Nagy Emese Gyöngyvér - Dani János - Hajdú Zsigmond szerk.: MÓMOSZ II. (Debrecen, 2004)

Kalla Gábor: A mezopotámiai lakóházak berendezése az óbabiloni korban. A régészeti és az írásos források ellentmondásai

GÁBOR KALLA THE FURNITURE OF HOUSES IN MESOPOTAMIA DURING THE OLD BABYLONIAN PERIOD: CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN ARCHEOLOGICAL SOURCES AND WRITTEN SOURCE DOCUMENTS One of the most problematic areas in the larger field of settlement research of ancient times is the research focusing on interior furniture and household instruments inside residential or dwelling places. One of the reasons for this is that pots, vessels, and pieces of furniture made of valuable kinds of material were never left inside the buildings which were supposed to be destroyed or pulled down. Another reason might be that the objects that were still left inside these building and had been made of easily decaying or decomposing sorts of material (wood, reed, leather, etc.) did not defy the ravages of time. Oftentimes, even the former ground floor level, which had been the level of everyday activities, fell victim to erosion. By the same token, it is difficult to evaluate not only the level of sophistication of interior design or decoration in the various prehistoric time periods but also how it went through certain trans formations. The case of Mesopotamia is surprisingly similar in this respect, despite the fact that the debris of adobe brick walls provided proper conditions at least for the survival of articles made of non-perishable or undecaying types of material. However, the available finds coming from dwelling places are scant here, too. The information we have on the furniture and fittings of houses is mostly restricted to such non-moveable fixtures as clay benches, pedestals, niches, fireplaces, and furnaces. The assumption that interior design in Mesopotamia was basically one without furniture occurs quite frequently in the relevant archeological literature. This opinion is related to the fact that archeology is prone to project the extant conditions back into the past. At the same time, it tends to disregard how small or large a fraction of the given culture is represented by the available finds. The above picture seems to be reinforced by certain ethnographical parallels, for contemporary interior decoration in Iraq uses almost no furniture at all. This analogy is misleading though, since only a portion of traditional Iraqi material culture would be akin to civilization in ancient Mesopotamia. Fortunately, there are also visual and written sources through which we can check how reliable an image the surviving finds convey to us. As the earliest written sources that are especially important from our point of view are first available from the so-called Old Baylonian period (the first half of the second millennium BC) in the required quantity, I will primarily focus on the discussion of this time period. Basically, there are three groups of findings that we can utilize as visually perceptible sources of information in this time period: the terra cotta models of various pieces of furniture, terra cotta reliefs depicting scenes of quotidian life, and artistic relics with the likenesses of reigning emperors or deities (including reliefs and seal cylinders). On the basis of the above, it appears quite clear that three kinds of furniture were used at the time: tables, chairs, and beds. This has been a fairly widely known fact even before. The more interesting part is about how broad a section of society was made up of those who used these kinds of furniture. A possibility of how pieces of furniture, as valuable items, should be wholly identified with places of worship and royal palaces has also emerged. Due to the above, it is only the written source documents that can provide us with information concerning the circle uf users. However, they have to be treated as carefully as if they were archeological data. We need to take into consideration the peculiarities of the contemporary documents and have to examine for what purpose they had been created. There are 122 such cuniform documents coming from the Old Babylonian time period that I am familiar with, which could be pretty interesting from the aspect of furnishing and decorating. However, a good portion of these is still unpublished. Apparently, the most useful sources in this respect would be the itemized lists attached to certificates of inheritance or to marital and engagement