180 BARBARA TSAKIRgIS
The configuration of the find spots indicates that the weights had fallen
from a loom erected in the building. Ten spindle whorls were found in the
same house. In a second area of the site, 101 loom weights were found and
in a third, 41. Evidence here of sherds pierced and reused as loom weights
shows that many more such weights created from recycled materials might
have been excavated in Greek houses everywhere but were not recognized
as such. Also recovered from the Libyan Greek houses were the fragments
of two bone beaters, used to tamp the weft tight. The commercial works at
Euesperides included dyeing as well as weaving, as attested by the pounds of
murex shells crushed in the streets and found in an industrial oven, where
they had probably been heated in the process used to extract the purple dye
(Megias and Wilson 2008 : 57).
Dye works have also been posited by Kardara ( 1961 ) for the Hellenistic houses
on the Rachi at Isthmia, although Anderson-Stojanović (1996: 92) argues more
convincingly that the vats dug into the floors of the domestic courtyards were
for the pressing of olives for oil, a production that may have been on an indus-
trial scale. The largest collection of weights for any house at Rachi numbers
fourteen (Anderson-Stojanović 1996 : 82). The industrial production of cloth,
from the raising of sheep, importing of wool, carding, spinning, and weaving
of cloth and the process of dyeing with expensive plant and murex-based dyes,
is amply attested in the many papyri of the Zenon archives. Loftus ( 2000 )
has proposed that the large-scale production on the estate of Apollonius was
intimately linked with the royal court and motivated by the Ptolemaic emu-
lation of the Persian practice of bestowing costly garments on favored friends
and retainers. Hellenistic dye works have been excavated also at Mycenae and
on Delos (Bowkett 1995 ; Bruneau 1969 ).
To project this Hellenistic data back into the Classical period, we need
to ask: What did a Classical ergasterion look like? The House of Mikion and
Menon in Athens serves as a good example. In its architectural form and plan
it differs not at all from many other houses. It has a roughly central court on
its southern side and possibly had a second to the north (Tsakirgis 2005 ; Shear
1969 : 383–94). The usual vessels for food storage, preparation, and service were
found on the floors of the house as well as in its cisterns. Here too was found
the detritus of workshop activity – in the case of this house, marble dust, chips,
unfinished sculpture, and tools. The space is not as large as that of Building
Z, but is comparable to that of the kapeleia in which the loom weights were
deposited in the U 13:1 well.
Textiles produced in the home were probably first and foremost intended
as garments for the members of the family. Woolen peploi and tunics, linen
chitones, and cloaks of various types made up the somewhat limited ward-
robe of the Classical Greeks. Many slaves would likely wear hand-me-downs,
although workmen, many probably slaves, wore the exomis and foreign slaves