House of a king, house of a god? Situating and distinguishing palaces and temples within the architectonic landscape of the Middle and Late Bronze Age southern Levant

Abstract

Two different types of monumental architecture arise as part of the urban landscape of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages in the southern Levant: palaces and temples. While these architectural feats stand out as different from domestic architecture, there is little discourse on what defines a space as a palace or as a temple. This article uses access analysis to demonstrate that, in terms of space syntax, the complexity and organizational schemes of palaces and temples are exceptionally divergent. As such, this study also investigates whether the ancient Near Eastern linguistic traditions of referring to palaces and temples as houses, accords with the archaeological record in the Levant. The study concludes that while the syntactic properties and architecture of palaces are modelled on contemporary courtyard houses, temples comprise a completely different category of space that neither resembles the syntax nor the architecture of palaces or houses. The utility of this approach for distinguishing Levantine architecture types is demonstrated by applying it in the analysis of two debated structures from the southern Levant: the Middle Bronze Age courtyard complex at Shechem and Late Bronze Age Building 7050 at Hazor.

Keywords:

• southern Levant
• Bronze Age
• palaces
• temples
• space syntax

Notes

1 RA = 2(MD-1)/(k-2) and MD = TD/(k-1), where TD is the sum of the depth values for all spaces of a structure and k is the total number of rooms plus the carrier space (Hillier and Hanson 1984: 108–14).

2 RRA = RA/D_k, where the appropriate D-value, corresponding with the size (k) of a system, can be found in Hillier and Hanson (1984: 112, table 3).

3 The control value of a room is used to infer the relative influence that a room has over neighbouring rooms. To calculate, each room is assigned a value of 1, which is then divided equally by all neighbouring rooms (e.g., a room connecting to five rooms gives 1/5 to each of those rooms). The sum of the values a space receives from its neighbours is its control value. The higher, the greater the control (Hillier and Hanson 1984: 109).