It was nothing more than a mud-brick structure no bigger than my parent's garage with a corrugated tin roof and a log fence around it to keep animals out.

The "tira" refers to a two-storey mud-brick structure purchased from the Arab landowner, Musa al-Almi.

City officials said that a famous historical site, the Bam citadel, dating back 2,000 years and said to be the world's largest mud-brick structure, was destroyed by the earthquake.

Most of the mud-brick structures in this area showed signs of recent repair.

The houses found at Volubilis range from richly decorated mansions to simple two-room mud-brick structures used by the city's poorer inhabitants.

So captivating is this earthen marvel, the world's largest mud-brick structure, that it makes little difference to the experience to learn that the current building only dates from 1907.

An interesting characteristic in this area was the large rock-cut rooms with mud-brick structures constructed in front of them.

These lamps are representative of the earliest objects that have been uncovered on the surface of these mud-brick structures.

The earliest layers date from the 7-9th centuries with the first mud-brick structures in the late 9th to early 10th centuries.

Originally, the camp housed 9,000 refugees in tents and then mud-brick structures, which were replaced with cement block structures in the early 1960s.