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In this excerpt from Chapter VII Trench By Trench, concerning finds from Hill V, Nippur's Professional Quarter on the East Side, John Peters describes the construction and maintenance problems of ordinary houses of the early second millennium, B.C.
[p. 200] At a depth of seven to nine metres below the surface, for depths varied in different parts of the hill, we came upon rooms destroyed by fire, containing large quantities of tablets of the Hammurapi period [1792-1750 B.C.]. The walls of these houses were built of unbaked brick, excepting that at the bottom there were sometimes two or three layers of baked bricks, or occasionally a baseboard of the same, and the door-posts and sills were also constructed of baked bricks. None of these houses were of any considerable size, all of [p. 201] them looking like the ordinary dwellings of citizens of the present day in such provincial towns as Hillah or Shatra. They were presumably of one story with a couple of small roof rooms reached by stair from the court. To the street they presented a blank wall, and they were built around one or two courts on which the rooms opened. There was no pretense at architecture or ornamentation.
The roofs of these houses had been made of palm-beams covered with mats on which was laid a great mass of earth. If the earth on the top was not cared for, a couple of rainy seasons would wash great gullies in it, and bring about the downfall of the whole. If a fire broke out in the house the palm-beams beneath the earth would burn through and let the mass of earth fall into the room. In one of these ways, all of these houses were destroyed, and, the roofs having once fallen in, the upper portions of the walls were washed down by the rains until the earth within the rooms had filled up to the top of what was left of the walls. This washed-in earth protected the lower portion of the walls, as well as all the objects already buried within, against further injury, the whole looking from the outside like nothing but a heap of clay.
This excerpt is taken from John Punnett Peters, Nippur or Explorations and Adventures on the Euphrates: The Narrative of the University of Pennsylvania Expedition to Babylonia in the Years 1888-1890, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1897, Volume II, pp. 200-201.
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