The acacia carries a distinct symbolic life in Freemasonry, where a sprig of acacia figures in the legend of Hiram Abiff, the builder of Solomon's Temple, as a marker of his grave and, by extension, as an emblem of the immortality of the soul, the evergreen or reviving branch standing for life beyond death. This Masonic meaning, developed in the eighteenth century, draws on the older Near Eastern and biblical resonance of the tree without being continuous with it. The thread running through all these uses, desert survival, sacred construction, the tree of life, the emblem of immortality, is the acacia's toughness: a tree that endures where little else does became, unsurprisingly, a sign of what endures.
Gum arabic remains a genuinely important modern industrial material, used today as a stabiliser and emulsifier in the soft drinks industry, in printing inks and in pharmaceuticals, so that the same exudate once prized in ancient Egyptian ink and medicine now quietly performs a very similar chemical role, holding pigments or flavour oils in suspension, inside products as ordinary as a canned soda. The great majority of the world's gum arabic still comes from Sudan and the wider Sahel region, a modern trade route running along much the same belt of dry acacia country the tree has always favoured.