Which are the deepest roots of that mix of cultures that we use to call ‘Mediterranean Civilization’? Which are comminglings and exchanges which produced its most complete fruit, i.e. the city, a place for landscape-modelling communities? And which elements did contribute to build up that baulk of customs, ideas, and innovations which compelled to confrontation and hybridizations different peoples for millennia? What did it made, from pottery to metallurgy, from gastronomy to architecture, from art to religion, of a sea a cradle of civilization? Archaeology may help in disentangling such questions, seeking unexpected answers , by tinkering what ancient Mediterranean peoples left buried in the ground. A privileged point of view of our course is the ancient Phoenician city of Motya, located exactly at the centre of the “sea in the middle”. Throughout the live experience of excavation, with images taken on the field, this course will let you touch the many tesserae of the great mosaic of the Mediterranean Civilization. The field diary of the archaeologist, and the handpick will be the two tools, which will lead us across the sea to discover what such early cities actually were, and how their contribute is still a major part of our shared memory.
7.1: Dwelling quarter
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Del curso dictado por Sapienza University of Rome
At the Origins of the Mediterranean Civilization: Archaeology of the City from the Levant to the West - 3rd-1st millennium BC
105 calificaciones
Sapienza University of Rome
105 calificaciones
De la lección
A changing society
Conoce a los instructores
Lorenzo NigroProf.
Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia
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According to the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily, Motya was a crowded city.
There were at least 12,000 people living in there.
And so this picture was, in some cases, confirmed by archeology.
That means that we excavated areas of popular dwelling with
a very crowded system of streets and houses.
But in other areas of the island, for example,
on the western flanks of the Acropolis, there were quarters for very rich people.
And these were populated by residences, villas, and many other major buildings.
There was also major east-west street, five meters wide,
what is called in Greek platella, or square, or something huge.
And there was, of course, a main street north-south.
So along this east-west street we found several major buildings.
One of them is this House of the Square Well.
It was called because of the discovery in one of the rooms of this beautiful well.
And, of course, these houses yielded a lot of material.
Basically pottery, but not only pottery.
All the items of the household life and also of this activities,
like trade or small production of textiles.
Everything was found in the destruction final layer of 397 BC.
And, of course, what these pictures give us is the image
of a melting pot place in which several people were mixing their cultures.
With the transmissions of ideas, of concepts,
which was fluctuating from one medium to another.
So we had something in terracottas, something which was painted.
We know that all these buildings that you see in a very shallow,
bad preservation state actually were beautiful buildings.
With the basement made of stones, a superstructure made of mud bricks,
and a very nice plastering, painted in red or in blue or yellow.
Basically red ochre, which was beautiful.
It was typical of Phoenicians.
So it was a colored city.
It was a three-dimensional city,
more than we can grasp looking at the ruins nowadays.
And it was a crowded peoples in terms of different imports of culture,
as this slide shows.
You see there is something from Eastern Sicily.
And there are also these kind of beautiful items made of terracottas.
This is a special product of Motya.
These are called in Latin arulae.
That means small altars.
They are decorated on the front side by mounting them with some images,
which, of course, are of their religious function.
In this case, you have a sphinx.
A very nice composite sphinx with mixing several traditions, from the Attites,
to the Phoenicians, to the Egyptians, and, of course, to the Greek.
In between two symbols, which actually are two sacred pillars,
ending on top with a palm tree.
This is just one of the many examples of these small altars made of
terracotta that Motya used to produce.
Motya was a production center of these items.
And these items are, for us, a very interesting source of information
about the motifs that they used to decorate all their spaces.
So it's very interesting.
Another area of the island, not far away from Area B,
is the one called Area D, on the northwestern flanks of the Acropolis.
You see it from this aerial view the location of the area.
And here, at least three main buildings have been excavated, actually two, four.
And they are, let's say, residences or
villas with the courtyard in the middle and major entrance,
a gate, and all the different rooms with different functions hosted in them.
For example, in this case we have also a triclinium.
We have also a cooking room, a kitchen.
And we have also a place for textiles, for producing textiles.
So you can see, if you watch,
that raised the shadow of a black loom which was carbonized on the floor,
which was found carbonized on the floor in one of these rooms.
So household activities are very well demonstrated by excavations
in this residential quarter on the western flanks of the Acropolis.
In the house called the House of the Domestic Shrine, we found these items,
parts of a statuette made of terracotta and an incense burner.
So there was a small shrine in the house for the cult performed by its inhabitants.
Perhaps it was the house of a priest of some high official in the city of Motya.
And this is published in this book.
There is also another house with a very nice, this is still ongoing,
the excavation on this, which is called the House of Triton's Horn
because of a very nice, very special find which was found in it.
That is that this seashell.
This seashell was a horn.
It was used for naval activities,
just for indicating the presence of a ship or a boat.
And in a lagoon this was a very precious tool that everybody needed.
So it has a very practical use, but it also has a symbolic meaning.
Because this was thought to be the one of Triton exactly.
So as it was preserved for a long time, until modern times.
You see in this masterpiece which is in Rome, and
I have to mention because I am from Rome, of course, by Gian Lorenzo Bernimi.
You see it is exactly the same seashell, which since antiquity was used for
the same purpose, that is, naval horn.
We do not have only to understand the ancient city like a map,
like a flat place, as we are accustomed by viewing it from the top,
from aerial views or Google Earth.
We need to understand their lives in a 3D dimension.
That means that we have to think in elevation.
Because this city was very well built up.
And we have a source, which is Diodorus of Sicily,
who tells us that the buildings in Malta had six stories.
So you can imagine this very high building with these stories,
with a lot of people living inside it.
We are now calculating about 12,000 people living in Motya.
Because our thought is to go back with our mind in the past and
to live with them to improve our knowledge of the past.
The western flanks of the Acropolis of Motya were crossed by this lane.
Which was converging towards the main road, which was at
the foot of the Acropolis, connecting the north and the south of the city.
And the lane was delimited by these two side walls of two houses.
This was a quarter of rich people,
aristocratic houses like the one which is here.
It was named House of the Domestic Shrine because of the finding inside it.
Here a shrine was found.
And now we are going to get into the house and to visit it.
Here we are at the entrance of this beautiful patrician house in Motya.
And you see that the entrance has a beautiful threshold made of
well-cut blocks and, of course, a pillar protecting it
from the square which was in front of the house.
Then there was a hole with benches.
And in this place we found extremely fascinating items that show
that the owner of the house was someone who was very rich.
Because we found a set of Attic pottery,
among which there was a a red figured.
So this house was the house of, for example, a priest.
And this suggestion descends from the finding in this corner
of a monument, which actually was part of a shrine.
It was a column with a capital,
a proto-Aeolic capital and a small altar below it.
This find led the house to be called House of the Domestic Shrine.
And this is why we think that it was belonged by a priest,
a high priest in the social body of the city of Motya.
Then from there we can enter into the central courtyard.
The courtyard actually was the heart of the house,
with a well in the corner and several rooms all around it.
One of these rooms was the dining room.
The other, like this, was the place in which they used to produce textiles.
And here there were women.
And we even found a loom, a carbonized wooden loom, collapsed on the floor.
Because unfortunately this house, as all others in this quarter, were set on fire
in 397 BC when the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius, destroyed the city.
So we have a picture of one day in the city.
And it is a very shocking picture, because each house has given its own information.
Each house has a well, each house has a courtyard.
Each house has a private area from, of course,
a leading quarter and a public area, like all of the entrance.
The store room, which is in one corner, and
which was full of what they needed for ordinary life.
Motya was a rich city.
And according to Diodorus of Sicily,
the people in Motya were the richest in western Sicily.
So they liked to embellish their homes.
We found fragments of plaster which was red painted, or
yellow painted, or even blue painted.
The walls of these houses were colored.
And the textiles they produced were colored.
Their life was colored.
So this is what happened in this small quarter of Motya.
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