The date palm, Phoenix dactylifera, is one of the oldest cultivated trees of the arid Near East and North Africa, a single tree that could give food, shade, timber, fibre and drink to the desert-dweller, and so a natural emblem of life, sustenance and the oasis. In ancient Mesopotamia and beyond it was a tree of life, sacred to great goddesses and shown in the stylised sacred-tree motif tended by winged genii. Its towering, fruit-laden form and its value in a barren land made it, across the region, a sign of blessing, fertility and abundance.
In one of the more remarkable feats of modern botany, a date palm seed recovered from the ancient fortress of Masada in Israel, roughly two thousand years old, was successfully germinated by Israeli researchers in 2005 and grew into a healthy tree nicknamed Methuselah, since crossed with a similarly ancient female seed to produce fruit, a genuine scientific resurrection of a variety of date otherwise thought extinct and a striking modern echo of the tree's old symbolism of life persisting against the odds. The date palm remains one of the oldest domesticated fruit trees still in major commercial cultivation, with named varieties such as the Medjool and Deglet Noor grown across the modern Middle East and North Africa in direct continuity with an agricultural tradition many thousands of years old.