Flora Unveiled

114 i Flora Unveiled

seems to offer protection to the tree while naked male servants sacrifice a bull. An even
more stylized date palm tree is shown in Figure 5.9F, in which the trunk is represented by a
single line adorned with volutes and terminates in a tuft of strap- like leaves.

Gendering Trees in Ancient Egypt

Judging from the two main figures on the upper register of the plaque from the Temple of
Inanna (see Figure 5.7), Mesopotamians seem to have associated fruit- bearing date palm
trees with women and pollen- bearing trees with men. Thus, it comes as a surprise to learn
that in some city- states of ancient Egypt, the fruit- bearing trees were regarded as male and
the pollen- producing trees as female.^65 Each Egyptian city also had its own distinct associa-
tion of trees and goddesses. In the town of Kôm el Hisn, one of Hathor’s names was “The
Mistress of the Date Palms,” which was written phonetically as Nb.t jmз.w.^66 She was given
the name for the male date palms, jmз.w, rather than that of the fruit- bearing female date
palms, bnr.t, which means “sweet.”^67 Gendering pollen- producing trees as female seems
counterintuitive because we feel that fruit- bearing, like child- bearing, is a female function.
It suggests that in Egypt during the Bronze Age, designations of plants as either “male” or
“female” were not always based on biological analogies but on cultural definitions of gender.
If so, what qualities of the male palm connoted “femaleness” to the citizens of Kôm el Hisn?
Since male and female date palms are indistinguishable vegetatively, the only differences
are in their reproductive structures. Here we encounter the possible cause of the confu-
sion: male date flowers have prominent white petals that give off a sweet fragrance, whereas
the female flowers lack visible petals, produce no scent, and resemble tiny green spheres. As
will become increasingly evident in later chapters, throughout history there has been a ten-
dency to associate attractive, sweet- smelling flowers with femininity. The ancient Egyptians
had a thriving perfume industry, and the perfume was derived from flower petals. Mural
paintings show that the collection and processing of flowers for making perfume was per-
formed by women. This might account for the gendering of male date palm flowers as female.
Egyptians occasionally reversed the sex of animals as well. For example, the Theban god
Amon was also known as the Great Cackler, an egg- laying goose, and Isis was born from one
of Amon’s eggs.^68 It has been proposed that the ancient Egyptians believed that the creation of
new life was essentially a male attribute, and that women were responsible for nurturing that
creation. Thus, the earth was represented by a male god, Geb, and the sky by the goddess, Nut.^69
Using the same logic, perhaps the citizens of Kôm el Hisn gendered the date palm tree that gave
rise to the fruit as male, and the tree that “nourished” the flowers with pollen as female.

Tree Goddesses of Ancient Egypt

According to Egyptologist Fekri Hassan, the iconography of the deities of Egyptians dur-
ing Dynastic times is deeply embedded in their Neolithic past.^70 As far back as 7000 bce,
the people who were to become Egyptians lived as cattle- herding desert nomads. These
nomadic societies tended to view the female as “the source of life and nurture” and the male
as the hunter. Hassan argues that vestiges of this Neolithic gender dichotomy persisted into
the Bronze Age, helping to explain why, in the Early Dynastic period (~3000 bce), the
Egyptian deity representing cattle, the source of life- giving milk and meat, is identified with
the cow goddess Bat or Hathor, often depicted with horns and cow ears. Similarly, trees,