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Persian Gardens

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

PERSIAN GARDENS
To Middle Eastern people gardens were always very important and also the Persians continued the country’s tradition developing their parks along the Assyro-Bailonian line. As I have already said, the trees were considered a fundamental element of the Assyrian gardens, but for the Persians they were much more because they had a deep veneration for them. From Strabo we learn that the reason of this special feeling was due to the fact that mythical long trunked plants held an important place in their religion. Fundamental for the Persians was the Tree of the Eternal Life hanging on a river that flowed at its feet, and also very important was another miraculous tree that – for what they believed - contained the seed of everything. To sum it, in ancient Persia trees were sacred, and to plant and cultivate them was considered a devoted occupation. Therefore - as Strabo tells us – to teach how to better tend them was part of the education that in the evening was imparted to young boys.
Long trunked trees were also planted around the tombs creating gardens and thickets for the pleasure of the dead relatives’ souls. Even the tomb of Cyrus at Pasagarde was surrounded by a small park and his son, Cambyse, entrusted its care to a Magi family. However, when Alexander the Great visited the place, he found that, also if the trees had grown well and were very tall, the gardens had been badly neglected. Alexander felt so indignant that he severely punished the faithless wardens.
If Persian tombs were surrounded by trees and gardens, many beautiful wooded parks were made for the livings and well known is the anecdote about Lysander, the Spartan king, to whom Cyrus showed his Sardis’ “Paradeisos”. Yes, “Paradeisos”, because our term “paradise”, the celestial and happy place where the souls of the departed will dwell for the eternity to come, came from the one with which the Persians indicated their gardens.
Reporting this visit, the chronicler writes:
“ Lysander admired how beautiful were those trees and how well they were set, all planted in straight rows and accurately put at the same distance the one from the other: a real perfect geometrical order. He also noticed with wonder the pleasurable perfumes that enveloped them while they were strolling in the park. Fascinated the Greek exclaimed “Cyrus I am really fully of wonder in front of such a beauty but I am even more full of admiration for whoever planned and created your garden” Pleased by the praise Cyrus answered “Well I am the one who did it, and here there are many trees that I planted with my own hands.”
Lysander was stunned in hearing this. He could never imagine that the Great King with his expensive dresses and his costly perfumes could stoop himself to do such a humble laborer’s task. But Cyrus assured him that, unless being ill, he never went to dinner without having first practiced some bodily exertion, and every day, when not engaged in martial arts, he spent his time tending his parks. As a matter of fact, Cyrus explained, he regarded planting a tree not only as one of the most important occupation but also one of the most gratifying.
Apart of all the rest the veneration for the trees permeated at such a point all the Persian society that, as Herodotus tells us, while Cyrus was passing through Lydia, he was so much stunned by the beauty of a particular plane tree set near the town of Caltebus, that he adorned its branches with golden chains and bracelets just as a lover would have decked his loved one. Then, very wisely, he left one of his Immortals (Cyrus’ personal guards) to protect this plane (maybe the ancestor of a Xmas tree) and its treasure.
Due to the adoration that Persians had for their trees. It is evident that anyone who wanted to deeply offend them could not find anything better to do than to cut their parks, and, as a matter of fact, every time their foes succeeded in penetrating their territory, this was the first hostile act that they undertook. As the Persians considered their trees the most precious of their treasures and deemed their destruction as a sacrilege, this was certainly a very effective idea.
Plutarch tells us that once during his campaign against the Cadusians, Artaxerxes camped in a deserted plain near one of the royal property that was endowed by a beautiful, well tended and extensive garden. As it was deep winter and there was a deadly cold, the king allowed the soldiers to cut the trees and warm themselves around the fires. He urged them not to spare any one of the park’s beautiful cedar, or cypress and pine. Then, as the soldiers did not dare to do such a thing, the king himself had to take an axe and give them the example.
Unfortunately the adoration of the Persians for their trees was never developed in their graphic arts, and, if in the Greek literature we read a lot of descriptions of their gardens, less than nothing we find in their superb bas-reliefs where, in the background, only a few schematic ornamental plants and some very stylized flower can be detected.
Luckily at Pasagarde we found the remains of the great park that surrounded Cyrus palace. Thus today it is possible to study how a Persian “Paradeisos” were made. The very extensive Royal Pasagarde Palace was enclosed by a wall, and many marble pavilions were scattered around the park that was divided in rectangular patches. It was in these patches that the long rows of the splendid and perfumed trees described in the anecdote about Lysander must have been planted. All around each one of these plots circled long and decorative white marble canals that at regular intervals were interrupted by little square pits measuring 1x 1 m and 0.50 m deep. Water flowed in them with a sweet low murmur and, fresh and pure as it was, made the place cheerful. We can imagine the pleasurable shade, the music of the birds’, songs, and the incessant buzzing of the insects of this “Paradeisos”.
A true paradise!

Bibliography
Scientific popularization
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Dossier: I giardini nell'antichità in Archeo nº 69, November, pp. 50-97

Academic papers
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI – I giardini del Paradiso in Donum Natalicium: studi presentati a Claudio Saporetti in occasione del suo 60. Compleanno, Rome 2000, pp. 225-246