Ads for new houses tend to sound very much the same, give or take a bedroom or two: living room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms, and full- and half-baths. Yet the layout of the modern home evolved over hundreds of years. Not so long ago, our homes would have looked very different.
“We are so used to having a lot of comfort in our lives — to being clean warm and well fed” writes author Bill Bryson in At Home: A Short History of Private Life “that we forget how recent most of that is. In fact achieving these things took forever and then they mostly came in a rush.”
To avoid taking our modern homes and comforts for granted let’s take a trip back in time to see how people lived in other eras.
Ancient Houses
One of the earliest domestic structures according to the Biblical Archaeology Review is the four-room “Israelite house.”
“Chazal tell us about these houses” says Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch founder and curator of Boro Park’s Living Torah Museum. “On the ground floor was an area for the animals and a room that served as a kitchen area. The upstairs reached by ladder had a room that served as a bedroom and a room used for eating; sometimes there was a porch-like structure serving as additional sleeping space. The roof was typically a work area — for example fruits would be dried there. All those Gemara discussions about the obligation to put a fence around the roof came from the fact that roofs were used this way.”
Create a free account to keep reading.
