Reject hallways
Embrace courtyards and rooms going into other rooms.
https://erenow.net/ancient/ancient-perspectives/2.php
An Ur III tablet from Nippur offers a further example of a building plan in which rooms are labeled: it represents a building containing a kitchen (É.MU), a washroom (É.LUH), a weaving room (É.UŠ.BAR.RA), and an archive, or “tablet room” (É.DUB)
II.1. BUILDING AND FIELD PLANS
II.1.a. House and Plot Plans. At the most localized level, there survive tablets on which plans for houses and urban plots are drawn, accompanied by various kinds of inscription. House plans, showing walls and doorways, come from a wide chronological span, from the Old Akkadian and Ur III to Old Babylonian and Neo-Babylonian periods (ca. 2350–400).⁸ Early examples are also known from third-millennium Girsu, although it is difficult to identify with any certainty what kind of buildings they represent.⁹ A well-preserved house plan from Ur III Umma shows dimensions in cubits, probably in reference to the dimensions of the rooms themselves.¹⁰
The ground plans of houses etched into clay tablets show walls by parallel lines, and in what seems to be a real representation of the floor plan they indicate the placement of doorways (see fig. 1.3). Sometimes doors are indicated by a pair of cuneiform wedges as though to mark a break in the wall, or even by hatch marks perpendicular to the wall. One Old Babylonian building plan—dated to the reign of Abi-Ešuh and inscribed with the description “plan (literally ‘drawing’) of a house of Sippar-Jahrurum”—includes labels for the various rooms and parts of the building, such as doors (KÁ = bābum), under the stairs (šapal simmilti, written GIŠ.KUN4), a reception room (PA.PAH = papāhum), and a barbershop (É ŠU.I = bīt gallabim).¹¹ These indications would suggest that the building had some sort of public function, though it is apparently not a temple.¹² Such labeling of rooms, or parts of a building, is also to be seen in an earlier plan from third-millennium Girsu: it mentions a courtyard (KISAL = kisallu), reception room (PA.PAH = papāhum), and living quarters (KI.TUŠ = šubtu), and gives the length and width of rooms measured in cubits (KÙŠ) and ropes (NINDA.DU).¹³ An Ur III tablet from Nippur offers a further example of a building plan in which rooms are labeled: it represents a building containing a kitchen (É.MU), a washroom (É.LUH), a weaving room (É.UŠ.BAR.RA), and an archive, or “tablet room” (É.DUB).¹⁴
FIGURE 1.3 [pictured] Ground plan of a residence in Umma with central courtyard, Ur III period. Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, VAT 7031. Photo: Olaf M. Teßmer, Vorderasiatisches Museum—Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Reproduced with permission.
Early house plans, such as from the Old Akkadian to the Old Babylonian periods, may well represent sketches, or scribal exercises, rather than true blueprints (see figs. 1.4 and 1.5). In the Neo-Babylonian period similar schematic house plans exist from the Nappāhu family archive (Baker 2004, 16). In addition to these documents, other Neo-Babylonian tablets, many of which are from Babylon during the reign of Darius I (522–486), preserve surveyed plans of urban plots in records of a land registry for both plots and fields, perhaps for the purpose of taxation. They do not show house plans, but merely the plot itself in relation to its surrounding streets or other properties;¹⁵ they provide measured boundaries and a total surface area of the property, a four-sided single plot with an occasional adjacent plot represented in addition. The houses so described in these plans are small (under 200 sq m) as compared against actually excavated houses. Various explanations are possible: they may have been additional rental properties, or the small-sized properties were only thus on the plan, whereas the actual area formed part of a larger house unit, not divided physically (Baker 2004, 62).
The “maps” which document the delimitations of properties served a social and economic function of controlling real estate. Archival sources dealing with inheritance, sales, and rents confirm that the ownership of real property was a significant issue in Mesopotamian society over the course of its history. As Heather Baker (2004, 60) has pointed out, the house plans “are very similar in their basic configuration to the textual descriptions of houses, that is, they represent the sides of the property according to the points of the compass, labeled according to the neighboring property-owners and/or topographical features (usually streets) on each side, giving the measurements of the property’s boundaries plus the total surface area. Usually each plan consists of a single four-sided plot, but occasionally an adjacent plot is also depicted, according to the requirements of the survey.” From the point of view of function, then, the graphic documentation of houses and plots, as with the field plans (to be discussed below), played a role in the control of property ownership. From a cartographic viewpoint, the representation of houses and building plots and the use of certain iconic conventions for showing walls and doorways probably indicate a relative standardization effected by the training of the scribes who drew up the plans.¹⁶
