Shahr-e Sukhteh
— — a city the wind has been keeping for five thousand years.
Not only on a wall.
“A Bronze Age city on the Sistan plain near the Afghan border, raised in mudbrick around 3200 BC and abandoned by about 1800 BC after the river that fed it shifted. The site covers more than 150 hectares of low mounds and burnt earth, the colour of the surrounding desert except where excavation has cut to the old streets. The archaeologists working here have lifted the world's earliest known artificial eyeball, a backgammon set, and the first surgically trephined skull. The wind comes off the plain almost every afternoon. — from the studio
Shahr-e Sukhteh, 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.
Shahr-e Sukhteh, the Burnt City, lies on the eastern edge of the Iranian plateau in Sistan and Baluchestan Province, about 57 kilometres south of Zabol along the road to Zahedan. The site sits on a former branch of the Helmand River delta, on the flat Sistan plain a few dozen kilometres from the Afghan border. It was founded around 3200 BC and grew into one of the largest urban centres of its era, covering some 151 hectares and divided into residential, industrial, monumental, and burial quarters. UNESCO inscribed Shahr-e Sukhteh as a World Heritage Site in 2014.
Excavations led by the Italian archaeologist Maurizio Tosi from 1967 onward, and continued by Iranian teams since the 1990s, have made Shahr-e Sukhteh one of the most-studied Bronze Age sites in West Asia. The cemetery alone holds an estimated 25,000 to 40,000 graves and has yielded an artificial eyeball of bitumen and gold thread on a woman dated to roughly 2900 BC, a backgammon-like board game with sixty pieces, and a skull bearing evidence of surgical trephination that healed before death. A clay goblet decorated with five sequential goat-and-tree images is often cited as the earliest known animated sequence.
The site is reached by road from Zabol, about an hour north, or from Zahedan, the provincial capital, about three hours south by Route 95. There is a small on-site museum, and the central excavated areas are walkable on marked paths. Sistan and Baluchestan sits in one of the hottest, driest corners of Iran; the practical visiting window is October through April, when daytime highs drop into the twenties Celsius. The Sistan basin is also subject to the Bad-e Sad-o-Bist-Roozeh, the wind of 120 days, which blows from late spring through summer and once kept the city's terraced courtyards cool.