Fustat & Old Cairo

The Real Tatooine: Star Wars, Southern Tunisia and the Living Art Beneath the Myth

The Tunisian desert that became Tatooine — its Berber architecture, its vanishing film sets and the living street-art scene painting over the myth.

George Lucas filmed Star Wars across southern Tunisia, borrowing Berber pit-houses and 15th-century granaries as an alien world. But the real story is what's underneath: a living tradition of desert architecture, two millennia of coexistence on Djerba, and one of the most ambitious street-art projects on Earth.

Cairo · Egypt

Byzantine Treasures Unearthed at Dakhleh Oasis: Coins and Inscribed Pottery Reveal Desert Life

Egyptian excavations uncover rare gold currency and hundreds of ancient texts at the 'Ain al-Sebil settlement

Archaeologists have revealed a remarkably preserved mud-brick settlement dating to Egypt's Byzantine period, containing unusual coinage and over 200 inscribed pottery fragments that illuminate everyday existence in this remote desert community.

Beirut · Lebanon

Women of Arab Abstraction

The letter set loose, the line woven, the arabesque the West once threw away — and the women who built modern abstraction out of all three, then got written out of it.

Abstraction is usually told as a Western invention that arrived elsewhere late. Saloua Raouda Choucair, Etel Adnan, Madiha Umar and a room of others tell it differently — often as the only woman in the movement, building modern form from the geometry, craft and calligraphy their own culture already held.

Cairo · Egypt

The Seal of Solomon: The Object That Grew Around One Word

The Qur'an never mentions a ring. What grew in that gap instead: a demon, a seal, seven signs nobody can trace, a thousand years of amulets, and a star that ended up on a flag.

A fisherman pulls up a copper jar stopped with lead, and the mark of a signet ring is pressed into the lead. Everyone hearing this in ninth-century Baghdad knew what came next — they knew it from the lid. The strange part is that the ring they all knew about is not in the Qur'an.

Cairo · Egypt

Unearthing the Golden City: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt

How a newly excavated workers' quarter reframes pharaonic history

A major survey travels to the West Coast, bringing ancient artefacts that shift focus from royal opulence to the daily lives of those who built the empire.

Baghdad

The Real Jinn: How the Middle East Imagined Them Before Disney

Seven kings, one for each day of the week. A portrait of Fever. Two spirits keeping a bathhouse warm. What the manuscripts actually show — and what the lamp replaced.

Folio 35v of a manuscript in Oxford shows the public baths at Tiberias in cutaway. Upstairs, people washing. Downstairs, two jinn tending the furnace, mid-conversation. It is not what most of the world expects — and it is much closer to what the unseen was actually understood to be for. A long read across twelve centuries of manuscripts, fieldwork, survey data and horror cinema.