Date Palm

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.

The palm branch became a widely shared emblem of victory and triumph: in the Greco-Roman world it was awarded to victors, and in the Bible the crowds spread palm branches before Jesus as he enters Jerusalem, the scene kept as Palm Sunday, while in Revelation the redeemed stand before the throne with palms in their hands, making the palm the emblem of the Christian martyr. In Islam the date palm is honoured, its fruit a favoured food to break the Ramadan fast, and the Quran sets Mary beneath a palm at the birth of Jesus, shaking it to let ripe dates fall. Life, sustenance, victory, martyrdom and sacred birth all gather to the tall tree of the desert oasis.

Date palms are dioecious, bearing male and female flowers on separate trees, so that fruiting has always depended on deliberate hand-pollination by growers who select and carry pollen from a male tree to female flowers each spring, a practical agricultural technique already practised in ancient Mesopotamia and very possibly the real horticultural fact underlying the winged, pollen-carrying genii shown tending the sacred tree in Assyrian palace reliefs, myth and agronomy meeting in the same gesture. The same technique, essentially unchanged, is still practised by date growers today, most of it still done by hand or with the aid of a long pole rather than by machine, one of relatively few major food crops still pollinated so directly by human hand.