Baghdad
— — a city built in a circle when the world was young.
Not only on a wall.
“The old capital of the Abbasid caliphate, set on a bend of the Tigris in central Mesopotamia. Caliph al-Mansur laid the first city out as a perfect circle in 762, and for five centuries it was the centre of the medieval world: astronomers, translators, poets. The walls are gone now. The river is still the river, and the date palms still lean toward the water at dusk.
Baghdad, 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.
Baghdad sits on the Tigris in central Iraq, near the narrowest pinch of Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates, at about 34 metres above sea level. Roughly seven million people live in the city, the capital of Iraq since the country's founding in 1921 and, before that, the seat of the Abbasid caliphate from 762 until the Mongol sack of 1258. The summer climate is among the hottest in the world, with afternoons commonly above 45 degrees Celsius from June through September.
The Tigris rises in the mountains of eastern Turkey and reaches Baghdad after roughly 1,400 kilometres, where the river bends through the centre of the city and divides it between the older Rusafa on the east bank and Karkh on the west. Date palms line the banks for much of its course south. The river is the city's reason: every quarter of the original Round City was set within a day's ride of its water, and the modern bridges, fourteen across the urban stretch, still mark the city's centre of gravity.
On 30 July 762 the Caliph al-Mansur laid the first brick of Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace, as a perfect circle some 2.7 kilometres across, four gates oriented to the four roads of empire. Within a century it held the Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom, where Greek, Persian, and Indian texts were translated into Arabic and the foundations of medieval algebra, optics, and medicine were laid. The Mongol siege of 1258 ended the caliphate; the round walls did not survive, but their shape still shows in places.