Arabah
— — the cracked floor where two seas almost meet.
Not only on a wall.
“The Arabah is the desert valley that runs from the southern shore of the Dead Sea down to the Gulf of Aqaba, the Jordanian half of the rift that splits the southern Levant. The road south from Wadi Musa drops through a wall of red sandstone into a basin of acacia, salt flats, and copper-coloured cliffs. Petra opens off its eastern wall. The Israeli border runs the centre of the floor.
Arabah, 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 Arabah, in Arabic Wadi Araba, is the desert valley that runs about 166 kilometres from the southern shore of the Dead Sea to the head of the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea. It forms the southern continuation of the Jordan Rift, itself part of the Great Rift Valley system. The international border between Jordan and Israel follows the centre of the valley floor. The valley rises from 430 metres below sea level at the Dead Sea to a low pass around 230 metres above sea level, then drops back to the Red Sea.
The rift is the reason the valley exists. The Dead Sea Transform fault, an active strike-slip plate boundary between the African and Arabian plates, has been pulling Arabia northeast past Africa for about fifteen million years. Sandstone and granite cliffs rise sharply on the Jordanian side, including the escarpment of the Dana Biosphere Reserve, where elevations drop from about 1,500 metres to the valley floor in a few kilometres. The Khirbet en-Nahas copper mines, worked since at least the Iron Age, lie on the Jordanian flank of the valley.
Few places are this empty this close to so much history. The Arabah floor receives less than fifty millimetres of rain a year in its southern half, and the acacia, tamarisk, and white broom that hold it together survive on flash-flood pulses from the surrounding cliffs. Bedouin families have grazed camels and goats through the valley for centuries. The Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature manages the Dana Biosphere Reserve on the western escarpment, where Nubian ibex still move between the highlands and the valley floor.