Just before this stage, in November 2022, I began the early stages of building the Horns of Hattin. I knew that based on the space available in the museum, the diorama could be absolutely no bigger than 3.5m x 2.4m. I had originally planned for a bigger board, but there was just simply not enough room and had it been bigger, I likely wouldn’t have finished the diorama in time. To start with, there were a number of important considerations. Firstly, how much of the Horns themselves did I want on the board. I decided that being the “Battle of the Horns of Hattin”, I needed both to be visible. However, this meant that the scale couldn’t be entirely accurate, but I was willing to take at least some creative liberties here. Secondly, I needed to analyse photographs of different angles to make the landscape itself as close as possible to the real thing. Thirdly, the terrain itself. There is often a misconception that the Holy Land is a dry, dusty and arid place and while that is certainly true for some parts, it is not the case for the Lower Galilee. 

With my sketches ready and a drawn plan of where all the miniatures would go, I began work building the Horns with my father, Nader. At this stage I had watched hours and hours of videos of people making their own diorama’s, taking many notes of  how experienced builders did things and what I thought may and may not work for my own build. After this, I set out a step by step way that my father and I would build Hattin and began to work. The first step was to build the overall structure of the board with styrofoam before using rock moulds to create realistic rock formations. At this early stage in construction, it is easy to worry that you did something wrong because it never looks quite right. It isn’t until the next stage, where a layer of plaster is placed on the board that things really start to blend in and come together. This also happens to be where my dad and I made the most mistakes. The board is divided into 6 separate sections and it was not until the very last one that we got our plaster mixture right. Before that, our mixture was drying too quickly, which meant we couldn’t take our time. Although not everything went smoothly, we were through this stage of the build and things were really looking good. 

After this, I painted the rocks using a technique known as “leopard-spotting” and we then began spreading a layer of brown grout across the entirety of the board to act as the “soil” for the flocking. With that done, we moved onto undoubtedly the most fun part of the build – the flocking. Here the colours of the terrain really bring the board to life. Layers and layers of coarse and fine flocking create a realistic landscape where upon close inspection, small variations in colours are visible. However, once this was done, something didn’t seem quite right. The terrain was a little too green and wasn’t entirely accurate for a hot July in Lower Galilee, so it needed some adjustments. Sand is a widely available resource in Kuwait, so we went outside, filled a bucket with sand and rocks and spread it across the whole board, which worked absolutely perfectly, toning down the colours and adding a layer of rockiness and dry summer terrain with elements of greenery. Now, the terrain was about 95% complete. From here, I began to add bushes, shrubs, flowers and trees to create another dimension to the board. Of course, it is difficult to be certain of tree formations on the Horns almost 900 years ago; however, there are trees spread across the hills today and so I took a small creative liberty and based my placement on the position of these trees.