How did the spatial design develop – and who were the builders?Whether the urban plan was the outcome of careful planning by an institution
responsible for the spatial design, or whether the placement of the temples amidst the
domestic housing had been part of the organic growth and development of the district,
is still an open question. So too is the search for the builders: were they local residents,
a planning collective of local users or the local elite of Khafajah? An unequivocal answer
cannot be found. However, the location, the dimensions of the buildings and the
resources necessary for their construction would not rule out the possibility that the
local inhabitants were responsible.
The question follows: who were the users?The integration of both cultic buildings into the surrounding houses and thus into
the world of daily life occurred hand in hand with the lack of any visible restrictions
on the accessibility of the buildings. The easy control of visitors by having only one
entrance per building has been mentioned. The only additional restriction that
tradition obviously demanded was to prevent the core area of a religious building from
being directly visible from the outside. Users thus had to enter each building through
a small anteroom, and reached the main room through the long side of the building,
turned to the left or to the right and only then faced the short side of the shrine or
worship space where the altar was located. Apart from this formal distinction no
further visible measures were taken to create a distance between the worldly and the
cultic sphere. What remains to be clarified is the way of lighting the shrines and the
question of whether the transition from daylight to dark was another measure to make
the difference between the worldly world and the world of the gods ‘visible’.
The system of spatial design visible in Khafajah at that time and in this district, the
integrated placement of the cult buildings into the living area, the fact that no visible
measures seemed necessary to fence off divergent functions and that access to the
buildings was easy, should be supporting arguments for the suggestion, that among
those who used the buildings, were those who lived in the precinct. That, as in every
culture, the presence of so-called ‘hidden bans’ might nevertheless have deterred people
from entering the holy places cannot, of course, be ruled out.
A break with the known – and the creation of the NewThe construction principle of a balanced relationship between buildings of divergent
functions came to an end and was replaced by a diametrically opposed modus operandi
when it came to the foundation of the so-called Temple Oval (corresponding with the
building activities in layer VIII in the Sin Temple) (Delougaz, 1940 ). We see for the first
time at Khafajah that the builders of a temple complex did not respect the existing
spatial order but implemented a radical break with the local building tradition. To
prepare the foundations for the new, and for the first time, monumental complex,
those responsible for the building activities removed existing domestic housing,
scooped out a foundation pit of 50 m to 60 m, filled it with clean sand and then began
to erect the monumental new structure. The building effort invested was unique in the
history of Khafajah as was the form and building type created on the site. The new
edifice consisted of a solid brick terrace built in the southeastern part of the oval
–– Public buildings, palaces and temples ––