If we woke as domestic servant, we might live, not inside the mansion (though this is possible), but in an adjacent street of the smallest among the preserved houses (7 X 7 meter). There, we would sleep and wake with our own sense of sacred, or not, of the materials within the four rooms (or three rooms and one yard) of our ground floor and in or on the roof space and of the right-angled planned streets from front door to the main east-west town street as wide as our own house and west along to the front door of the mansion. The mansions have an entrance hall made grand by a single column, with a small side room for doorkeeper and supplies. The way into the main part of the house is through either a broad corridor or a narrow corridor, in the first of a series of disorienting side turns, to a second chamber with
One column: the great reception hall where a grander visitor might meet the main person in the house is not approached along a single line, like the axis of many formal stone temples (see Chapter Three), but twisting and turning according to a different psychology of the nested, perhaps intended to emphasize the separation of world inside from world outside, so in a sense sacred from the inside. If we are providing our manual labor, we probably take the narrower corridor, past four rooms where possibly we receive orders, clean clothing, or other materials.
From this point on, we stand in the same spaces as the wealthy, but not necessarily same corners or same times: the columned chamber brings us all into the great open garden court, at its northeast corner. Along its southern side, concealed from view when we first enter, an eight-columned portico provides shade for a select few. On this south side of the garden, one door at the east leads to a second suite of rooms, with its own columned halls and pools, while a second door at the west takes us into the transverse hall behind the portico, with three south doors in turn into three different ceremonial spaces of the inner house: the main bedroom, with raised bed bench along the far wall; the main reception hall, with four columns; and the two-columned hall with the limestone slab immediately on our left as we enter. The three rooms are interconnected by doorways, and a door at the rear of the main reception hall leads to the single-columned hall giving access to a final suite of rooms. If food and drink were prepared or stored in that innermost space, we might need to enter here to collect material; it is also possible that external servants had to collect, earlier, anything they needed at rooms closer to the entrance and that only select house staff enjoyed access to the innermost rooms. At the hall with the limestone slab, we might have been needed to lift the heavy jar to pour liquid or to carry heavy trays of food or other equipment. However, these heavier tasks of table setting could have been carried out before ceremonies began, and we might never have been in the room at the time the owner of the house and/ or guests performed those ceremonies. Whoever brought the portable items to the slab, and whenever, the position of the feature within the great house suggests its function: as location for guests to wash and/or receive sustenance, just before entering the main reception hall where they could be received by the owner of the house. No remains of offerings are recorded on the site, and no writings survive to reveal how sacred the participants might have considered the ceremonial in preparing a reception.
World History
