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

present contracts. Yet, these never comprise a full inventory, they tend to include only the most valuable items. It varies from case to case what contemporary people thought would be important to record. In the certificates of inheritance, apart from the more valuable pieces of real estate (lands, yards, residential areas) and the expensive slaves, pieces of furniture also occur in almost half of the cases. The order the individual pieces used to follow varies from town to town. In Southern and Central Babylonia, the most frequently occurring items are the door wings (which used to be considered as a chattel or a piece of moveable property) and a particular kind of table used during family cult meetings. In Northern Babylonia, the most often mentioned items are the various kinds of grinding stones and mortars. In less than half of the certificates of inheritance, we also find beds, chairs, and large storing pots made of clay. The relatively unusual or rare items include storage boxes, bronze implements and copper vessels (boiling kettles), and wooden vessels. Jewelry items made of precious metals are hard to come by, while (hand) woven fabrics are something we never met. In comparison, the lists of articles are much more detailed in the case of engagement present contracts. The obvious reason for this phenomenon is that each and every article had to be returned to the husband in the case of a divorce. The most complete lists occur in the case of a peculiar female group who are called nunnery ladies, whose parents' gave presents to go with their daughters. Among the presents given to women, the following items almost always occur: beds, tables, chairs, storing boxes, bibbles or grinding stones, bronze implements, copper dishware, oftentimes wooden or clay dishware, and even gold and silver jewels and woven fabrics. On this basis, we can safely state that Mesopotamia used to have a refined furniture culture, and that the use of furniture was widespread at least among the members of urban population. If we consider the above listing, it turns out that it is mostly the minor part of the contemporary household items that remain extant to us, including items such as grinding stones and clay pots. Bronze implements, copper vessels, or precious metal jewelry tend to be much rarer, and they generally surface only from graves or burial places. Wooden pieces of furniture and other household articles made of wood on the other hand almost always perish and disappear. All this should be a warning for us as to how careful we need to be concerning any conclusions drawn on the basis of the composition of archeological findings, since these items comprise but the smaller, oftentimes less valuable, part of the ancient material culture. KALLA GÁBOR ELTE BTK RÉGÉSZETTUDOMÁNYI INTÉZET 1088 BUDAPEST, MÚZEUM KRT. 4/B