German architecture

Germany in ancient times was covered with thick forests of big oak and walnut and maple trees. It was easy to get wood. So people there built most of their buildings out of wood. But wooden houses don't last very well, so the earliest buildings from Germany that we still have today are important people's graves built out of big stones, like the one in the picture. People built these graves between about 3000 and 1500 BC. This is about the same time as the Pyramids in Egypt and the Bronze Age palaces in Greece. Like the Greeks, the Germans at this time often lived in villages on hilltops, surrounded by deep ditches and wooden fences to keep out their enemies. Often there is more than one set of ditches and walls, as at the Greek site of Dimini. Their small round houses had wood frames filled in with wattle and daub, sometimes sunk partly into the ground.

Roman bath building in Trier, in southern Germany, about 300 AD

By the time of the Roman Empire, about 1 AD, many people in Germany were living under Roman rule, and their buildings began to look more and more like Roman buildings from other parts of the Roman Empire. At Trier, for example, the Roman army built a stone bridge over the Mosel river, a large bath building, a fort, and a basilica. Even outside the area held by Rome, people began to build stone buildings in the Roman style.

But most people still lived in wooden houses. They built their wooden houses in a rectangular shape now. A normal Saxon house from Tofting on the North Sea from about 300 AD has two rows of wooden posts running down the middle to hold up the roof. The outer walls are still of wattle and daub. One end of the longhouse was for people to live in, and the other end was for the cows and sheep and pigs.

German architecture in the Middle Ages
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