The history of plasterwork

About 160 to 200 million years ago, dinosaurs migrated to the marshlands of the world. Horse-tailed plants grew so tall that they reached 12 meters in length, and so did ferns up to 4 meters tall. During this time some of the large and small seas dried up, and the layers of plasterstone that had formed beneath them appeared.
According to geologists, the disappearance of dinosaurs and the emergence of plasterstone layers is much older than the creation of civilizations on Earth. The effects of the use of plaster according to archaeologists in Iran date back to the pre-Islamic period about 1500 years ago.
Chalk is one of the oldest building materials in the world. Chalk may have been produced and used in other ways in the past centuries. The Egyptians had gypsies 600 years ago.
The Egyptians used plaster 1,500 years ago to cover the inner surfaces of the walls of the Three Pyramids. Inside the pyramids there are magnificent mural paintings of Egyptian soldiers, chariots , gods, animals and birds on flat, white plaster surfaces.
Ancient civilizations also used a type of plaster, which today we call Alabaster. Large statues of winged cows belonging to the Assyrian civilization, now in the Museum of the City of London, are made of the same stone. The Greeks also minted coins bearing the name Alabaster, after a city called Alabaster in Egypt. They also made small pots and pans out of plaster.
The Greeks also gave the stone a name consisting of two words with the meanings of earth and baking. They used a special form of glassy gypsum for the windows and especially dedicated these stones to the temples of the moon goddess. The glass plaster used in this traditional way is called selenite or moonstone by the Greeks.
The Romans also knew about gypsum stones, which could have applications in their profession and craft. The indication of this information is statues without humans, made in Western Europe with plaster mortar and available today. The Anglo-Saxons and Normans had forgotten about the chalk stone until they met the Paris chalk for the first time in the 13th century .
Today, good Alabaster can be found in the middle of England, especially in Nottingham, in the form of sculptures of various shapes carved by masters of the 14th and 15th centuries. Later, these plaster artifacts became famous and were mass-produced throughout Europe. These alabaster can be seen in public museums. Alabaster has also been used in some tombs , church motifs and other historic buildings.
When the roof and walls of houses were made with straw and cane, people needed a filler to fill the gap between them.
In most parts of Western Europe houses were built this way. This was initially done with clay and clay. The buildings then found a type of limestone mortar that created hard, white surfaces. Later, by reaching the gypsum stone, this was done with the use of gypsum mortar. Buildings preferred plaster mortar to lime mortar due to the high rate of drying and the absence of cracks afterwards. Today, lime mortar is used to some extent.
However, the highest consumption of plaster was for the interior surfaces of the building, but from the 16th century onwards plasterwork was used.
They developed their skills and gained valuable abilities in the field of decoration and artistic works with plaster. In Ian’s work on the plaster surfaces of walls and ceilings created the role of flowers , branches of trees , fruits and even the design of musical instruments. Some of the best examples of these designs have been worked by Stucco plaster in homes in Dublin(Georgian), Republic of Ireland.
The plaster designs on the ceiling are not very old, although there are still prominent plaster strips around the ceiling in some old houses or designs around the central ceiling lights, but these works do not have a very long life. Today, some companies are still active in creating traditional designs on chalk surfaces. This activity is carried out by skilled craftsmen on the roofs of important people’s homes or churches.
Gypsum is one of the materials that is of special importance in the construction industry and because of the characteristics that it has had since ancient times in the field of housing. In many old buildings, especially during the Sofia epoch, most of them exist in Isfahan, chalk has played an effective role, and very beautiful chalk bars from that era remain. Because of its properties, gypsum is needed from the first step in creating a building that is grounded and with a slab to pour color around the ground, and also until the last stages of the work that is white work and stone installation, gypsum is still needed and even in the painting of the building, they use gypsum.