[179] It is a moot point whether bricks were made in Egypt in prehistoric times. In Persia, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor (Mersin) they were used on a great scale from the Al Ubaid period onwards, and were known even earlier. In Egypt a few bricks have been found in prehistoric context, but not actually in walls, and whether they were used for buildings may well be doubted, since in Nubia, where prehistoric culture continued to flourish even after the accession of Menes, bricks were used only at a later date. Moreover, a design on the Hunters’ Palette (Fig. 25), and hieroglyphs representing traditional palaces and shrines, indicate that predynastic public buildings were made of wood and matting, or perhaps of wattle and daub. It is likely that the palaces and other important buildings of the First Dynasty were still made of those materials.[180] But in this dynasty highly sophisticated brick architecture is suddenly used in the construction of graves. In Egypt secular buildings were at all times less permanent than tombs and temples. When, from the Third Dynasty onwards, these were built of stone, houses and palaces were still built of brick. And this distinction holds good for all subsequent periods. Under the First Dynasty, when brick architecture came into its own, this new and more permanent architecture was used, at first, for the royal tombs which were decorated with buttresses and recesses on all four sides (Figs. 46, 47, 50). This ornamentation was achieved, in some cases (Fig. 46),[181] by the use of two kinds of bricks—large ones for the core of the building and smaller ones for the recessing. These small bricks are of a size and shape peculiar, in Mesopotamia, to the latter half of the Protoliterate period and were used in an identical fashion, three rows of stretchers alternating as a rule with one row of headers.[182] The recesses and buttresses duplicate exactly the recessing of Protoliterate temples. Other technical details—the manner in which a plinth or platform is constructed (Fig. 47),[183] the use of short timbers inserted horizontally as the strengthening in the niches (Figs. 49, 50)—likewise reflect Mesopotamian usages of the Protoliterate period (Fig. 48).[184] In Mesopotamia the whole method of recessed brick building can be seen to come into being, starting with the temples at Eridu and Tepe Gawra of the Al Ubaid period (when the buttresses, widely spaced, seem merely to strengthen the walls), until, in the Protoliterate age (Fig. 45), the exact degree of complexity was reached with which brick building appears under the First Egyptian Dynasty,