The paradise garden

The etymology is transparent and shows at once what the thing first was. The name is an Old Iranian compound, reconstructed as Old Persian *pairi-daiza- or *pari-daida-, built from *pairi-, 'around', and *daiza-, 'wall' or 'mud-brick heap' (the same element that gives 'fortress' in a cluster of Iranian place-names). Its literal sense is therefore not 'garden' at all but 'a walling-around', an enclosure. Maria Brosius states the derivation flatly: "an Old Persian word *pairi-daeza-, which means 'walled space'; the word was translated into Greek as paradeisos and is first used by Xenophon".^[1] The Avestan cognate pairidaēza- is glossed by Bartholomae as a '(walled) enclosure', and it is this Iranian word, and not any Greek coinage, that stands behind every later form.^[2]

One small and disputed fact sharpens the picture. For all its fame, the word is barely attested in Old Persian itself. It may occur once, in a late royal inscription: on an inscribed column-base from Susa (A²Sd), Artaxerxes II appears to call the building he raised a *paradayadām (p-r-d-y-d-a-m), a form John Curtis and others take for the very word later hellenised as paradeisos, here applied to a built, columned structure rather than a garden.^[2][3] Even this is contested: Pierre Lecoq questioned the reading and proposed instead *paridaidām, 'I have consecrated', though the older hand-copies favour the traditional text.^[2] In its familiar sense of a planted enclosure the word is best attested not in the monumental Old Persian of the kings but in two humbler and more revealing registers: the Elamite of the accountants, who wrote partetaš, and the Greek of the visitors, who wrote paradeisos. Between them they show the paradise as a lived thing rather than a royal boast.

Almost everything a Greek reader knew of the paradise came from one man. Xenophon, soldier and country gentleman, had served the younger Cyrus in person and knew his gardens at first hand, and it is he who fixed the image of the paradise for the classical world. In the Oeconomicus he makes Socrates hold up the Persian king as a model of the two noblest arts, husbandry and war, and dwell on the royal care for the gardens above all else:

in all the districts he resides in and visits he takes care that there are 'paradises,' as they call them, full of all the good and beautiful things that the soil will produce, and in this he himself spends most of his time.

Xenophon, Oeconomicus 4.13 (Delphi Complete Works of Xenophon)^[4]

The care of the garden is thus made a proper occupation for a great king, not a self-indulgence.

The centrepiece is a scene at Sardis. The Spartan Lysander, come with gifts, is shown round Cyrus the Younger's paradise and marvels at its order:

Now Lysander admired the beauty of the trees in it, the accuracy of the spacing, the straightness of the rows, the regularity of the angles and the multitude of the sweet scents that clung round them as they walked ... the whole of the measurement and arrangement is my own work, and I did some of the planting myself.

Xenophon, Oeconomicus 4.21-23 (Delphi Complete Works of Xenophon)^[4]

When Lysander, eyeing the prince's robes and jewellery, cannot believe he had planted trees with his own hands, Cyrus answers with an oath, "I swear by the Sun-god that I never yet sat down to dinner when in sound health, without first working hard at some task of war or agriculture".^[4] The Greek names Mithres, rendered 'the Sun-god' in the translation, that is Mithra,^[4] and the whole anecdote welds three ideas the Persians held together: the king as warrior, the king as cultivator, and the garden as the fit setting for both.

Xenophon also preserves the paradise in its other guise, as a game-park for the royal hunt. Describing the younger Cyrus's march up-country he notes that at Celaenae in Phrygia "Cyrus had a palace and a large park full of wild animals, which he used to hunt on horseback whenever he wished to give himself and his horses exercise".^[5] In the Cyropaedia the boy Cyrus the Great empties the stocked park of his grandfather Astyages by hunting, and grows impatient for the open country; grown to king, he keeps up the practice and is said to have enjoined each of his satraps to "have parks, too, and keep wild animals in them".^[5] These are the two faces of the institution the Greeks saw, the orchard-garden and the hunting-preserve, and Xenophon shows them as parts of one thing. The hunt in the paradise was no idle sport: it was understood as a rehearsal for war, a school in which the young learned to ride, to endure and to kill, so that the enclosed park where the boy Cyrus wearied of tame prey is, in Xenophon's telling, the first classroom of the martial king. The garden that grew fruit and the park that held game were thus two departments of a single royal virtue, the mastery of nature in its fed and its wild forms alike.

Xenophon's near-monopoly on the vivid detail can mislead, for the word had reached Greek before him. He uses paradeisos freely across the Anabasis and the Cyropaedia and troubles to gloss it only once, at Oeconomicus 4.13, which implies he expected his readers to know it already; the likeliest earlier source is the Persica of Ctesias, the Cnidian physician at the court of Artaxerxes II, whose lost history seems to have named royal paradeisoi at several points.^[6] After Xenophon the paradise became a fixture of the Greek picture of Persia. Plutarch stages a scene of Artaxerxes II in his park;^[7] Diodorus, cataloguing marvels, still takes care to separate an ordinary garden, kēpeia, from a paradeisos proper, which he calls "full of plants, with trees of every species";^[7] and the same tradition read the institution back into an older fantasy of the East, crediting the legendary Assyrian queen Semiramis with laying out paradeisoi and pleasure-palaces along her road from Babylon to Ecbatana, one of them at the cliff of Bīsotūn.^[6] The Greek writers did more than report the paradise: they made it one of the standing marks of Persian wealth and Persian order, a thing the barbarian king possessed and the Greek city did not.

The Greek picture is vivid but partial, and it is corrected and grounded by the one Achaemenid archive that speaks of paradises from the inside. The Persepolis Fortification tablets, the Elamite accounts of the crown's economy around Persepolis in the years about 500 BCE, record a network of installations called partetaš, the Elamite realisation of the same Old Iranian word. Here the paradise is no pleasure-ground of the philosophers but a unit of production. Matthew Stolper, editing a set of these fruit-accounts, describes documents that enumerate "fruit trees at 'paradises' (Elamite partetaš) and storage complexes (balum) in the vicinity of Persepolis", and follows Xenophon in retaining the loaded word, using "the cognate 'paradise,' festooned with warning quotation marks".^[8] The tablets list the paradise's yield in the dry idiom of the storeroom: apples, figs, dates, pears, quinces and other fruit, deposited, assessed and estimated, and staffed by "orchard-makers and 'paradise'-tenders".^[8] A companion inventory, PFa 33, records deliveries of seedlings for planting at named royal estates in Persis, "114 apple seedlings, 22 mulberry seedlings, 54 olive seedlings ... 80 date seedlings, 57 pear seedlings", the very trees Xenophon's Cyrus set in the ground, here counted out by a clerk.^[1]

The administrative evidence carries a scholarly caution of its own, and it turns precisely on the word. Wouter Henkelman has argued against rendering partetaš as 'paradise' at all, preferring the neutral 'plantation', to keep clear of the religious freight the Greek cognate later took on; Stolper defends 'paradise', partly on the ground that one such installation near Persepolis bore the name Mišbašatiš, 'all prosperity' or 'all happiness', which suggests that the connotation of a place of delight was not foreign even to the world of the accounts.^[8] The disagreement is more than terminological. It marks the exact gap between the Greek gloss and the documentary reality: the partetaš was first of all a working estate that fed the court, and only in the eye of the visitor a garden of the soul. That the institution ran deeper and older than the Persepolis archive is shown by Babylonia, where cuneiform documents already speak of a royal pardesu, an orchard worked by hired hands, from the reign of Nabonidus before the conquest.^[3]

The tablets show the paradise as a thing of daily upkeep rather than display. Named installations took in consignments of seedlings and were enriched with foreign stock: one Persepolis text details royal vine-cutters sent to prune choice grapevines from Lebanon for carriage and replanting in Persian soil, another the introduction of exotic shrubs and fruit trees.^[9] Nor was the paradise only the king's. The great households of the empire held enclosed estates of the same kind, so that the word covers a whole social range. Aršāma, the absentee Persian prince who held great estates in Egypt in the late fifth century, was told through his steward to enlarge them, not merely to hold them steady; Parysatis, the mother of Artaxerxes II, drew revenue from lands in Babylonia and across the Euphrates; a paradeisos of the satrap Pharnabazus lay at Dascylium, and a humble Aramaic prds in a legal document from Makkedah in Idumaea shows the same term in wholly ordinary use.^[6] The paradise thus ran from the king's showpiece down to a landlord's orchard, and its administrative sinews, the accountants, the tenders, the counted deliveries of stock, were much the same at every level. One such park is recorded at Nupistaš, the Elamite name for Naqsh-e Rostam, so that a garden may have lain before the rock-cut tombs where Darius and his successors were laid, joining the paradise to the sacred landscape of the royal dead.^[9]

Behind both the orchard and the game-park lay an idea, and it is the modern synthesis of Pierre Briant that has drawn it out most fully. The royal paradise held the empire within a single wall. Stocked with plants and animals gathered from every subject land, it made the king's dominion visible and portable, a place where the whole variety of the earth was assembled under one hand. "Paradises," Briant writes, "in fact constituted a representation in microcosm of the ecological, floral, and faunal variety of the imperial realm".^[10] The gardens were also, in his phrase, zoological gardens, into which kings and satraps introduced new species, a practice already old in Assyria; the exotic beasts that a satrap could present to Alexander, the dromedaries and the imported elephants, came from just such collections.^[10]

The idea had a sharper political edge still. The paradise was a demonstration that the king could impose fertility and order on a reluctant nature. The Greek authors, Briant notes, dwell on "the brutal contrast between the verdure of the paradise and the barrenness of its surroundings", and in doing so, half-unawares, they magnify a sovereign powerful enough to make greenery grow where the land itself would not allow it.^[10] The straightness of Cyrus's rows and the exactness of his angles, which so impressed Lysander, are of a piece with this: the paradise is nature disciplined, the wild made rectilinear. And the king is not merely the owner of this order but its author. The theme of the gardener-king, the ruler who plants with his own hands, is not a Greek invention: it recurs in the book of Esther, whose Ahasuerus feasts in a garden "planted by the royal hands", and on Achaemenid-era seals and a coin of Tarsus that show a royal figure driving the plough.^[10]

Because the paradise embodied the king's majesty, to lay an axe to it was an act of war. Briant collects the evidence: the first hostile blow of the Phoenician revolt against Artaxerxes III, according to Diodorus, was "the cutting down and destroying of the royal park in which the Persian Kings were wont to take their recreation"; Cyrus the Younger ravaged the paradise of a satrap who had sided against him; the Spartan Agesilaus "ravaged the orchards and the paradise" of Tissaphernes near Sardis.^[10] The felling of a paradise's trees, Briant concludes, was reckoned an affront to the sovereignty of the Great King. Mirko Novak, tracing the type back through Assyria and Babylonia, sets the Persian paradise in this longer Near Eastern lineage, in which the flourishing garden stood for peace and fertility and one aspect of every good ruler was that of a gardener.^[11] The role was old and deep. Assyrian kings from Tiglath-pileser I onward boasted of transplanting cedar and other foreign trees "in the orchards of my land"; Sargon II praised himself for bringing waste ground under the plough at his new capital; and Mesopotamian rulers were likened to fine trees, a date-palm or a cedar set by water. The Persian gardener-king took up an image of sovereignty already a thousand years old.^[9]

The same bond between king and tree could fasten on a single specimen. Herodotus tells that as Xerxes marched through Lydia "it was hereabouts that he came across a plane tree of such beauty that he was moved to decorate it with golden ornaments and to leave behind one of his Immortals to guard it".^[10] The story struck the Greeks as absurd, a king hanging jewellery on a tree and posting a soldier to mind it, but it is of a piece with the ideology of the paradise: the sovereign's power over the vegetable world was so complete, and so charged with meaning, that even one perfect tree became an object of royal regard. And because the paradises were planted the length and breadth of the empire, from western Anatolia to Central Asia, their reach went well beyond their owners' pleasure. In Kuhrt's summary the network of royal and satrapal gardens "served to mark the presence of Persian (and not only royal) power throughout the empire ... the imperial landscape itself bore the physical imprint of Persian rule".^[3] The paradise was, in this sense, a technology of dominion as much as of pleasure: to plant one was to plant the empire.

How far this ideology was religious as well as political is disputed. Briant reads the paradise chiefly in the register of power, as an image of the realm and a display of the king's command over nature. Bruce Lincoln presses further, taking the garden as a religious image as much as a political one: the insistence that a paradise hold plants and beasts "of every species" is on his reading not mere magnificence but a small eschatology, the walled space of perfect order and abundance standing as a model of the renovated world that Zoroastrian thought expected at the end of time, with the king labouring in his park as the god's deputy in the perfecting of creation.^[7] The evidence for a doctrine so exact is indirect, resting more on the later Zoroastrian texts than on anything the Achaemenids say of themselves, and the political reading is the safer; but the two need not exclude each other. Lincoln draws a darker corollary. The same court that made the ordered garden its emblem of benign rule is shown by the Greek sources practising studied cruelties, so that the paradise and the punishment can be read as two faces of one idea of the king, the sovereign who imposes his order, fertile or terrible, on a world that would otherwise run wild.^[7]

On the evidence so far the paradise is richly documented in words, in Greek description and Elamite account alike. In the ground it is far thinner, and the two must be kept apart. Of the many paradises the texts name, at Sardis, at Dascylium, at Celaenae, at Susa and Ecbatana, scarcely one has been excavated as a garden; they are known from literature, not from the spade.

The great exception is Pasargadae, the capital of Cyrus the Great, where David Stronach's excavations traced, from surviving carved stone water-channels and basins, the plan of a planted garden laid out before the throne-portico of Cyrus's palace. It is the earliest royal garden yet recovered anywhere, and Stronach argued that its central axis documents the first known instance of the fourfold garden, the čahārbāgh of later Persian and Islamic tradition. That reading is a careful reconstruction from the axis rather than a fully excavated cross-plan, and a later geomagnetic survey found the channels preserved on only three sides and suggested a looser, larger layout; the qualification is set out under the Pasargadae entry.^[12] Around Persepolis the partetaš of the tablets have left almost nothing certainly identifiable on the surface, though recent Iranian and French survey in the Tang-e Bolāghi and at Tol-e Ājori has begun to recover walled garden-enclosures of the period. What fed these gardens is better understood than the gardens themselves: the Persians commanded the qanāt, the underground channel that carries water for miles from the mountains without loss to evaporation, and Briant gathers the classical notices, including Polybius on the qanāts tunnelled beneath the Elburz, that tie this technology to the making of Achaemenid gardens and fields.^[10]

There is one register in which the ground does speak plainly, if not of the gardens themselves then of the country that made them possible. Survey across Persis has shown that in the centuries before Cyrus the heartland was thinly peopled, an agro-pastoral land almost without towns, whereas by the empire's end it had filled with settlement, watered and shaded, so that the early Hellenistic writer behind Diodorus could describe the province as a richly cultivated garden of plenty.^[13] That change was deliberate. The paradise belonged to a wider Achaemenid effort to bring marginal land under cultivation and carry water to it, the same policy that kept up the canal network of Babylonia, spread the Iranian qanāt to the oases of the Egyptian desert, and maintained the irrigation of Bactria.^[13] Set against this, the walled orchard is less an aesthete's retreat than the ornamental face of a state that treated the increase of its own fertility as a duty of rule. The sober summary is that the paradise as an institution is beyond doubt, attested in three languages and across the empire, while the paradise as a dug and datable thing rests, for the Achaemenid centuries, very largely on the single garden at Pasargadae.

The word outlived the empire, the institution and the language that coined it, and its journey is the last and strangest chapter of the story. From the Old Iranian *pairi-daiza- it was borrowed into Hebrew as pardēs, 'park', which appears in the Persian-period books of the Bible: Nehemiah asks the king for timber from "the keeper of the king's park" (pardēs), and the word recurs in the Song of Songs and in Ecclesiastes.^[10][2] Xenophon, in the early fourth century, carried it into Greek as paradeisos; and when the Hebrew scriptures were rendered into Greek, the translators of the Septuagint reached for that same paradeisos to name the garden God plants in Eden, so that the Persian king's walled orchard became the garden of the beginning of the world.^[2] That a word for a walled orchard should turn into the name of heaven was no accident of translation. Needing a Greek term for the garden of Eden, the translators reached for the grandest walled pleasure-ground their world knew, and the choice carried more than horticulture with it. The royal paradise was already, in its own ideology, a perfected and abundant world set apart from the barren land about it, a place of order, fertility and ease, which was close to what Eden and the garden of the blessed were understood to be. The religious reading Lincoln presses for the Achaemenid centuries thus finds a confirmation of sorts in the fortunes of the word: the associations that may have made the garden a small model of the renovated creation for its makers were the same that fitted paradeisos, in Greek and in every tongue that took it up, to name the place of blessedness. From the Greek Bible it passed into the Latin paradisus and into the New Testament promise of paradise, and thence into the vernaculars of Christendom, English among them. In Persian itself the descendant firdaus / pardis kept the sense of the garden, and the form the Achaemenids began, the walled, water-cut, fourfold garden, ran on through the Sasanian and Islamic čahārbāgh to shape the pleasure-gardens of Iran, Mughal India and Moorish Spain. Few words have travelled so far from so plain a root: what began as an accountant's term for a walled fruit-orchard on the plain of Persis became, by way of Greek wonder and a Greek Bible, the name Western languages give to heaven.