Structure AO — a domestic room near the centre

Structure AO is described as a small domestic unit in the vicinity of Structure AD, at the edge of Karahan Tepe's central group. Its interest is that it brings floor, tool and animal-image evidence together in one small room: a stone-paved floor, grinding stones, a phallus-shaped grinding tool, and — set into the floor — a small slab carved with a running wild donkey or equid, roughly 20 cm long.

Taken together, these are the residues of ordinary work — grinding, food preparation — in a room that also carried a carved image. AO is where Karahan's monumental world and its lived-in world sit side by side.

Karul's 2025 excavation report gives rooms like AO their setting: the dwellings encircling the central complex in a dense, honeycomb-like pattern — circular and irregular houses 3 to 9 m across, each with a pair of pillars at its core that carried the T-pillar symbolism indoors, with stone-paved floors, grinding equipment and large limestone vessels. The report singles out a wild ass in motion carved on one such floor slab as a symbolic example (its Fig. 12), and treats these houses as proof that Karahan was a genuine settlement — lived in, not only gathered at.

Most of what makes Karahan Tepe famous is exceptional: descent into the pillar chamber, the watching head, the ribbed statues. AO is deliberately unglamorous, and that is its value. It shows that the people who built and used the extraordinary chambers also cooked, ground grain and worked stone nearby, and that they carved a small running animal into the floor of an ordinary room. The monuments belonged to a functioning settlement, not to an empty ceremonial stage.

The running wild donkey slab from this room is treated in its own object guide; here it belongs to the fuller picture of AO as a place of everyday use.

The dwelling type and the wild-ass floor slab are now published in Karul's report, so the broad picture is secure: a ring of honeycomb houses with paired pillars, paved floors and grinding equipment, one of them carrying a carved running equid. What stays field-grade is the specific 'AO' designation for this exact room and its precise plan, dimensions and findspot — labels and loci the project's detailed publication will pin down, on a site excavated only since 2019.

So the honest statement is both confident and bounded: Karahan was a real settlement of such houses, and a room of this kind held the carved donkey slab; the exact identity of 'AO' within that ring is the part still being finalised.

The objects recorded for this building, gathered as one catalogue. Where a full object page exists, it is linked from the card.