Mount Sinai
— — the mountain that gave the law.
Not only on a wall.
“Jebel Musa rises in the granite heart of the southern Sinai Peninsula, the peak long held by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim tradition to be the Mount Sinai where Moses received the Ten Commandments. The summit stands at 2,285 metres. At its foot, Saint Catherine's Monastery has held an unbroken monastic life since the sixth century — one of the oldest continuously inhabited Christian communities in the world. Pilgrims climb in the dark to be at the top by first light, when the surrounding desert ranges turn rust and rose. — from the studio
Mount Sinai, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mount Sinai, known in Arabic as Jebel Musa or 'the Mountain of Moses,' rises to 2,285 metres in the southern Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. It sits within the Saint Catherine Protectorate, a granite mountain district inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2002 as the Saint Catherine Area. The peak is the most widely venerated of several candidates that scholars have proposed for the biblical Mount Sinai. At the northern foot of the mountain stands Saint Catherine's Monastery, founded under the emperor Justinian between 548 and 565 CE and inhabited by Greek Orthodox monks ever since.
Two paths reach the summit: the gentler camel path, Siket El Bashait, which climbs in switchbacks over roughly seven kilometres, and the steeper Steps of Repentance, a stairway of about 3,750 stone steps cut by a single monk according to Orthodox tradition. Pilgrims and visitors start the climb between midnight and 2 a.m. to reach the summit before dawn. From the top the surrounding granite ranges — Jebel Katherina, the highest peak in Egypt at 2,629 metres, rises to the south — catch the first light and run through rose and amber for the first quarter of an hour after sunrise.
Saint Catherine's Monastery sits at about 1,550 metres at the foot of the mountain, walled in granite blocks cut from the surrounding range. The monastery houses the second-largest collection of early Christian manuscripts and icons in the world, after the Vatican Library, including the sixth-century encaustic icon of Christ Pantocrator and parts of the Codex Sinaiticus, discovered in the library in the nineteenth century. The monastery's small mosque, built within the walls in the eleventh century, has protected the community through more than a thousand years of Muslim rule in the region.