Mediterranean Families in Antiquity by Huebner Sabine R.; Nathan Geoffrey; & Geoffrey Nathan

Author:Huebner, Sabine R.; Nathan, Geoffrey; & Geoffrey Nathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2016-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Houses of the common people in Roman Egypt were modest in size and had two or three, sometimes four, rooms. They were of rectangular shape, on average about 30–50 m2 in area, most often built from mud brick, and, even if built next to each other, did not share their outer walls. Archaeological reports suggest that houses were not, once constructed, unchangeable entities but were continuously modified and rebuilt to respond to the changing needs of its inhabitants, whether a house was expanded by additional rooms or another floor level, or subdivided to fit several families where formerly just one had lived. The non-durable construction from mud bricks, however, also meant that houses and their parts needed constant maintenance, repairs, and replacements. This fact contradicts Alston’s assumption that “the particular pile of bricks had more significant associations for Romano-Egyptians” than in other cultures (Alston 2002: 126). Rather the opposite seems to be true, in my opinion: while the material house held little significance for the individual, it was a very economical, quickly built structure that lasted at most a few decades before it needed to be leveled and rebuilt. It was the household as the community of its residents was significant, rather than the architecture of the house which I believe held little emotional investment.

The modest town house offered little comfort and its inhabitants probably had little furnishing apart from straw mats and palm branches functioning as sofas and beds. They usually had a small open courtyard for cooking, milling grain, and baking bread, where probably also a couple of small animals such as pigeons, goats, and maybe even pigs were kept, a staircase to reach the first or even second floor, and a basement with a vaulted low ceiling where food was stored. The exact layout of village houses varied from region to region.

The women of the household – sometimes together with the women of neighboring houses – most likely spent the greater part of their day in the open courtyard occupied with preparing meals, baking bread, and tending the small animals, while the men probably spent most of their day in the fields. Family members slept in rooms that could be locked by keys, so these must be the smaller rooms at the end of the house away from the main entrance. The main room to the street served probably as the room for eating, socializing, and welcoming guests.

Moreover, daily life within the domestic space was not only organized spatially but also temporally, meaning that not only physical subdivisions separated ongoing activities but also that a room that belonged to the men in the mornings might have been used by the women in the afternoons. The room where the female slaves slept at night might have served as the master’s reception room in the morning. If domestic space was like this or similarly arranged, even in these small houses the women and men of the household may have pursued their daily activities separated from each other. If, however, the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.