in cemeteries that allowed the possibility for elite public display (Cohen 2005 : 80 ). At
home, connections with the deceased may have been maintained through rituals and
offerings placed near or in the tomb. Below a house at Tell Taya, for example, a
terracotta statuette of a naked female was found in the cellar leading to a cavern
containing three adult skeletons (Reade 1971 : 97 – 98 ). The cellar may have been acting
as both a place for storage and a shrine for the ancestors. By the Ur III period,
comparable practices are found in the Sumerian heartland and prosperous households
at Ur were now burying their dead at home, in family vaulted tombs below the floor
of the chapel; infants were kept closer to the living being placed in clay pots before the
chapel altars.CONCLUSION
This survey has highlighted that the longue duréeof Mesopotamian culture is a relevant
concept when applied to Sumerian home life. Despite what appear to have been
fundamental changes in the political and economic organisation of society during the
fourth and third millennia BC, that is, a shift from a temple to palace-based economy,
there was considerable continuity in the domestic sphere. Urbanism was the defining
characteristic for a large number of people in Sumer; living together in densely packed
communities helped to mitigate some of the challenges of the harsh environment of
southern Iraq. Such close proximity might have also helped to preserve long-
established traditions of social relations, as well as kinship and family structure; these
are reflected in the physical remains of homes, the enduring layout of which includes
a small, central courtyard, where work activities took place, surrounded by rooms used
for reception, storage, cooking and sleeping. Ethno-archaeological studies and
archaeological evidence suggest there was a persistent relationship between the scale
of buildings and family structure (Stone 1996 : 229 ); it is possible that smaller houses
may have been occupied by nuclear families, while larger ones sheltered extended ones
(Stone 1996 : 233 ; Brusasco 1999 – 2000 : 67 ). In addition, the close proximity of ‘rich’
and ‘poor’ houses within these neighbourhoods may indicate that they were inhabited
by groups who were related to each other, rather than by groups of similar economic
standing (Brusasco 1999 – 2000 : 144 ). Thus, despite changes in the activities that took
place within houses, the continuity in planning and construction of Sumerian homes
suggests that in the domestic world social conditions altered very little across the
millennia of time.
REFERENCES
Bottéro, Jean. 2001. Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Brusasco, Paolo. 1999 – 2000. Family archives and the use of space in Old Babylonian houses at Ur.
Mesopotamia XXXIV–V: 3 – 174.
Cohen, Andrew. 2005. Death Rituals, Ideology, and the Development of Early Mesopotamian Kingship:
Toward a New Understanding of Iraq’s Royal Cemetery of Ur(Studies in Ancient Magic &
Divination). Leiden: Brill.
Collon, Dominique. 1987. First Impressions: Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East. London: British
Museum Press.–– Paul Collins ––