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In northwest Saudi Arabia, the artistic heritage of the Alulah Oasis is literally carved into the landscape, from the enigmatic rot art of the Neolithic era, through the colossal statues of the Dadanite and Lehanite kingdoms to the monumental architecture of the Nabtaeans. Alula was already steeped in artistic tradition when a new and distinctive art form began to emerge, Islamic art. After the founding of Islam in six ten CE. The religious spread rapidly and in time became associated with

a recognizable style of artistic expression. Because of Islam's Arabic roots, its art has often been associated with Arabia. The reality is far more complex. Islamic art drew little on Arabic artistic traditions. The Islamic faith is a way of life. Religion touches almost every aspect of the daily experience, as well as the life journey. As such, Islam comes with a strong, unique and unifying cultural identity that is reflected

in its art. Islamic art encompasses much more than pieces created explicitly for religious purposes, such as an illuminated Koran or an intricately carved men mianbar in a mosque. It is the art of Muslim people everywhere. Any work created by a Muslim or for a Muslim over the fourteen hundred years of Islam's existence falls under this classification, and the geographical and historical range of Islamic art it is huge and instantly identifiable. Initially, artistic expression was not fundamental

to Islam. Art is not directly mentioned in the Koran or early religious texts. As the faith spread, conquered lands continued their own indigenous artistic traditions. However, as a unified Islamic state emerged under the Umayad and Abbasid caliphets, a distinctly Islamic form of art was also emerging. But by this time Islam had also moved far beyond its Arabian

roots and had embraced an array of cultural influences. However, for all its extraordinary diversity, there are four broad artistic themes that transcend place and time to be consciously recognizable as Islamic. Vegetative patterns, geometric patterns, figurative art, and calligraphy have long been consistently employed by Islamic artists to form a cultural compesion across ethnically diverse following of Islam. These four forms of artistic expression are found wherever Islam is practiced,

and all have powerful stories behind them. Intertwining plants, stems, leaves, and flowers are found on objects throughout the Islamic world, but foliage patterns like these were not new. Such designs predate Islam and are present in the cultures of ancient Byzantium and Sasanian Iran, where early Islam firmly established itself. This local artistic tradition was adopted, adapted, and developed by

Islamic artists, and their experimentations spread through Muslim lands. By the twelfth century, a highly abstract and distinctive style of Islamic foliage patterns had emerged, found in architecture, textiles in every form of object. This style came to be known as Arabesque. These Arabesque patterns were neither specifically Arabian nor religiously symbolic, but they remained a unifying feature of Islamic art. Another instantly recognizable style of Islamic art is the geometric pattern.

These abstract designs, often formed using circles, squares, stars, and polygons, can be linked to Islamic interest in mathematics and science. But again, while such patterns reached their peak through Islamic art, they were originally adapted from the classical traditions of Greece, Rome,

and Sesanian Iran. Building on these traditions, Islamic artists elaborated and built on simple forms like circles, duplicating, overlapping, interlacing, and combining them into complex and intricate patterns that stress symmetry, balance, proportion, and order, while also offering the possibility of infinite expansion. Little wonder then, that this is one of the most prolific forms of Islamic art in the world. Perhaps the most misunderstood influence on the emergence of Islamic art was

that of figurative representation. Depictions of humans and animnimals. Initially, figures continued to be widely used for decoration, as they had been for centuries before Islam, but around the eighth century, the use of figurative forms in religious works was expressly forbidden by Islam, based on the belief that God alone could create living forms. This aligned with Christian thinking at the time, and both religions actively eradicated the human form

from their religious art. However, figurative representation in secular art continued. Perhaps in deference to the religious prohibition, Islamic artists often stylized their figures, creating a great variety of figural designs, though conspicuously rare in sculpture, stylized figures or integral to books, where miniature paintings supported the text for both esthetic and practical reasons, providing a visual aid for those who could

not read the written word itself. Channels one of Islam's Islamic arts most distinctive and distinguished forms of expression, calligraphy, and it is here that we found a profound connection to Islam's origins in Arabia. The Koran was written in Arabic, and the Arabic script had a particular propensity for being

written decoratively, which was eagerly cultivated by Islamic artists. Named after the city of Kufa, located in now modern day Iraq, this style has a geometric elegance that combines esthetic beauty with a form and spacing that makes it demanding to read, serving to slow the reader down to concentrate on the word of God. Many forms of Kupit calligraphy emerged through the centuries, but the earliest example records the death of a caliph in six forty four CE and is engraved

on a rock in Ailulah. Today, Islamic art is still being carved into the landscape of Alulah. In twenty twenty two, Desert ex Alulah brought together acclaimed international artists to create monumental works amid the red sandstone canyons of the desert. The temporary exhibition included a piece by Saudi artists Dana Awartani, where the dwellers lay the concave structure, an homage to the ancient Nabatean tombs of hegra draws on Islamic arts

reliance on geometric design. Indeed, Aratani's works often revolve around the highly codified and symbolically latent language of geometry. With works like these, the Islamic artistic tradition continues to thrive, embedded in a landscape that is hosted art for millennia. Next, Love, Hate, and rattlesnakes. They've been revered as symbols of renewal. They've been reviled as everissaries of the underworld. They've been hunted

and harassed into the dark corners of our imagination. But can our fears be debunked before an icon of the American West disappears? By Elizabeth Roight, The night of near continuous rattlesnakes was mellow, the temperature pleasant and humidity low, the beer cold under a crescent moon. The electric golf cart rolled silently over hilly paths. When our head lights illuminated a venomous snake. Matt Good would hop out, a drink in his right hand, a snake stick in his left,

and calmly present the creature from my inspection. Unlike the amped up fellows on YouTube snatching hissing vipers from beneath the wooden boards, Good never shouted, dude. It was early September and the herpetologist's field season was winding to a close. For ever twenty years, the University of Arizona research scientists and his students have been capturing snakes, including western diamondback rattlesnakes,

tiger rattlesnakes, and black tailed rattlesnakes. They have found more than seven thousand so far on the cart paths of Ora Valley's Stone Canyon golf course just north of Tucson, and on the private roads dotted with multi million dollar homes that surround it. On the best night, Scood's team might bag up to twenty snakes in a campus lap.

The next day, his students measure, sex, weigh and mark them for recapture, using paint on their rattles and inserting tiny micro chips under their skin, then return them to

their site of capture. Good's central research question, how does the ongoing conversion of Christine Desert to housing developments affect snakes posed something of a conservation paradox Compared with snakes in more natural areas, The Stone Canyon ones are growing larger, producing more offspring, and expanding their ranges among the mcmagiens. It helps, perhaps that most homeowners are absent during the hottest months. As we rolled over a bridge past an

artificial waterfall, Good exclaimed, look at this productivity. Thanks to irrigation, berries and blossoms abounded, attracting primary consumers such as the silky pocket mice. We saw scampering among the along paths. On the lush fairways, Our headlamps revealed the small herd of javelinas, members of the Pekerey family, in a stand of trees, a retreating mountain lion. Good had seen bob pats here, coyotes and raccoons. Clearly this was an eden

for snakes. We had plenty of rodents, birds and eggs to eat, and the rocky outcrops styled by bulldozers provided plenty of places to hide. Who had had placed informational signs here and there in an effort to curtail people's baser instincts smashing rattlesnakes with golf clubs, But the nearby roads were occasionally greasy with flattened reptiles. You gotta ask who had said, with a sigh, is this development and ecological trap? How sustainable is it? The fate of all

species is tied to antipomorphic disturbances. A golf course could loose its water supply, for example, and half the birds could DeCamp. The one thing you can count on people to view, he said, mess things up. The snakes of stone care Onion may be doing well, but the fate of most other rattle snakes more than fifty species occur

exclusively throughout the Americas, is grimmer. From southwestern Canada to central Argentina, people continue to capture them for the pet or skin trade, swerve to flatten them as they warm themselves on roads, and chop up their habitat with subdivisions, pipelines, and sell towers. Timber rattlesnakes, once abundant, have been extirpated in a number of northern US states and Ontario, and they're threatened or endangered in pockets throughout their broad US range.

Several other species are categorized from generally threatened to critically endangered. I got a taste of how far conservationists will go to protect Pennsylvania's remaining timber rattlesnakes on a sunny late summer day, sporting canvas snake gaiters. Thomas LaDuke, a herpetologist at East Stroudsburg University. Picked his way along the rocky ridge line of Hawk Mountain, twenty six hundred acre reserve

that's wildly popular with birders during migration. When the brush to our right opened to a view of the valley below, we stepped off trail. Look, le Duc said, nodding toward a rocky shelf of pink and gray conglomerate. Not ten feet away, I discerned a thick pile of yellow and black coils. Somewhat incredulous, I crept infintesimis, infintesimously closer, anticipating the characteristics of a tail rattle. Nothing. The snake wanted only to pass. To my right, I saw another heap

of snake, female, said le Duc, probably pregnant. Her head, like that of all rattlesnakes, was triangular, tapering quickly to a narrow neck. Her pupils were vertical, and the yellow and black chevrons down her spine looked as plush as velvet. As I stared, she slowly uncoiled, creating an uncanny illusion of moving in two directions at once, then disappeared into a crevice. Voodook and I continued over the ridge line, then descended to a talus filled just below the heavily

traveled trail. At first I solidly rocks. Then, as before, I became aware of another reality. A coiled snake the diameter of a fedora on a prominent boulder than six feet away. Another scanning the boulder fields careful to move only my eyeballs, and made out six more rattlesnake piles. Atop one A clutch of neonates, khaki colored with brown stripes, squirmed. Born alive just yesterday, Leuduke said, they already were more than seven inches long and venomous, with hollow fangs and

one tiny tail segment called a button. Each time a rattlesnake sheds its skin up to twice a year for adults, more often for the young, it gains another rattle segment. The rattles often fall off, so segments don't always reflect age. After a week of parental protection and behavior more often

seen in mammals, the babies fend for themselves. They shed their skin for the first time, then may start following a trail of small animals such as mice and shrews, using a scent detecting organ at the roof of their mouth known as the vomuro nasal organ and heat detecting organs inside small pits between their eyes and nostrils. They ambush their prey, inject a dose of highly toxic venom,

then swallow their meal. Pole As the weather cools, young rattlesnakes follow their mother's chemical trail back to the family's den or hybernaculum. They overwinter coiled with kin of all ages, including males returned from asse nations with females up to two miles away, as well as with other snake species such as racers and copperheads that might at other times prey on the rattlesnake offspring. During hibernation, snakes have no interest in eating if they don't mask, if they don't digest.

The Duke and his students radio tagged and tracked timber rattlers for almost three years on Hawk Mountain, estimating their

population in size and pinpointing their most important hybernocula. Females, alongside newborns and subadults, spend most of their time basking, feeding, mating, and giving birth within several hundred yards of these underground layers and legions of bird watching human visitors at the time, LeDuc had recommended that the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary reroot its ridge trail to avoid this basking site, which it did. People picnic on these rocks, not knowing how close they

are to snakes. La Duke said. Nowadays, herpetologists consider the location of dens and basking sites state level secrets. Some spend hours scouring social media persuading enthusiasts posing with snakes to remove geotags from their Facebook and Instagram posts. It's great that people are interested in rattlesnake's, Luduke said, but they don't realize the magnitude of their impact on the population. Persuading the public to protect venomous snakes can be difficult.

Rattlesnakes have booth fascinated and terrified us with their ability to remain hidden and their surprisingly strong bodies, needles, sharp fangs, and toxic venom. As biologist Edward O. Wilson has written, it pays in elementary survival to be interested in snakes.

Human's relationship with rattlesnakes have always been complicated. The Hope of the US Southwest considered them messengers to the rain giving spirits of the earth, and including rattlers in biennial rituals the Aztec and Yucatec Maya of pre Columbian Mesoamerica venerated rattlesnakes, linking them with rain and the planting season. According to one early nineteenth century account, some Western Cherokee felt an obligation to avoid killing rattlesnakes out of respect

for their tightly knit family organizations. The Apache associated them with rebirth and renewal, while other Native American cultures linked them with violence and revenge. For early European colonists, rattlesnakes, found only in the New World, symbolized virility and fearlessness. In an infamous political cartoon from seventeen fifty four that urged colonial unity, the timber rattlesnake is separated into chunks

representing the original British colonies. Under the snakes that the words join or die later A rattlesnake in the model don't tread on Me were used on the Gadsden flag, which rallied the colonial Continental Marines during the American Revolution. That flag, with a snake loosely coiled into a pyramid and ready to strike, has been brandished ever since by those with an anti government right, but reverence extends only

so far. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, communities offered bounties for dead rattlers, a practice New York and Vermont continued into the nineteen seventies. States organized some still do annual round ups that slaughtered hundreds, sometimes thousands, of snakes in the name of safety. In the cold Northeast, where hundreds of or rattlesnakes may overwinter in a single den, their mass exists in the spring made them particularly vulnerable

to wholesale extermination. I'm blue in the face from teaching people that snakes aren't out to get you, Matt Good said as we hummed through Stone Canyon. But I don't know how much progress we've made. Throughout much of the South and Southwest, is legal to kill many rattlesnake species,

and some people kill a whole lot. Sweetwater, Texas population ten thousand, has held its Rattlesnake round up annually since nineteen fifty eight, when hunter Is extracted more than three thousand pounds of Western diamondbacks from their hideaways in the nearby countryside. Sponsored by the local jcs A youth leadership group, the event continues to attract tens of thousands of visitors to the Noland County Coliseum and procures a yearly average

of fifty eight hundred pounds of live rattlesnakes. Some are collected on roadsides, but most are captured by hunters who cruise the state, busting up rocky cracks and crevices with crowbars and flushing their quarry from dens with aerosolized gasoline. The eradication of a purported menace was the Sweetwater round Up's founding goal, as it likely was at the nation's twelve other round ups, but today its aim is unmistakably financial.

The round up by snakes from hunters at a fluctuating per pound rate, It sends most of them to the coliseum's cool shack, where they are dropped beer battered into fry pans, and sells the rest to vendors who will convert their skins into wallets, boots, purses, and trinkets. The three day event raises cash for local charities sixty three thousand dollars in twenty twenty three, and visitors annually inject

over eight million dollars into the local economy. Kieren Hunt, head of the local Chamber of Commerce told a Texas newspaper that for many folks in Sweetwater, this is Black Friday. This is what Black Friday is like. For the snakes piled ankle deep in octagonal wooden pens, they mostly they

remain coiled. Some rattle continuously and indication they feel threatened in the while these solitary predators may rattle just a few times in their entire lives, many suffocate to death, and those with enough energy circle the perimeter of their pen, constantly searching for an exit. The air stinks of right guard deodorant sprayed to mask the snake's pungent musk released in fear. Inside the milking pit, handlers squeeze yellowy venom from snake's bangs into a glass funnel atop a baby bottle.

A filthy centrifuge sits nearby. What's the venom for drug research? A handler answers vaguely. According to longtime JC Milking Pit chairman Dennis Comby, the Sweetwater round Up sells large quantities of venom to private companies that make anti venoms, but he won't reveal their names. In fact, companies that produce anti venoms or use venom for research, either keep their own captive snake colonies, or by venom from zoos that

collect it under some sterile laboratory conditions. They inject this venom into large donor mammals like sheb horses, which spurs the creation of antibodies that distilled into anti venoms are used to disable toxins in snake bite victims. Medical research sures are keenly interested in venoms hundreds of proteins and enzymes which attack blood cells, damage muscles, or destroy the

central nervous system. Researchers around the world are experimenting with venom derived compounds that block or neutralized pain pathways, potentially offering an alternative to highly addictive opiates. Rail snake venom has been used to treat blood clots that occur deep inside veins, and to develop drugs that lower blood pressure

and stop heart attacks and strokes as they happen. In the education pit, handler David Sager, in a stetson and tall boots, pass among a dozen or so snakes, offering snake factoids and describing Western die backs as mean, dangerous, and ugly language that helps rationalize their persecution. With a snake stick, he crowds animals into a coil, pins their

heads and lifts them from photos. He drops snakes to the floor, kicks them, and antagonizes a snake with a balloon until it strikes pop. The crowd, ranging from toddlers to retirees, gasps. If education is the curtain raiser, skinning is the round up's denouement. Jac's pin live snakes to a wooden block, then sever their heads with a single mashetty chop. Still, writhing bodies are hung from a pole. Sometimes gall bladders are removed. They can fetch several dollars

each and are used in traditional Chinese medicine. Then, for a twenty dollar fee, visitors separate skin from sinu, appoint, anoint their palms with snake blood, and leave their red handprints on the wall. Even young children participate. I wander the dirt floored colosseum. The masked snakes look beaten down, stressed, possibly injured. If the is all about education, teaching the public that Western diamondbacks retreat from threats, hiss and rattle

and warning strike enemies only as a last option. Bite non venomously twenty five percent of the time, and are relatively easy to avoid. Why continue to stoke fear that results in mass slaughter? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nationwide, in the average of five people

a year die from venomous snake and lizard bites. While some snake hunters claim to be protecting livestock, which abound in west central Texas, it's very rare to see cattle bit and by rattle snakes, says veterinarian Bud Aldridge Junior, who's been practicing in sweet Water for fifty five years, and bytes are unlikely to be fatal. What explains the

round ups persistence? The money, yes, but as Morehead State University philosophy professor Jack Weir put it in a case study published by the Journal of Conservation Biology, round ups are away of continuing the extras and adventure of the cowboy saga, proving one's manhood and identifying with the local ethos. Though published in nineteen ninety two, weirs thesis appears to

hold true today. I ask j C President Jimmy Hendrix if his organization would consider switching to no Kill's shows, as a few other round ups have to each his own, He answers, I understand Pupil's point that, yeah, we're killing rattlesnakes, but that's certainly not what we'd want to make a priority. It's what economically works for us. You think you'd get such a big crowd if he didn't kill the snakes.

I don't know, he says. Western diamondbacks, which breed at a relatively young age, are not endangered in Texas, though the state's Parks and Wildlife Department acknowledges it doesn't have any data from any specific populations anywhere in the state.

Since nineteen fifty eight, hunters have delivered, unto the Sweetwater JCS more than three hundred fifty thousand pounds of snakes, equivalent to about seventy thousand rattlers, at a time when populations of animal species globally have declined by an average of nearly seventy percent. Wanton disregard for life in the absence of imminent threat to humans fathers Texas A and M University herpetologist Lee Fitzgerald. The round ups do send a twisted message. He says, They're not helping the way

we think about biodiversity. We care about polar bears, but these snakes are worthless. Back home, I try to forget what I'd seen in the skinning pit and focus on that afternoon on Hawk Mountain, where Tom Ledeuke and I had contemplated, had contemplated over half a dozen ges dating or postpartum timber rattlers, large and peaceful, vital and venomous as they'd glided in and out of the sun. Pennsylvania counties used to host their own sweet water style rattlesnake

round ups. Le Duke had told me the festivals were hard to stamp out because they funded fire departments, but eventually the State Fish and Boat Commission, which break it lights hunting, inaugurated a paid permit system for live capture of rattlers and used the proceeds to fund community works. They recruited old snake hunters to survey populations. Leduke said they asked them for data, tag the snakes at round ups,

and returned them to their capture sites. As the population recovered, rattlers were removed from the state's endangered species candidate list. Nodding toward visitors toting binoculars along the Hawk Mountain ridge line, the Duke had asked rhetorically why herpers or at least those board flippers and tail grabbers notching likes on social media couldn't be more like birders than they count, but

not capture. I recalled that Hawk Mountain, before being set aside as a bird refuge, was a popular site for shooting gashawks, which carried a five dollar bounty. Gashaks prey on game animals such as rabbits, grouse, and ducks, so maybe there was hope. Its a mental shift, le Duc said, first you're a hunter, then an illegal poacher, and then with a little bit of education, near someone who helps

another species survive. Petrick glyffs, including rattlesnakes on basalt that painted rock Petroglyph's site and Maricopa County, Arizona, highlight how snakes have coexisted with humans for centuries. The rock art, created by indigenous peoples dates back fourteen hundred years. Rattles are made of hollow, interlocking segments of carratin, the same material that forms human figure nails and hair. When rattlesnake tales vibrate, the loose segments rattle against each other, sending

a warning to leave the snake alone. More than fifty species of rattlesnakes live across North America. Found in a wide array of habitats. Most species remain within two to five miles of their birth location their whole lives. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for to day. Your reader has been more. If you've enjoyed hearing this content, please give us a call at eight five nine for two two six three nine zero. Thank you for listening, and have a great day.