Among the thousands of objects lifted from the sands of Dubai’s southern desert, one small gold ornament has come to occupy a place in the culture of the United Arab Emirates that reaches far beyond the museum vitrine. Its diameter is just over a centimetre. It is roughly three thousand years old. And it is precisely this object that was chosen as the emblem of Expo 2020 Dubai and became the geometric foundation of one of the most significant architectural structures in the modern UAE: the dome of Al Wasl Plaza.
Discovery in the Al Marmoom desert
The story begins in 2002. His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, was flying by helicopter over the Al Marmoom reserve, some 70–80 kilometres south-west of Dubai, when he noticed an unusual pattern in the dunes and dark fragments scattered across the sand. The Ruler directed the archaeologists of Dubai Municipality to investigate. The dark fragments turned out to be metallurgical slag, evidence of ancient copper and iron smelting. Thus was revealed the site now known as Saruq Al Hadid, meaning “the way of iron.”
Excavations beneath a three-metre layer of sand uncovered a fifty-centimetre archaeological horizon rich in material: pottery, arrowheads, axes, a fishing hook, bracelets, knives and the serpent imagery so distinctive of the site. Over two decades of work by international teams, some 12,000 artefacts have been recovered from the sands of Saruq Al Hadid, including around 600 bronze and gold serpent figurines, one of the rarest corpora of ritual metalwork in the region. Between roughly 1300 and 600 BCE, Saruq Al Hadid was one of the largest metallurgical centres of south-eastern Arabia, and its output travelled throughout the Gulf region.
One centimetre of gold
The now-famous ring itself was uncovered by the Dubai Desert Survey during the 2008 and 2009 seasons. Its dimensions are recorded in the official Dubai Municipality publication:
- overall diameter: 1.02 cm;
- thickness: 0.12 cm;
- granules (spheres): 0.1 cm in diameter each;
- two nested rings, each composed of twenty granules.
By archaeological context, the piece belongs to the Second Iron Age, 1300–600 BCE.
Technically, it is an outstanding work of the jeweller’s art. The craftsmen of Saruq Al Hadid worked in the lost-wax casting technique and decorated the surface with granulation, microscopic gold spheres soldered onto the base with extraordinary precision. An international research team has identified the first archaeologically confirmed goldworking workshop of the Arabian Peninsula, combining casting, plastic deformation, polychrome alloying, filigree and granulation. The Polish expedition of the University of Warsaw noted a distinctive technological feature: the local gold granules are flattened and deliberately irregular in shape, unlike the European medieval tradition, and were joined with a silver solder, pointing to an independent Arabian school of goldsmithing.
The ring was not worn on a finger. Such miniature gold circles were linked into a chain and served as an element of a necklace or as an independent decorative pendant. Similar beads have been discovered at other sites of the UAE and the Arabian Peninsula, but the Saruq Al Hadid assemblage proved to be the richest of its kind.
The symbol of Expo 2020 Dubai
In March 2016, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum unveiled the official logo of Expo 2020 Dubai. The ceremony took place at the Armani Hotel at the foot of Burj Khalifa, and the mark itself, the outline of two nested rings of twenty granules, was projected in gold light onto the tower’s façade. The Ruler of Dubai addressed the nation in the following words:
“We have chosen a truly Emirati emblem for Expo 2020. Its design is inspired by a civilisation that existed four thousand years ago on lands stretching from Baynunah in Abu Dhabi to Saruq Al Hadid in Dubai, and from the Mleiha valley in Sharjah to the mountains of Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah. Our land connected ancient civilisations, and we shall remain a hub that connects the world.”
Her Excellency Reem bint Ebrahim Al Hashimy, UAE Minister of State for International Cooperation and Director General of the Dubai Expo 2020 Bureau, explained the choice as follows: the circle symbolises connectivity, resilience and strength: three qualities that the UAE places at the core of its image in the world. Another of her statements captures perhaps the most precise formulation of the project’s spirit:
“Of the thousands of objects discovered at this site, what moved Sheikh Mohammed was not a mighty sword and not a majestic vessel, but a small gold ring.”
The decision is rare in its logic: the national emblem of the largest international event of the decade rests not on an abstract graphic gesture but on an authentic archaeological object, whose geometry, dimensions and origin can be stated with scientific precision. In the visual identity developed by the Chicago-based agency Lippincott, these two interlaced rings read as “a universal symbol of trade and of the connectivity of humanity across time.”
The dome of Al Wasl Plaza: architecture of memory
From a flat graphic mark, the ring became an architectural volume. Al Wasl Plaza, the central square of Expo 2020 Dubai and of today’s Expo City Dubai, is crowned by a monumental dome whose structure is a literal three-dimensional interpretation of the emblem. The very name al wasl translates from Arabic as “the connection” and is a historical name for Dubai itself.
The project is the work of Chicago-based Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG), the authors of Burj Khalifa (through Smith’s previous practice at SOM) and Jeddah Tower. The design was selected through an international competition in 2016.
The dome has a diameter of 130 metres and a height of 67.5 metres: the world’s largest 360-degree projection surface, its steel “trellis” shell a spatial development of that same double ring from Saruq Al Hadid. From within, the dome functions as a climate shelter and a vast projection screen: the image is visible simultaneously from outside and inside, and at night the dome becomes a light-sign at the scale of the city.
One ring, three thousand years later
Three thousand years ago, a small gold ring was the summit of human skill, the very limit of what a craftsman could do with his hands, with fire and gold. Today it stands on the same land, but it has grown to the scale of a city, and everything that was once the jeweller’s art at the edge of the possible has become the art of engineering, of architecture and of light, also at the edge of the possible. The ring has not moved, has not changed its shape, has not lost its name. It has remained itself and, at the same time, has been transformed into something extraordinary, just as the United Arab Emirates, in a matter of decades, have carried themselves from the desert to the heights of world architecture, culture and technological thought, without ever letting go of the hand of their own ancestors. Herein lies the quiet pride of this story: authenticity does not argue with the future; it becomes the form of it.
Where to see it
The gold rings of Saruq Al Hadid (there are several, varying in the number of granules, from three to twenty) are on display at the Saruq Al Hadid Archaeology Museum, in the historic Al Shindagha district of Dubai. The museum was ceremonially inaugurated by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum on 4 July 2016 and is housed in the residence of Sheikh Juma Al Maktoum. The archaeological site itself lies on the northern edge of the Rub’ al Khali desert, within the Al Marmoom Desert Conservation Reserve, roughly 45 kilometres from the coast of the Arabian Gulf. Today, Al Wasl Plaza is open as part of Expo City Dubai. It continues to live as a civic stage, a cultural centre and, most importantly, a monument to the continuity between millennia of Arabian history and the modern city of Dubai.
© OpenSpace
Julia Smolenkova
