Hillah
— — the river that still remembers Babylon.
Not only on a wall.
“A city on a slow bend of the Euphrates, about a hundred kilometres south of Baghdad. The Hilla branch runs green between date palms; the ruins of Babylon sit ten kilometres north, walked by archaeologists since the late nineteenth century. Long, flat country. The light goes orange at dusk and the river holds it a little longer than the sky does. from the studio
Hillah, 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.
Hillah is the capital of Babil Governorate in central Iraq, set on the Hilla branch of the Euphrates roughly a hundred kilometres south of Baghdad. The city was founded in 1101 CE by the Banu Mazyad, an Arab dynasty that ruled the area as Mazyadid emirs along the river. The population sits near six hundred thousand. The surrounding land is the flat alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia, hot in summer and mild in winter, and the river has been the reason for settlement here since the third millennium BCE.
The Hilla branch is one of two arms the Euphrates splits into south of Musayyib, the other being the Hindiya. Date palms line the banks in town and irrigation canals run out into the surrounding farmland. The river carries silt from the Anatolian highlands and feeds the wheat, barley, and rice of Babil Governorate. Bridges through the centre of Hillah cross water that runs the same channel the Babylonians depended on three thousand years ago.
The ruins of ancient Babylon lie about ten kilometres north of Hillah. The site has been excavated since Robert Koldewey's German expedition of 1899, which uncovered the Ishtar Gate and the foundations of the Etemenanki ziggurat. A reconstruction programme in the 1980s rebuilt parts of the southern palace over the original strata, which delayed UNESCO inscription. The site was finally added to the World Heritage list in 2019. The original brick panels of the Ishtar Gate now sit in Berlin's Pergamon Museum.