Abstract of the Doctoral Dissertation of F. Deblauwe

Abstract of the 1994 Doctoral Dissertation
A Spatial Analysis of Mesopotamian Buildings from the Late Bronze Age till the Parthian Period
by Francis Deblauwe

The study of Mesopotamian buildings in general and of the Late Bronze Age till the Parthian period (ca. 1600 B.C.-224 A.D.) in specific is hampered by the shortage of fully excavated and/or preserved floor plans within clear contexts. Therefore, purely architectural data were used which do not rely on texts, ceramics, seals and other objects associated with the buildings. The commonly used categorizations of these buildings were checked: period (e.g., Neo-Babylonian), type (e.g., palace) and region (e.g., Assyria). The corpus of 331 buildings which was available for analysis is large enough to be representative for the time period and geographical area (present-day Iraq and Northeast Syria). Unfortunately, due to varying levels of incompleteness of floor plan not all buildings yielded values for all variables.

We performed a spatial analysis which focused on circulation and spacings. The circulation and access patterns were analyzed and quantified in two ways: real relative asymmetry and doorways per space. Moreover, the following spacings were distinguished and quantified: door width, longest side of a space and shortest side of a quadrilateral space.

The spatial variables gleaned from the buildings from our corpus were then statistically analyzed. First, the distribution of the values for the separate variables was discussed. Furthermore, two kinds of cluster analyses were performed: hierarchical and partitioned. The results were mixed as far as a correspondence with the commonly used categorizations is concerned. Finally, discriminant analyses by categories (including some more cultural labels) and newly established clusters were carried out. The categories were confirmed as meaningful in the analysis, the clusters were less clearly significantly coherent. The circulation variable values helped to best distinguish the different groupings of buildings but the other variables did help to obtain better discrimination of a larger number of structures.

In conclusion, the commonly used groupings based on type, region and underlying cultural strains were found in the discriminant analyses to be spatially distinctive. The attempts via cluster analyses to discover new groupings of the buildings along different lines however did not provide an outright alternative.

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