Jeddah Park

Petra Beyond Indiana Jones

The 1989 film gave Petra a façade and invented everything behind it. The real story is in the water systems, the aniconic sculpture, the painter who framed your photograph in 1839 and the families moved out so the world could come in.

Spielberg's crew filmed the Treasury's façade in Jordan, then built the Grail chamber on a soundstage in Hertfordshire — because the real interior of Al-Khazneh is a plain, undecorated room. It's a perfect miniature of how Petra is understood: one wall, photographed a million times a year, standing in for a city that is mostly still unexcavated.

Marrakech · Morocco

Filmed, but Not Recorded: The Arab World’s Missing Film Locations

Wikidata knows Gladiator was filmed in Morocco. It doesn’t know where.

Ouarzazate is the second most filmed place in the Middle East and North Africa, yet 25 of its 27 productions are recorded only in Wikipedia prose. We compared filming records worldwide and found that in the Arab world, Wikidata usually knows the country but not the place.

Jeddah · Saudi Arabia

AlUla on Film: When Heritage Becomes a Film Set

Hollywood came to AlUla to build Iraq and Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia is using the same landscape to build AlUla itself — destination, museum, cultural stage — and the old stone is being asked to say something new.

Hollywood built Iraq and Afghanistan in AlUla; Saudi Arabia is building AlUla into itself. On carved kings, a warning old as scripture, a mirror the size of a building, and who gets to author a place.

Tunis · Tunisia

Women Makers: Sadu, Sejnane and the Art the West Called Craft

How the women of Sejnane and the Sadu tents made a world of geometric art the museum system had no shelf for — and how it is finally being called by its name.

Two women's traditions — the clay of Sejnane in Tunisia, the woven tents of the Arabian Peninsula — share no bloodline, only a rhyme: the same spare geometry, held and passed down by women, in whatever material their world gave them. This is the story of the visual knowledge the West filed under "craft," the makers it kept downstairs, and the contemporary artists now carrying it back up into the room where "art" is defined.

Jeddah · Saudi Arabia

Why Jeddah Was Built From Coral

A treeless port with no stone quarried its whole city out of the reef offshore — then oil and concrete let it walk away from the sea that built it.

Jeddah's old town isn't decorated with coral. It's made of it — reef cut soft from the water and hardened into towers. The strange part is what happened when the city no longer needed the sea.

Marrakech · Morocco

Why Desert Architecture Loves Earth Tones

In the deserts of North Africa and Arabia, ochre and terracotta were never a palette choice — they were what the wall was made of.

In most cities, colour is something you apply. In the old desert towns it was something you excavated — the red of Marrakech, the brown of Shibam and the gold of Diriyah all pulled straight from the ground underfoot. From iron-oxide chemistry to Hassan Fathy to the rammed-earth revival in Saudi Arabia, this is the story of a colour that outlived the place it came from.