Arabian Desert
— a sea of stone the wind keeps polishing.
Not only on a wall.
“The Iraqi reach of the Arabian Desert spreads west of the Euphrates across Anbar, Najaf, and Muthanna. Limestone plateau, basalt outcrops, and the long dry channel of Wadi Hauran. Bedouin tribes have crossed it on foot and on camel for three thousand years. In late afternoon the ground holds the heat and the sky reads pale, almost lilac, where the dust climbs.
Arabian Desert, 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.
The Arabian Desert is the great desert wilderness of West Asia, covering about 2.3 million square kilometres from Yemen to Jordan and east into Iraq. The Iraqi portion lies west and south of the Euphrates, mainly in Al-Anbar, Najaf, and Al-Muthanna governorates. The terrain is a limestone plateau cut by dry wadis, the longest being Wadi Hauran, which runs about 350 kilometres from the Syrian border to the river near Haditha. The desert merges with the Syrian Desert to the north.
Most of the Iraqi desert is bare limestone and chalk laid down in shallow Cretaceous seas about 90 million years ago. Where wind has stripped the surface, basalt fields show through, remnants of older volcanism along the Arabian shield. Flint chipped from these outcrops appears in Palaeolithic toolkits scattered across the plateau; the Acheulian sites in Wadi Hauran are among the oldest known human workings in the region. The ground reads white at midday and turns the colour of bone near dusk.
Population density across the Iraqi desert falls below one person per square kilometre. The few permanent settlements, Rutba on the trans-desert highway and the wells at Nukhayb, sit a hundred kilometres or more apart. The old caravan road from Damascus to Baghdad once crossed this ground in eight days by camel; today the highway runs in roughly twelve hours when the border is open. Between settlements the only sound is wind in the saltbush and the occasional vehicle a long way off.