Cultures from pre-history to the modern era constructed early and simple domes using local materials. Although it is not known when or where the first dome was created, sporadic examples of early domed structures have been discovered as far back as the Stone Age. The first examples may not have survived due to the use of perishable materials like saplings, reeds, or timbers covered with thatch, turf, or skins, but similar forms have been documented more recently in vernacular architecture around the world. Comparable historical domes built with such materials include Central Asian felt tents, Thule whalebone dwellings, Inuit igloos, Native American wigwams and Anasazi roofs, and various African grass, leaf, wattle and daub, and thin clay domes.
Examples built with more lasting materials have been found from the Neolithic period and Chalcolithic periods, with sites in the ancient Near East showing small corbelled or mudbrick domes over round houses and granaries. In the Bronze Age, corbelled stone "beehive" tombs and other structures appear from Egypt and Nubia through Oman, Crete, Sardinia, and Mycenaean Greece. Iron Age and later early domes include Etruscan, Hellenistic, Achaemenid, and Han-dynasty Chinese examples. Nineteenth-century beehive houses in Turkey and the trulli of Italy belong to the same family of techniques.
The historical path from the earliest examples to later monumental masonry and concrete domes remains poorly documented. That similar forms appear across many cultures could reflect either a common source or multiple independent traditions. The dome form encloses a given volume with less material and surface area relative to rectilinear techniques and so often has favorable thermal properties, which may explain why some Indigenous peoples around the world produce similar structures today.
Early and indigenous domes
The earliest domes were likely domed huts made from saplings, reeds, or timbers and covered with thatch, turf, or skins. Materials may have transitioned to rammed earth, mud-brick, or more durable stone as a result of local conditions. The earliest discovered remains of domed constructions may be four small dwellings made of Mammoth tusks and bones. The first was found by a farmer in Mezhirich, Ukraine, in 1965 while he was digging in his cellar and archaeologists unearthed three more. They date from 19,280–11,700 BC.
The historical development from structures like these to more sophisticated domes is not well documented. That the dome was known to early Mesopotamia may explain the existence of domes in both China and the West in the first millennium BC. Another explanation, however, is that the use of the dome shape in construction did not have a single point of origin and was common in virtually all cultures long before domes were constructed with enduring materials. Sylvester Baxter wrote that domes were evidently of Persian origin, with those early Persian domes being thought by Pascal Coste to have been derived from hemispherical bent-pole hide tents of the nomadic Iliate tribe of Turkmens near the Aral Sea, and thought by Frederic Edwin Church to have been derived from an earlier use of brick dome-shaped huts like those he had seen in Turkey.
Turkic and Mongolian nomads have used domed tents covered in felt for at least a thousand years in central Asia, and they were used to the early 1900s from Anatolia to Mongolia.
Semi-subterranean dwellings of the Thule people, ancestors of the Inuit who were established in the Canadian Arctic by 1300 AD, were made of whalebone frames lashed together with hide straps in a parabolic dome shape covered with hides and blocks of sod and snow. The igloo, a shelter built from blocks of ice in a spiral, was used by the Inuit. The wigwam was made by Native Americans and covered with hides or bark. A kind of corbelled dome using lengths of wood was used by the Anasazi to cover some kivas between 900 and 1250. A similar technique is used in Afghanistan.
In South Africa, there are accounts as far back at 1727 describing mobile domed shelters about 4.2 meters wide made by Khoi nomads as well as grass houses among forager communities in either a conical or dome form, which appear to have been the dominant type of housing by 1800 among communities in the grass-rich areas east of the Drakensberg escarpment. A later development of the grass dome house were the cone-on-cylinder and dome-on-cylinder houses in KwaZulu-Natal. A traditional dome house is used by the Xhosa people as a temporary male initiation shelter that is then burned. The Efé people of central Africa construct similar structures, using leaves as shingles. The Himba people of Namibia construct "desert igloos" of wattle and daub for use as temporary shelters at seasonal cattle camps, and as permanent homes by the poor. Extraordinarily thin domes of sun-baked clay in diameter, high, and nearly parabolic in curve, are known from Cameroon.
In developing countries, domes are often less expensive alternatives to flat or sloped-roofed construction because they use less material to enclose a given volume and provide a lower rate of heat transfer due to the reduced surface area. Domes made with loam are found in Europe, Asia, and Africa, almost always using mud-bricks or adobes. A way of building them without centering called the Persian dome technique has been used for centuries in Afghanistan. Earthen brick domes bonded with earthen mortar in villages near Aleppo, Syria, are distinguished from similar corbelled domes known since antiquity in the Mediterranean region, such as those of Italy, Sardinia, Spain, France, North Africa, and the Near East, by being closer to the funicular shape for a dome, having thinner structures, laying the bricks in a continuous spiral, and behaving like a monolithic material. Although descended from a longer tradition, the examples of clay brick beehive domes at Harran, Turkey, have been dated to the 19th century AD, as are the dry stone trulli of Italy.
Neolithic and Chalcolithic Small domes in corbelled stone or brick over round-plan houses go back to the Neolithic period in the ancient Near East, and served as dwellings for poorer people throughout the prehistoric period, but domes did not play an important role in monumental architecture.
The discoveries of seal impressions in the ancient site of Chogha Mish ( to 3000 BC), located in the Susiana plains of Iran, in the vicinity of the modern city of Dezful in Khuzestan province, show the extensive use of dome structures in mud-brick and adobe buildings, likely granaries. Other examples of mud-brick buildings that also seemed to employ the "true" dome technique have been excavated at Tell Arpachiyah, a Mesopotamian site of the Halaf ( to 5400 BC) and Ubaid ( to 4000 BC) cultures.
Domed houses at Shulaveri in Georgia and Khirokitia, Cyprus, date back to around 6000 BC.
Bronze Age Ancient stone corbelled domes have been found from the Middle East to Western Europe. Corbelled beehive domes were used as granaries in Ancient Egypt from the first dynasty, in mastaba tombs of the Old Kingdom, as pressure-relieving devices in private brick pyramids of the New Kingdom, and as kilns and cellars. They have been found in brick and in stone. The mastaba tombs of Seneb and of Neferi are examples. A model of a 10th dynasty house has also been found in Rifeh showing the tops of three domes just emerging through the terraced roof.
In an area straddling the borders between Oman, UAE, and Bahrain, stone beehive tombs built above ground called "Hafit graves", or "Mezyat graves", date to the Hafit period between 3200 and 2700 BC.
Above-ground tombs made of corbelled stone domes have been found in the fourth cataract region of Nubia with dates beginning in the second millennium BC. The "Nubian dome" technique of using a movable guide to lay courses of a spherical dome dates back thousands of years in Upper Egypt.
At the Sumerian Royal Cemetery of Ur, a "complete rubble dome built over a timber centring" was found among the chambers of the tombs for Meskalamdug and Puabi, dating to around 2500 BC. Set in mud mortar, it was a "true dome with pendentives rounding off the angles of the square chamber." Other small domes can be inferred from the remaining ground plans, such as one in the courtyard of Ur-Nammu's ziggurat, and in later shrines and temples of the 14th century BC. Some monumental Mesopotamian buildings of the Kassite period are thought to have had brick domes, but the issue is unsettled due to insufficient evidence in what has survived of these structures. Excavations at Tell al-Rimah have revealed pitched-brick domical vaults from about 2000 BC.
Minoan free-standing tombs about 4 to 13 meters in diameter are partially preserved on the Messara Plain of Crete. Only the lowest 3 or 4 meters remain standing of structures that may have risen up to 12 meters, but they are generally agreed to have been domed and provide a developmental link between Neolithic round houses and the circular tombs of the Bronze Age. They are dated after the round houses of Chalcolithic western Cyprus and before the Mycenaean "tholoi".
Examples on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia have been dated to 2500 BC. The nuraghe built between the 17th century BC and the 5th century BC include stone corbelled domes, some of which were covered by a flat roof or terrace. The largest, Nuraghe Is Paras from the 15th century BC, is 11.8 meters tall and spans 6.4 meters.
Underground tombs called "treasuries", a term used by Pausanias for the grave of a hero, flourished in Mycenaean Greece between 1500 BC and 1300 BC, increasing in diameter from about 8 meters to about 14 meters in that time. Stone courses above the doorway openings may have an inward inclination to increase the inward thrust from surrounding soil used to stabilize the structure. Smaller scale examples from this time can also be found in other parts of southern and western Europe.
The "Treasury of Atreus", a large Mycenaean tomb covered with a mound of earth, dates to around 1330 BC. It is about 15 meters in diameter and one of several tholos tombs with corbelled domes. Others include the "Treasury of Clytemnestra" and the "". The tombs of Clytemnestra (13.4 meters in diameter), Lion (14 meters in diameter), and Atreus (14.6 meters in diameter) use dry masonry ashlar limestone and conglomerate blocks and are the only three at Mycenae that are monumental in size. The size and quality of the stonework, in particular the inner lintel stone in the Atreus tomb carved to match the double curvature of the dome's inner surface, have led to speculation that these were the tombs of royalty. The Atreus inner lintel stone was almost eight meters long, five meters wide, and weighed more than 120 tons. It was the heaviest stone block used in Greek history.
Iron Age
A Neo-Assyrian bas-relief from Kuyunjik depicts domed buildings, although remains of such a structure in that ancient city have yet to be identified, perhaps due to the impermanent nature of sun-dried mudbrick construction. However, because the relief depicts the Assyrian overland transport of a carved stone statue, the background buildings most likely refer to a foreign village, such as those at the foothills of the Lebanese mountains. The relief dates to the 8th century BC, while the use of domical structures in the Syrian region may go back as far as the fourth millennium BC. The piece depicting the beehive domes, SWPS 150a (referring to the identifier in 1998 publication Sculptures from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh; possibly slab 61), was documented in a drawing as part of the excavation by Austen Henry Layard but was not sent to London, likely due to its state of damage.