Sacred Trees and Enclosed Gardens j 9595 95
Exactly when Mesopotamians first learned the technique of artificial pollination of
date palms is irrecoverable, but it may have occurred as early as the Ubaid period dur-
ing the fifth millennium bce. Our first glimpse into the ancient practice during the his-
toric period was provided by tablets written in Akkadian from the cities of Umma and
Nippur. The tablets consisted of accounts of the number and types of trees in various
date orchards. In the eight orchards that were listed, there was a total of 1,332 trees, of
which 1,000 were described as “productive” and 332 were designated as “unproductive.”
Although the “unproductive” trees could refer to male trees, the literal translation of the
term used to describe these trees was “not (yet) pregnant,” which implies sexuality. The
translator— the Dominican friar Jean Vincent Scheil, who in 1901 was part of the French
team that discovered the stele bearing the code in the ancient city of Susa (the modern
Iranian town of Shush)— interpreted the phrase “not (yet) pregnant” trees as meaning
young female trees.^27 The tablet makes no specific mention of male date palms in any
of the orchards. Because male date palms were not mentioned among the trees in the
orchards, presumably they were being grown at different locations, suggesting that artifi-
cial pollination was being practiced.
Seven years after the publication of Scheil’s paper, A. H. Pruesner reviewed the available
evidence for artificial pollination of date palms in ancient Babylonia.^28 To the evidence
Scheil presented, Pruesner added a startling new translation of two laws from the Code of
Hammurabi, as well as additional translations of some agricultural contracts, all of which
strongly supported Scheil’s conclusion. According to the new translation, four paragraphs
of the Code of Hammurabi specifically address the rights and responsibilities of date
orchard owners and their gardeners. Two of these laws, numbers sixty- four and sixty- five,
specifically addressed the question of artificial pollination. These laws had originally been
translated by Robert F. Harper in 1904 as follows:#64
If a man give his orchard to a gardener to manage, the gardener shall give to the owner
of the orchard two- thirds of the produce of the orchard, as long as he is in possession
of the orchard; he himself shall take one- third.Figure 5.4 Date palm flowers. (Left) Female (pistillate) flowers with green sepals and petals
reduced to a cup- like structure. (Right) Male (staminate) flowers, with white petals.