Friday, December 20, 2024

Mari: Model of a House

 


Researchers are uncertain whether or not this model was intended to represent an actual round house. The interior is divided into nine parts. There is a square central room that communicates with the other rooms, one of them is in the shape of a triangle and covered with a roof, with a chimney hole through which smoke could escape. One of the rooms forms a sort of vestibule, since the house entrance is on its outer wall. The central room has a horseshoe-shaped hearth and benches in the corners. Its walls are higher than those of the other rooms, and tenons in the corners of these walls could have been used to support a wooden roof. Since this model and others like it were buried under temple thresholds or under the surface of the roads leading to the temples, it seems reasonable to assume that they were a type of cubic object that was placed in the ground to purify the means of access to the temple. 


Provenance: Mari.
Era: Early Bronze Age (about 2400 BC).
Substance: tera cotta. 
Dimensions: 61 x 29 cm. 
Text: Michel Fortin (p. 278). 
Photography: Jacques Lessard
Collection of the National Museum of Damascus







Michel Fortin, Syria, Land of Civilization. Les Éditions de l'Homme, Musée de la Civilisation de Québec 1999.

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