A doorway at one side led into a courtyard. There were other rooms around the sides of the courtyard, among them store-rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. In the kitchen there might be a well, a brick-built table, an oven, and grinding stones for making flour, as well as the pots and pans the last owners left behind. A long room at the center of one side could have been the reception room. In these houses there is usually a well-constructed staircase at one side of the courtyard.
Arab houses built in recent times in the towns of Iraq follow almost the same plan.
Clay tablets left in the houses, some in small archive rooms, tell what the occupants of those houses were doing. Among them were merchants, local businessmen, priests and others in the service of the temple. Their records deal with the sale and purchase of houses and land, slaves and goods, with adoption, marriage and inheritance, and all the affairs of a busy city. In a few houses there were many tablets of a much different nature. On round balls of clay, flattened to a bun shape, pupils had copied the teacher's handwriting in exercises to learn how to form the cuneiform signs.