The Editor: Origin of the Date Palm 



505 



THE SO-CALLED ADAM AND EVE CYLINDER 



Design from a seal cylinder now in the British Museum. It is of unknown date, 

 but apparently belongs to an early Babylonian period. It has given rise to 

 more controversy than any other seal cylinder ever found, one school of 

 orientalists, led by George Smith, seeing in it a representation of Adam and 

 Eve before the Tree of Life, with the serpent at the left, while others, includ- 

 ing Menant and Ward, think it has no reference to the account of the fall of 

 man contained in Genesis, but represents rather two deities of production, 

 Ningirsu and Bau. Whatever be the interpretation, it is at least obvious that 

 the tree in the center is a date palm. (Fig. 9.) 



E. B. Taylor'^ is credited with the enun- 

 ciation of the theory that the designs 

 symboHzed the artificial pollination of 

 the palm. The interpretation was gen- 

 erally accepted, and a late legend was 

 also brought forward, which explained 

 the figures by the story that they were 

 gods which had taught man how to 

 produce dates by artificial fecundation. 

 Bonavia, in his "Flora of the Assyrian 

 Monuments," considered them to be 

 the winds, agents of pollination in na- 

 ture. Siret" and others interpret them 

 as human personifications of the palm 

 itself — the palm-god, the palm in the 

 form of a god with a hum.an figure. 

 Siret thus explains the fact that they 

 are usually winged: 



"The essential morphological charac- 

 ter of the palm, which distinguishes it 

 among all other trees, is its leaves; in 

 anthropomorphizing it, these could not 

 be suppressed; but as leaves could not 

 very well be represented on a human 

 body, these leaves which are not very 



dissimilar to feathers, are represented as 

 feathers, which are grouped together 

 as wings. Such a grouping in itself is 

 not arbitrary: look at a row of palms 

 carrying all their leaves. It will be 

 noted that horizontal leaves are rare, 

 because as soon as they reach that 

 position, their weight rapidly pulls 

 them down; accordingly they divide 

 into two groups, one pointing upward, 

 the other downward. Such are the wings 

 of the Assyrian deities, the one raised, 

 the other lowered."^ 



IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN. 



As we approach nearer to strictly 

 historic times, and the records which 

 have come down to us become fuller, 

 we get more and more light on the im- 

 portance of the palm in the life of Se- 

 mitic peoples. The most interesting mani- 

 festation of it, seen by some orientalists, 

 is in the story of the Garden of Eden 

 related in the first chapters of Genesis. 



We know that Edin was, from the 



5 Nature, June 23, 1890; Proc. Soc. Bib. Archeol., 1890. 



^ Siret, Louis. Les Cassiterides et I'Empire Colonial des Pheniciens. L'Anthropologie, XX, 

 292. Paris, 1909 



' As a matter of fact, the very earliest seal-cylinders, in representing winged animals and man, 

 show them merely with palm leaves attached to their shoulders. There can thus be little doubt 

 as to the significance of the wings in the minds of the later artists. 



