Flora Unveiled

Sacred Trees and Enclosed Gardens j 109

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Ninshubur:  In the orchards may there be honey and wine,

In the gardens may the lettuce and cress grow high,

In the palace may there be long life.

May there be floodwater in the Tigris and Euphrates,

May the plants grow high on their banks and fill the meadows,

May the Lady of Vegetation pile the grain in heaps and mounds.

Although Inanna also likens Dumuzi to a “blossoming garden of apple trees” and to a

“fruitful garden of mes- trees,” in general, Dumuzi is most strongly identified with his gar-

den, while Inanna represents the vegetation goddess who makes agricultural crops grow.^57

Inanna and Shukaletuda. Experts consider the text of Inanna and Shukaletuda to be very

obscure and difficult to translate and therefore difficult to interpret. Nevertheless, the story

clearly associates Inanna with date palms, and it is therefore of interest to us here.

The text includes three fragmentary topics, and the connection between them is not

entirely obvious. In the first episode, we are told only that Inanna ascended the holy moun-

tains “to detect falsehood and justice, to inspect the land closely, to identify the criminal

against the just.” The connection between this episode and the next is unclear.

The second episode tells how Enki instructed a raven to create the first date palm tree.

He tells the raven to chop and chew up a magical substance used by priests, to mix it with

sacred oil and water, and to plant it in a furrow in a vegetable garden. The raven does as he

is told and soon a plant resembling a leek appears. The raven then irrigates the garden using

a shadouf, a simple wooden device for lifting water with buckets. Voila! The leek becomes a

date palm tree.

A plausible interpretation of this transformation is that the leek- like plant represents a

basal offshoot used in the vegetative propagation of date palms. But since no date palm

existed at the beginning, a magical substance had to be used to create the first offshoot, just

as in the Bible the first humans had to be made from dust.

Next, this very unbird- like raven climbs up the date palm using a harness and smears the

same magic substance from its beak onto something in the crown of the date palm, possibly

the female flowers:

Then the raven rose up from this oddity, and climbed up it— a date palm!— with a

harness. It rubbed off the kohl [magic substance] ... which it had stuffed into its beak

onto the pistils.^58

Although the precise meaning of this passage is ambiguous, it could very well refer to

artificial pollination. The next few sentences enumerate the uses of the date palm, with

special emphasis on the production of dates, which are fit for the “great gods”:

Its scaly leaves surround its palm heart. Its dried palm- fronds serve as weaving mate-

rial. Its shoots are like surveyor's gleaming line; they are fit for the king's fields. Its

branches [rachises? leaves?] are used in the king's palace for cleaning. Its dates, which

are piled up near purified barley, are fit for the temples of the great gods.^59

The implication of this passage is that the raven has fructified the tree so that it will pro-

duce dates.^60 The raven then returns to Enki, and the third episode begins.