Taxila
— — a city the centuries kept turning over.
Not only on a wall.
“A scatter of ruined cities on the Pothohar plateau, where the Grand Trunk Road climbs out of the Punjab toward the Khyber. Buddhist monasteries, Greek street grids, Persian foundations: three thousand years of crossroads stacked into one valley. The stupa at Dharmarajika still rises above the wheat, and the museum below holds heads of the Buddha carved when Gandhara was a sentence the world had only just learned.
Taxila, 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.
Taxila sits on the Pothohar plateau in Punjab province, about 35 kilometres northwest of Islamabad, where the Grand Trunk Road climbs toward Peshawar and the Khyber Pass. The site is not one city but a sequence of three, Bhir Mound, Sirkap, and Sirsukh, built and abandoned between the 6th century BC and the 5th century AD. UNESCO inscribed Taxila in 1980 for its layered record of Achaemenid, Greek, Mauryan, Indo-Scythian, and Kushan rule. The wider zone covers more than eighteen sites, including the great Dharmarajika stupa.
The signature sculpture of Taxila is Gandharan: grey-green schist carved in a vocabulary that fused Hellenistic drapery with Buddhist subject matter. Heads of the Buddha from the 2nd century AD wear the wavy hair and aquiline nose of a Greek god while sitting in dhyana mudra. The Taxila Museum, opened in 1928 and built in the Indo-Saracenic style, holds the largest collection of this work outside Lahore, including pieces lifted from the monastery at Jaulian, whose votive stupas still ring the hilltop.
The archaeological complex sits about a 45-minute drive from Islamabad's Faizabad interchange. The museum opens daily except Friday morning, with a ticket office that handles the entry fee for the three main excavated cities. Sirkap and the Dharmarajika stupa are reached by separate access roads off the main site and need their own time. Summer temperatures on the plateau pass 40°C in June; October through March is the steady season. Foreign visitors are advised to register with the local tourist police on arrival.