The Megaron and Its Roof

TL;DR: In the early stages of architectural evolution, roofs were not archaeological afterthoughts, matters of individual choice, or for that matter, merely environmental necessities, which could be constructed upon any kind of structure.

Abstract: THE architectural character and historical significance of the pre-Hellenic and Mycenaean megaron, as well as the possibilities of its cultural origin, are conditioned by the type of roof it had. Theoretically it may be argued from the existing ground plans that all megara had sloping roofs, that all megara had flat roofs, or that some megara, under specific conditions, were exceptions to either the slopingor the flatroof tradition. The question is, can all these assumptions be built, as they have been, on the same set of facts? In the early stages of architectural evolution, roofs were not archaeological afterthoughts, matters of individual choice, or for that matter, merely environmental necessities, which could be constructed upon any kind of structure. Externally they were the most distinguishing feature of the house, deriving their significance from cultural traditions, environmental habits and social ideas, while structurally they were, in their different forms, an integral part of particular types of building. Apparently the megaron has come to mean all things to all men. Some scholars have limited it to a large communal hall, entered through a porch at the short end, and hence, when they have attributed its origin to the flat-roofed halls of Minoan palaces, have been untroubled to find the \"megaron\" in Crete only as a part of a complex of contiguous rooms and in Greece as a free-standing structure. It is not the intention of this article to review all the theories regarding the origin of the megaron; but in order to illustrate how the Cretan obsession has influenced these theories, it might be noted that Mackenzie, in deriving the megaron from EgyptoCretan halls, attributed its isolation to the environmental necessity of a fixed hearth when it moved to the colder mainland,' while Noack reversed the process by claiming that the northern megaron by the Mycenaean period gave up its gable for the flat roof as a result of Cretan influences.2 Other scholars have based their reconstruction of the appearance of the megaron on their interpretation of the four interior points of support, which occur in the late and fully developed plans at Tiryns and Mycenae. By themselves and apart from any consistent tradition of building, the imprint of four columns in a room is equally good evidence for several different kinds of structures: two rows of uprights for the support of a gable roof, bearing members for a flat roof, the interior boundaries of a rectangular hypaethral opening or light well, and the uprights necessary to carry a clerestory on a flat roof. Hence four interior columns, when found in a few small rooms at Palaikastro (fig. 1), do not make a \" Cretan megaron\" any more than a similar arrangement of supports in the houses of Tell el-Amarna (fig. 2) makes the megaron a flat-roofed structure of Egyptian