|
Context Description:
|
Room 7 had its pavement preserved in the NW corner only and the rest of what was really a passage rather than a room showed no sign of ever having been paved. In front of the west door-jamb was a double impost of bricks set on edge and let into the clay floor. In the west wall there was a straight joint close to the NW corner, and at the south end a doorway to the street had been walled up so as to leave a shallow recess. The south jamb of the blocked door was connected with and seems to have been built on the top of a buttress of an older wall which ran under the south wall of Rooms 7 and 9 and served as a footing for them; its face to the door opening was rough, the bricks cut back and only smoothed over with mud plaster; it looked as if the burnt brickwork of the original angle had been bonded in to a mud brick wall which had afterwards been replaced by the existing burnt-brick west wall of Room 7 when the door was made; the blocking of the door would mark a third stage in the occupation of the building. Finally the jamb had been truncated and stood 0.70 m. high, with a flat top, projecting from the corner of the passage and fulfilling no structural purpose; it is possible that it served as the support of a wooden shelf of which the other end rested on wooden uprights set in the brick imposts; the quantity of tablets found along the wall here would be consistent with the existence of such a shelf: tablets were found in a somewhat similar passage-room in No. 2 Church Lane, q.v.2
|
