HOUSES OF ANCIENTS

Southland Times, Issue 20833, 23 July 1929, Page 11

HOUSES OF ANCIENTS

A 4QO-ROOM DWELLING.

COMFORTS IN 1500 B.C.

The apartment house hotel is not a characteristic contribution of the crowded modern age to the world’s social history after all, says the Christian Science Monitor.' Bible times had their prototype. True enough, the recent excavations at Nuzi, near Bagdad, described at the annual . meeting of the American Oriental Society at Harvard University by Dr. David G. Lyon, professor emeritus of Hebrew at Harvard, show a distinct architectural difference, in that instead of piling floor upon floor toward the sky, the ancient builders preferred to spread hundreds of connected rooms on the ground level.

In fact, these unidentified people of 1500 B.C. —Dr. Lyon said he thought they were related to the Hittites —made their spraw-' ling one-storey dwellings of 400 rooms even more sufficient than the modern adaption with its barber shops and delicatessens. Residents did not have to leave home for religious worship, since a temple was part and parcel of the structure. Baking rooms with pottery ovens and lavatories, with pits for bathing, equipped with plumbing that carried running water, were also uncovered in the investigations. What Dr. Lyon thinks is the oldest suit of plate armour known was also discovered. A full suit of bronze, it is now in Bagdad at the museum.

The work which uncovered the "apartment house” at Nuzi was begun two ygars ago, and is being continued in the same neighbourhood by Harvard University and the American School of Oriental Research at Bagdad. Dr. Lyon expresses the opinion that perhaps the more well-to-do class occupied the vast dwelling, living as at the court of their chief, who probably maintained his headquarters there in the form of a onestorey place with its connected official suites. ____________