Assur
— — the first capital, still standing in pieces.
Not only on a wall.
“The first capital of Assyria, on a high bend of the Tigris in northern Iraq. The mudbrick walls have weathered into the colour of the bluff itself, and the ziggurat is a low pyramid of rubble against the sky. Nothing here is loud. The river runs on below, slower than the traffic on the road across it, the way it has for four thousand years.
Assur, 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.
Assur sits on the western bank of the Tigris in Iraq's Saladin Governorate, about 110 kilometres south of Mosul and near the modern town of Ash-Sharqat. It was the original capital of the Assyrian Empire and the religious centre of the god Ashur from whom both city and empire took their names. Occupied from the third millennium BC, it stood for more than two thousand years before the Median sack of 614 BC. The site was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2003 and to the List of World Heritage in Danger the same year.
The standing remains are mudbrick and stone, weathered to the colour of the bluff. The ziggurat of Ashur, once roughly 60 metres on a side, survives as a stepped mound; the foundations of the Old Palace, the Sin-Shamash temple, and the city wall are all legible on the ground. German excavations led by Walter Andrae between 1903 and 1914 carried much of what was portable to the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, where the reconstructed Ishtar temple gate now stands. What remains at the site is the footprint, in scale, in place.
Assur has been on the UNESCO endangered list since 2003, originally over a proposed Makhul Dam that would have flooded the site, and since over the wider instability of northern Iraq. The area was held by ISIL between 2014 and 2017 and suffered documented damage. Today the site is open in principle but visited rarely, and silence is the dominant condition — wind across the bluff, the Tigris a hundred metres below, and the call to prayer from Ash-Sharqat carrying faintly from across the water at dusk.