Editorial

Cairo · Egypt

The Museum of Everything That Became a Tomb

Egypt built a museum to tell the story of an entire civilisation — seven thousand years of it, from flint tools to the present. The public knows it for one thing: the room where twenty dead kings lie in the dark.

In a black, hushed hall beneath the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Old Cairo lie the mummified bodies of Ramesses II, Hatshepsut, and eighteen other rulers of the New Kingdom — carried here in 2021 in a televised parade watched around the world.

Dubai · United Arab Emirates

The Flower That Was Never Only Beautiful

The rose rules Persian poetry and painting — but under the sweetness sits a thorn, a bleeding bird, and a national emblem quietly assembled out of Chinese, European and Persian parts. A history of gol o bolbol, from a medieval still to a Dubai gallery.

Gol o bolbol — the rose and the nightingale — is among the most beautiful images in a thousand years of Persian art, and in modern Persian it also means sweet, empty talk. Under the tile, the picture is darker: a bird singing in blood for a flower that will not answer and will not last.

Amman · Jordan

Why Wadi Rum Keeps Playing Mars: A Desert That Is Right About the Wrong Planet

A valley in southern Jordan has become cinema's favourite Mars — not because it is like the planet, but because it looks like the one we carry in our heads.

Put Wadi Rum beside a rover photograph and you can't tell which is Mars. But the desert shares almost nothing with the real planet except its colour — and lately, the illusion has grown powerful enough that real space missions have come to Jordan to rehearse.

Baghdad · Iraq

Where Is Agrabah? The City Disney Assembled From Real Places

Agrabah was going to be Baghdad. A war made it fictional — and then Disney built it back out of real places, from a tomb in Agra to a valley in Jordan that usually plays Mars.

The Sultan's palace where Princess Jasmine feels trapped has the silhouette of the Taj Mahal — which is not a palace at all, but a tomb. That is how Agrabah works. Disney's fairy-tale city was going to be Baghdad, until the Gulf War made the name impossible; the studio invented a place that could not be found on a map, then quietly rebuilt it out of real ones — Isfahan and Agra, Marrakesh and Mandalay, a Jordanian desert that has played both Arabia and Mars.

Why Old Sana'a Builds Upward

The tower houses of Old Sana'a rise five to nine storeys of stone and mud — and the usual reasons, defence and lack of space, are both too small.

In one of the oldest cities on earth, families live stacked from the animals on the ground floor to the poetry room at the top, in mud towers nine storeys high. Why Sana'a built vertically has half a dozen answers, heat least of all — and the system that raised the towers is the same one now dissolving them.

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

The Word for Beautiful Was the Word for Moon

The moon has been the measure of a beautiful face in Arabic verse for fifteen centuries — but beauty was only one of the things that light was ever asked to carry. A history of one disc, from a pre-Islamic ode to a glowing sphere over an Abu Dhabi harbour.

Ya qamar — you moon — is the oldest compliment in Arabic, and almost nothing about it means what we assume. The moon it praised was not always a woman, not always even a kindness, and in the end not only about beauty at all.

Cairo · Egypt

The House Whose Famous Guests All Moved Out

When Tutankhamun's mask left Cairo's Egyptian Museum for the Grand Egyptian Museum, it took the crowds with it — but not the collection. What remains in the old building on Tahrir Square turns out to be a stranger and more interesting museum than the one that emptied.

For most of a century, the golden mask of Tutankhamun stood behind glass on the upper floor of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In October 2025 it was driven out to Giza, and it was not the only thing to go: the royal mummies, the whole Tutankhamun collection, tens of thousands of objects have left the old museum for Egypt's gleaming new institutions.

The Desert That Was Written Over

Twenty-five thousand ancient inscriptions, one British officer, and a Hollywood desert filmed largely in Spain — how Wadi Rum keeps being renamed by whoever holds the power to make it visible.

The rock at the entrance is called the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, after a book that never named it. Beneath the film legend lies a landscape covered in older writing almost nobody stops to read.

Damascus · Syria

The Real Aladdin: The Story That Belonged to No Country

Aladdin has no Arabic manuscript older than its French translation. Behind the gap stands a young man from Aleppo, catalogued for a century as anonymous.

The most famous "Arabian" tale in the world is missing from the oldest Arabic manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights — because before a French translator wrote it down in Paris, there was no manuscript of it to be missing from.

Cairo · Egypt

The Bottle That Was in Pieces on the Floor

A car bomb left one of the world's great collections of Islamic art in fragments on the floor. What the Museum of Islamic Art chose to do with the repair — mark it, rather than hide it — turns out to be the most quietly radical decision in the building.

Near the entrance of Cairo's Museum of Islamic Art stands an eight-hundred-year-old Syrian glass bottle with a small gold mark on its label. The mark does not mean the bottle is precious, though it is. It means it was broken — shattered on the floor by the 2014 bombing across the street, then patiently glued back into a single shape.

Assassin's Creed and the Real Alamut

The world's most widely played version of the Assassins inherits a story that passed through a chain of tellers eight hundred years long — Muslim polemicists, Crusaders, Marco Polo, a Slovenian novelist, Ubisoft — not one of whom spoke from inside the community it described.

Ubisoft's motto "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" comes from a 1938 novel, drawing on Marco Polo, drawing on slander. The real Alamut was no garden of hashish but a puritan fortress where the flute was banned — and most of its own account was lost in Mongol fire.

Tehran · Iran

The Fruit We Are Sure We Recognize

How the pomegranate became one of the most confidently named motifs in Islamic ornament — and one of the least confidently identified — across a thousand years of tile, silk and stucco, with meanings we mostly attached later.

A slab of sixth-century plaster in the Met shows a fruit you recognise at a glance: a pomegranate, and surely it means paradise. Hold that certainty up to the light and it dissolves. Across a thousand years of tile, silk and stucco, the pomegranate is the shape we name most confidently and identify least — blurring into the artichoke and the palmette, its meanings attached by later viewers, its very name partly a nineteenth-century invention