Film · The Date Palm, Part I
The Date Palm: The Origins
The deep history of date cultivation in Arabia
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Seven thousand years ago, on an island in the Gulf, someone ate the fruit of a date palm and left the stone behind. It is among the oldest dates yet found in Arabia, and it settles something older than any kingdom or inscription: the date palm is native to the peninsula, and its fruit was being eaten here before the first cities.
The received story of ancient Arabia holds that its wealth came from the incense trade. The record says otherwise. The base of it was the farmed oasis, held together by the one tree that could grow where there was water. This is the history of that tree, and of the green islands it made possible, built and lost and built again across seven thousand years.
Sources
- Nigel Groom, Frankincense and Myrrh: A Study of the Arabian Incense Trade
- Robert G. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam
- Peter Magee, The Archaeology of Prehistoric Arabia
- Serge Cleuziou and Maurizio Tosi, In the Shadow of the Ancestors: The Prehistoric Foundations of the Early Arabian Civilization
- J. C. Wilkinson, Water and Tribal Settlement in South-East Arabia: A Study of the Aflaj of Oman
- Margareta Tengberg, on the beginnings and early history of date palm cultivation in the Middle East
- Sophie Méry and Margareta Tengberg, on the date offering from the third-millennium grave at Hili
- Muriel Gros-Balthazard and colleagues, on the discovery of wild date palms in Oman and the date's domestication history
- Mark Beech and Elizabeth Shepherd, on the early date stones from Dalma Island
- Walid Yasin al-Tikriti, on the south-east Arabian origin of the falaj
- Rémy Boucharlat and Jérémie Charbonnier, on the dating and diffusion of the falaj
- Jérémie Schiettecatte, on the oasis economy of al-Yamāma and central Arabia
- Christian Julien Robin, studies in South Arabian epigraphy
- D. H. Müller (ed.), Ṣifat jazīrat al-ʿArab of al-Hamdānī
- Daniel Martin Varisco, on agriculture in al-Hamdānī's Yemen
- With the work of the Yemeni, Omani, Emirati and Saudi–German epigraphic and archaeological missions
Primary sources
- al-Hamdānī, Ṣifat jazīrat al-ʿArab, ed. D. H. Müller (Leiden, 1884), p. 200
- CIH 540, the Maʾrib dam repair inscription of Shuraḥbiʾil Yaʿfur, AD 455
- Enki and Ninḫursaĝa, Sumerian composition, ETCSL t.1.1.1, trans. Black, Cunningham, Robson and Zólyomi
Image sources
Images from Wikimedia Commons, the Walters Art Museum, and the Library of Congress, under Creative Commons and public-domain licences; three schematics are house-authored. Full per-image credits appear at the end of the film.