Barrel vaulting was known and utilized by early civilizations, including
ancient Egypt and
Mesopotamia. However, it apparently was not a very popular or common method of construction within these civilizations. The Persians and the Romans were the first to make significant architectural use of them. The technique probably evolved out of necessity to roof buildings with masonry elements such as bricks or stone blocks in areas where timber and wood were scarce. The earliest known example of a vault is a
tunnel vault found under the
Sumerian
ziggurat at
Nippur in
Babylonia, ascribed to about 4000 BC, which was built from fired bricks amalgamated with
clay mortar. The earliest tunnel vaults in Egypt are found at
Requagnah and
Denderah, from around 3500 BC in the
predynastic era. These were built with
sun-dried brick in three rings over passages descending to
tombs with a
span of only two metres. In these early instances, the barrel vault was chiefly used for underground structures such as drains and
sewers, though several buildings of the great Late Egyptian
mortuary palace-
temple of
Ramesseum were also vaulted in this way. Recent
archaeological evidence discovered at the
Morgantina site (in the province of
Enna) shows that the aboveground barrel vault was known and used in Hellenistic
Sicily in 3rd century BC, indicating that the technique was also known to
ancient Greeks. The vaulted roof of an early Harappan burial chamber has been noted from
Rakhigarhi.
S.R Rao reports vaulted roof of a small chamber in a house from
Lothal. Barrel vaults were also used in the Late Harappan
Cemetery H culture dated 1900 BC-1300 BC which formed the roof of the metal working furnace, the discovery was made by
Vats in 1940 during excavation at
Harappa. Ancient Romans most probably inherited their knowledge of barrel vaulting from
Etruscans and the Near East. Persians and Romans were the first to use this building method extensively on large-scale projects and were probably the first to use
scaffolding to aid them in construction of vaults spanning over widths greater than anything seen before. However, Roman builders gradually began to prefer the use of
groin vault; though more complex to erect, this type of vault did not require heavy, thick walls for support (see below), and thus allowed for more spacious buildings with greater openings and much more light inside, such as
thermae. After the fall of the
Roman Empire, few buildings large enough to require much in the way of vaulting were built for several centuries. In the early
Romanesque period, a return to stone barrel vaults was seen for the first great cathedrals; their interiors were fairly dark, due to thick, heavy walls needed to support the vault. One of the largest and most famous churches enclosed from above by a vast barrel vault was the church of
Cluny Abbey, built between the 11th and 12th centuries. In 13th and 14th centuries, with the advance of the new
Gothic style, barrel vaulting became almost extinct in constructions of great Gothic cathedrals;
groin vaults reinforced by stone ribs were mostly used in the beginning, and later on various types of spectacular, ornate and complex medieval vaults were developed. However, with the coming of the
Renaissance and the
Baroque style, and revived interest in art and architecture of antiquity, barrel vaulting was re-introduced on a truly grandiose scale, and employed in the construction of many famous buildings and churches, such as
Basilica di Sant'Andrea di Mantova by
Leone Battista Alberti,
San Giorgio Maggiore by
Andrea Palladio, and perhaps most glorious of all,
St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, where a huge barrel vault spans the -wide nave. ==Engineering issues==