House of the Months
About
Sometime in the first half of the third century, a Thysdrus household paved a room with sixteen panels charting the twelve months and four seasons. The calendar mosaic is one of only two known ancient examples anywhere that name the months outright. Looters and time scattered its panels over the centuries; surviving pieces now sit split between the Sousse and Bardo museums. The house itself vanished under modern El Jem, known today only through this floor.
What happened here
A working estate with a comfortable house attached, and the proportions vary with how rich the owner is and how often he visits. The farm side has presses for oil and wine, threshing floors, storage sunk into the ground, stables and quarters for the workforce. The residential side has baths, dining rooms sited for the view, mosaics, and a garden with water in it. A manager runs the place year-round and reports; the owner arrives for the vintage and for the summer. Produce goes to market or to the owner's town house, and the accounts are kept in detail. Some villas are pure retreat with no farm at all, built on a cliff or a lake specifically to be looked at from a boat.
Sources
- https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Mosaic-of-the-Months-House-of-the-Months-Thysdrus-modern-El-Djem-third-century_fig1_365894834
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mosaic_with_the_months_of_the_year,_starting_with_the_Roman_first_month_March,_from_Thysdrus_(El_Jem),_1st_half_of_the_3rd_century_AD,_Sousse_Archaeological_Museum,_Tunisia.jpg
- https://www.doaks.org/resources/north-africa/urbanism/el-jem
Nearby
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