Rafah
— — a town a road has always passed through.
Not only on a wall.
“Rafah lies at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, where the Mediterranean coastal plain meets the Sinai. It has stood at this crossing for more than three thousand years, named in Egyptian inscriptions and traded between empires moving up or down the Way of Horus. Olive groves once held the land between the dunes and the sea. The town today carries a long memory of settlement and the weight of the present hour. from the studio
Rafah, 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.
Rafah sits at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean coastal plain, directly on the border with Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Its name appears in Egyptian sources as early as the reign of Seti I in the 13th century BCE, and the site lay on the ancient Way of Horus, the military and trade road from the Nile Delta into the Levant. Before recent displacements its population stood near 170,000. The Rafah Crossing has long served as the only Gaza border gateway not under Israeli control, opening south into the Sinai desert.
The town has been Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, and British in turn. The Battle of Raphia in 217 BCE, fought a few kilometres south, brought Ptolemy IV of Egypt against the Seleucid king Antiochus III in one of the largest engagements of the Hellenistic age, with roughly 70,000 men on each side and 175 elephants between them. After 1948 the wider Rafah area received tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians from the coastal plain to the north, and the population has carried the weight of that arrival ever since.
The coastal plain at Rafah is low and dry, opening toward the Mediterranean to the west and the dunes of northern Sinai to the south. The climate is hot semi-arid, with rainfall averaging around 230 millimetres a year, falling mostly between November and March. Before the recent decades of pressure on the land, the area between the town and the sea carried olive groves, citrus orchards, and date palms, with the Wadi Gaza watershed draining the inland slopes toward a coast a short distance north. The wind off the sea reaches the town most afternoons.