“semitisches pantheon”. eine “männliche tyche” - MOSAIKjournal.com

102|ANASTASIA CHRISTOPHILOPOULOU
one particular example, that of Zagora on Andros. The appearance
of courtyard houses in Zagora offers a possibility of discussing
gendered space in this community. According to I. Morris, the appearance
of multi-room houses and particularly the courtyard
houses which we first see in Zagora by 700 BC are indicative of
male and female symbolic divisions of space in the households. 84
He also argues that even the “outer/public space” and “inner/private
areas” symbolic associations with masculinity and femininity
respectively, can be traced back to those early years. 85 Such
associations of course would have been impossible before the mideighth
century BC, when houses were mostly one-room households
without physical separations to break up the flow of activity.
The case of the house around rooms H26/H27 in Zagora exemplifies
the transition of one-room houses and megara built between
775 and 725 BC into functionally specific multiroom structures
after 725 BC. Between 750 BC and 725 BC room H24/25/32
was a simple single-room house. Sherds from its floor show that
cooking, eating, drinking and storage all went on in the one main
room. By 700 BC however, the occupants divided this room into
three smaller rooms (H24, H25 and H32). Judging from the finds
all three were used solely for storage. The south wall of the old
porch was extended by eight meters, and two new rooms, H40 and
H41 built at its end. H40, with an unusually wide door, was probably
an anteroom to H41, with a monumental stone hearth and
many sherds from fine cups. The new house was reached from the
courtyard now formed by the space between H32 and H40. Turning
right, the visitor entered through the wide doorway into the
public area of the house for feasting; turning left, to storerooms at
the back. The house immediately to the south went through a similar
transformation at just this time.
Attributing gender to excavated space is difficult, but by this
we are not suggesting that men or women were restricted to particular
parts of the house. Certainly women often went into Zagora
H40 and H41 and men into H24, H25, and H32. But perhaps the
ideas about gendered space which we see in Hesiod and Classical
Athens began to take shape in the late eighth century BC. The
84 MORRIS (2000) 283–284.
85 KENT (1990) 9–12.