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

DOMESTIC SPACE AND COMMUNITY IDENTITY |91
The bench-houses, the second distinctive category in Emporio,
have no porches and their doors may face north or south. In
plan they tend to be squarer than rectangular and their roof supports
are set irregularly. 54 This is an indication of a flat mud roof,
or perhaps a slight one-way pitch. The walls are all stone and only
the masonry of house A compares favourably with that of the megara.
The characteristic stone benches appear in almost all the benchhouses
built against the rear (eastern) wall of the house. J. Boardman
believes they were used as sleeping platforms, associating
them with the wooden pataria in many peasant houses on Greek
islands during the 60‟s (although such examples survive even today).
55 Finally small, stone-built hearths were identified in three of
the bench-houses.
CRETE
Chalasmenos
The settlement at Chalasmenos belongs to the dense pattern of
occupation in the wider northern Ierapetra Isthmus. The site has
added two significant new elements to our knowledge of the area.
First unlike nearby settlements, this site shows a short-lived Late
Minoan IIIC occupation. 56 Secondly, Chalasmenos, together with
the site of Katalymata in the vertical wall of the Cha Gorge, provides
the first excavated example of a Late Minoan IIIC dual settlement
pattern of a refuge site (Katalymata in the Cha Gorge) and
of a lower settlement (c. 240 m above sea level) immediately to the
south of the entrance to the Cha Gorge (fig. 11). 57
Chalasmenos is among the largest settlements in the area. Together
with Kavousi and Kephala Vassilikis, Chalasmenos controlled
the major axes converging on the fertile plain of the northern
Ierapetra Isthmus and had visual control of the sea routes of
both the Cretan and the Libyan seas. 58 The site was an extensive,
54 BOARDMAN (1967) 40–51.
55 BOARDMAN (1967) 37.
56 TSIPOPOULOU (2004a) 104–105.
57 HAGGIS – NOWICKI (1993) 305–311.
58 TSIPOPOULOU (2004a) 104, fig. 8, 1.