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The House as Temple

he extent to which these probable elite houses show similarity in form and function to the first urban temples will now have to be considered. To begin to answer this, the reasons for why these houses would be used as foci of ritual activity in the first place need to be looked into. M. Ainian calls these buildings rulers' dwellings, but who were these powerful men and how far would their power have extended within their community?

Mazarakis Ainian suggests that the rulers who inhabited these dwellings would have been men who came to power on either a hereditary basis or through possessing desirable personal virtues (1997: 270). In anthropological terms this would make them either chiefs or big men. He proposes that in some areas these powerful men may have had their origins as local governors in the Late Helladic IIIB Period, and so would have maintained control of small settlements after the Mycenaean collapse. In most areas settlements would have been small made up of one or two extended families, with the head of the dominant or perhaps oldest household becoming responsible for the management of communal affairs (Mazarakis Ainian 1997: 375, 393). Thomas and Conant express it well:

The community is virtually an extended family, and the village leader, the head of the most important family.(Thomas and Conant 1999: 52)

This reflects what is thought from Homer; that the Oikos consisting of extended family of maybe three generations was the basic 'kinship, residential and economic unit' with any number of oikoi making up a community (Donlan 1985: 299). It would only seem logical that as part of his control of communal duties the 'chief' would also be in charge of religious cult practice. When the settlement was small and only consisting of the one kinship group the ideal place to worship a deity or ancestor would have been within his home. As the settlement grew perhaps this practice https://www.51lunwen.org/StudentPapers/ continued as tradition. It is M. Ainian's view that by literally housing religious practice the ruler was maintaining his prestige and control within the community (1997: 393). The control of religion by a single ruler, or dual rulers in this particular case, was continued into later periods by the kings of Sparta who continued to act as chief priests, retaining their religious role (Mazarakis Ainian 1988: 118). This would seem to suggest that religious duties would and could have been controlled by the settlement leader. There would therefore seem to be several strong explanations as to why a ruler's house would have come to be used as a forerunner to the temple.

The archaeological evidence is mostly in support of this view, with domestic and ritual artefacts often found in association. Nichoria, a site in Messenia is a good example of this. At this site two particular house remains, known as unit IV-1 and unit IV-5, stand out from the rest of the dwellings in the vicinity. As a result it could be said with relative certainty that they held some special importance within the community. Both were quite large apsidal buildings surrounded by small apparently low status apsidal huts. The first, IV-1, has been dated to the 10th century BC while IV-5 most likely replaced it in the 9th. I本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。