Najran
— — mud walls the colour of the dusk that built them.
Not only on a wall.
“A valley city in the kingdom's southwest corner, where mud-brick towers stand among date palms along the Wadi Najran. The ruins at Al-Ukhdood sit on the plain south of town, a square of black-stone walls older than the road that passes them. From the studio, the place reads as a quiet pocket of older Arabia.
Najran, 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.
Najran sits in the southwest of Saudi Arabia, against the border with Yemen, in a broad valley fed by the Wadi Najran. The province carries roughly 600,000 people across desert and farmland, with the city itself near 1,290 metres of elevation. Mud-brick towers and walled compounds still mark older quarters, and the road south runs to the Al Wadiah crossing into Yemen. The ruins at Al-Ukhdood, on the southern edge of town, anchor the city to a much older trade route along the frankincense corridor that ran north toward Mecca and the Levant.
The black basalt walls at Al-Ukhdood sit in a roughly 235 by 220 metre square on the plain south of the city, the remains of a pre-Islamic settlement tied to the South Arabian kingdoms. The site is named in the Quran's Surah Al-Buruj, and excavations have turned up Sabaean and Himyaritic inscriptions cut into the stone. Above ground, the foundations are low and weathered; beneath them, archaeologists have traced streets, cisterns and a city wall. The Saudi Heritage Commission lists the ruins among the country's earliest urban sites.
Najran's air is dry and high, the city sitting at the lip of the Empty Quarter's southern flank. Date palms along the wadi pull a green line through ochre rock, and the local mud-brick style, with towered houses up to seven storeys, was shaped by long summers and short, sharp winters. Average highs reach the low forties Celsius in June and July; January nights can drop below ten. The valley catches monsoon edges some years, enough to keep the palm groves working through the dry months.