Main Buliding

Directly behind the throne room are two fairly large storerooms (23, 24), where olive oil was kept in large jars that were set deep into stucco-coated stands (Fig. 14). There were seventeen jars in room 23 and sixteen in room 24. Many tablets and fragments of tablets found in room 23, scattered about on the stand and on the floor, indicate that various types of perfumed olive oil were stored here; it is of interest to note that the word for olive oil, elaiwon, which appears on the tablets, is essentially the same as that used in Classical Greek, and even modern Greek, today, more than 3,000 years later.

Figure 14. Main Building from northwest, with rooms 23 and 24 in foreground

A long corridor (25, 28, 35) still survives on the northeastern side of the throne room. Through a branch passage (26) it gave access to yet another oil storeroom (27) in the northern corner of the building, where remains of sixteen large jars were found still in place. Opposite the throne room to the northeast is a suite of five chambers (30, 31, 32, 33, 34) of various sizes. The northwesternmost (32) likewise contained olive oil in a dozen jars, and therewere numerous smaller vessels of other kinds. Many of these pots are of a distinctive shape, and the painted decoration is unusually elaborate for this site (Fig. 15); it is likely that the most elegant grade of oil was kept here.

Some of the oil at least was perfumed, as three tablets found in the room confirm. The other rooms in the suite seem to have been empty on the day of the fire, or were used for the storage of perishable materials, but well above the floor in the middle chamber (31) were found many small fragments of ivory, burned and blackened by fire and badly broken, which had obviously fallen from the room above. Recent research suggests they are fragments of furniture inlay.