Model of a round house
Terra cotta
2400 BC

Researchers are not sure whether or not this model was intended to represent an actual round house. The interior is divided into nine parts. There is a square central room that communicates with the other rooms; one of them is triangular-shaped and covered with a roof, with a chimney hole through which smoke could escape. One of the rooms forms a sort of vestibule, since the house entrance is in its outer wall. The central room has a horseshoe-shaped hearth and benches in the corners. Its walls are higher than those of the other rooms, and tenons in the corners of these walls could have been used to support a wooden roof. Since this model and others like it were buried under temple thresholds or under the surface of the roads leading to the temples, it seems reasonable to assume that they were a type of cultic object that was placed in the ground to purify the means of access to the temple.

Tell Hariri, Ancient Mari
61 x 29 cm
National Museum, Damascus M2351 Baal 112

_{© Musée de la civilisation, 1999}