SEVEN PARADISE GAINED

The Indo-European peoples of Central Asia were nomadic pastoralists and when they migrated away from the steppe grasslands at the heart of the continent they brought their animals and their pastoral way of life with them. They encountered the sedentary urban civilizations of the great river valleys and were soon influenced by this new and unfamiliar world, and their own way of life began to change. However, as a result of the fact that the various Asiatic tribes migrated into what were geographically very diverse regions, they encountered a great variety of new terrains and types of land. As a result there were considerable differences among the peoples in their responses to these new environments.

The Aryans who moved southwards into the Indian subcontinent towards the end of the second millennium BC arrived at the great rivers of the Indo-Gangetic plain and there came into contact with the civilizations that had long been established around these rivers.¹ The waters from the Indus and the Ganges and their tributaries, together with the soils produced by the sedimentary material they brought down, were able to sustain rich agricultural lands producing an abundance of foodstuffs and other agricultural products. This diverse agriculture supplied the needs of the great cities of the urban civilizations of northern India. While the pastoral lifestyle of the Aryans did not fit well into this agricultural economy, the cattle they brought with them were cherished symbols of their earlier life in the dry steppes. The cow was closely associated with the legends of their nomadic past in the heart of Asia and in time the worship of the sacred cow became a central feature of their polytheistic Hindu religion.

The experience of those Indo-European peoples who migrated into the Middle East was in many ways similar. There they arrived at the two great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, and encountered the urban civilization that had arisen around them. This civilization was dominated by the great city of Babylon, one of the world’s earliest cities, which dated back to the third millennium BC. This had been for much of its history both the political and the economic heart of Mesopotamia, the ‘Land Between the Rivers’. However, by the time the Persians were migrating southwards at around the beginning of the first millennium BC, the region had already become overcrowded with other migrants. As has been observed, the powerful Assyrian empire dominated much of the west while the Medes had created their own strong state in the centre. Others, such as the Lydians in Anatolia and the Elamites south of the Zagros mountains, had also carved out their own powerful states.

Faced with this stiff competition for land, the Persians were at first denied access to the more productive areas in the west of the region. Moving southwards they crossed the dry plateau country between the Alborz and the Zagros mountains. The eastern flanks of this plateau are desert and semi-desert and the low rainfall is accompanied by very high summer temperatures. In the northern foothills of the Zagros mountains the Persians found at least some grazing for their animals and were able to establish themselves on the fringes of the more settled lands to the west. By the seventh century BC they had organized themselves into two separate but adjacent states, Anshan in the west and Pars – or Fars – in the east. The leading families of the two states were both descended from Achaemenes, founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, and there was much internecine rivalry between them.

Since the area into which they migrated was largely dry and unproductive it must initially have been even less attractive to these pastoralists than the steppe grasslands of Central Asia, which they had left behind in search of better lands. The steppe, and even the adjacent dry steppe or semi-desert to the south, had usually provided sufficient grazing for the animals, but this was by no means always the case in the lands into which they now moved. However, in the Zagros mountains themselves the precipitation was considerably higher and the melting of the snow produced abundant water in the spring. The existence of these geographical conditions led to the idea of irrigating the dry lands by taking water from the mountains and feeding it down into the plains. Of course, irrigation was by no means a new idea and it had been from the outset an essential feature of the agriculture of the urban civilizations of the river valleys. Mesopotamia’s wealth had to a large extent been based on the knowledge and use of irrigation techniques. It was new, however, when used in the desert and semi-desert of the plateau. A major problem with irrigation in this area was the great distance the water had to be brought, combined with the extreme heat in summer of the dry lands through which it flowed. This resulted in substantial water loss into the ground and high levels of evaporation. If open watercourses or river diversions were used, the greater part of the mountain water would be lost well before it reached the grazing lands lower down. In natural circumstances, the rivers flowing from the mountains onto the plateau soon dry up on the plateau itself and very little of the water from the eastern Zagros mountains ever reaches the sea.

The problem of water supply was solved by something that all the evidence points to having been a Persian invention – the conduits known as qanats. It seems likely that the Persians invented and perfected this technology some time between the tenth and eighth centuries BC.2 These were underground channels excavated from the mountains down into the lower lands and usually covered over with large stone slabs in order to protect the water from the heat. In some cases these were at a considerable depth below the surface, while in others, particularly in the higher land, they were just below the surface. These conduits proved to be an excellent method for transporting the water with very little loss and this meant that it was possible for otherwise unproductive land to be brought into use. Of course, initially the cultivation of crops was not something the pastoralist Persians would have known much about and the water would initially have been used mainly for their animals and, where possible, to improve the grassland. However, they soon learned about agriculture from the other peoples of the Middle East, in particular their neighbours the Medes who, as has been seen, were in so many ways the mentors of the Persians.

The Persians clearly found these irrigation techniques to be of considerable value for watering their animals, and also began early on to experiment with the growing of a variety of plants. In doing this they aimed to produce what was useful to them as food and, when they had done this, what would improve and beautify their harsh environment. In this way the useful and the beautiful were grown together in the artificially improved conditions. Thus while they grew flowers and trees to beautify their environment, they also grew fruits and vegetables. It was soon discovered that the high temperatures on the plateau during the summer months, together with the water brought down from the mountains in the qanats, produced ideal conditions for a wide range of cultivated plants.

However, while this was so, the heat that was good for cultivation was considerably less welcome to the human beings who worked the land. In order to deal with this, trees and bushes were planted to give cover, making the working and inhabited areas cooler. As with farmlands in many other parts of the world, the growing of trees around settlements proved to be highly beneficial in many ways. According to Ronald King, this would have been the origin of ‘the classic Persian garden’.3 The trees provided shade and protection and cooled the air to make life altogether more pleasant than it could be in the surrounding desert and semi-desert lands.

In order to use the precious water efficiently, relatively small areas were at first cultivated in this way, and from this comes the idea of the ‘garden’ rather than the farm. This was a huge contrast to the vast grasslands that the Persians would have been accustomed to in their earlier pastoral nomadic life, and this must have stimulated them even more to pursue their new techniques. The cultivated area would also have been walled in, to protect what was within from the harsh, dry environment outside. The evidence reveals that the water flowing down from the mountains in the underground qanats would have been stored in large tanks to ensure a constant supply throughout the year. When the water was released it would have taken the form of watercourses flowing through the cultivated enclosure. These would have had the dual function of both irrigating the enclosed land and, given their geometrical shapes, making the whole garden a more aesthetically pleasing environment. In this way the Persian garden developed into an art form.

This Persian creation in the midst of desert and semi-desert lands was the ‘paradise’ that became so central a feature of their lives. The Old Persian word pairidaēza means an enclosed park or pleasure ground. This was something that first came into being in the lands to which the Persians had migrated around the northern flanks of the Zagros. Since the whole concept dates from soon after the initial migration, the word would probably have originated at around this time.4 According to King, it signified a warm and verdant ‘in between’ land, ‘where sun and shade are equal and pleasant waters flow’. This artificially produced temperate environment was totally different to those extremes characterizing most of the Middle East. The enclosure of this precious space would then have been of considerable importance. As another writer put it, in the ancient Middle East,

Happiness was associated with enclosures rather than open spaces . . . for deserts and hills, the wind and the sun, were generally too harsh to man. When he thought of a pleasant place he thought of an oasis or garden, where he could relax in the shade with ample water and fruit.⁵

Diagram showing how water is carried along a qanat.

The inadequacy of the natural environment into which the Persians had moved was thus completely transformed by the invention of the qanat. By its invention, it had been possible to create that ‘pleasant place . . . with ample water and fruit’.

There is evidence that knowledge of the existence of the Persian pairidaēza was well established by the sixth century BC. Xenophon in the Oeconomicus tells how a Greek envoy was taken by Cyrus to admire his pairidaēza at Sardis, the old Phrygian capital. Cyrus took great pride in such gardens and seems to have found the time, among his many other activities, to be involved with the planning and even the planting.6

Among the most famous of the Middle Eastern gardens were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. There are many accounts of their origins, probably the most widely believed being that they were constructed by Nebuchadnezzar II for his wife, who came from Media and missed its landscape of hills and streams. There is also the strong probability that they took their inspiration from the parks and gardens in the Assyrian capital, Nineveh. Interestingly, Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, has a different story. He maintains that they were actually built and laid out by Cyrus after his conquest of Babylon. According to Diodorus:

The Hanging Garden of Babylon was not built by Semiramus who founded the city, but by a later prince called Cyrus, who, for the sake of a courtesan, who, being a Persian . . . desired the king, by an artificial plantation, to imitate the land in Persia. This garden was 100 feet long by 100 wide and built up in tiers so that it resembled a theatre . . . The highest gallery contained conduits for the water which was raised by pumps in great abundance from the river.⁷

When the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey was excavating at Babylon in the early twentieth century, he found evidence to suggest that the account of Diodorus Siculus was, in fact, surprisingly accurate.

As has been observed, the Greeks of the time were well aware of the Persian pairidaēza, which they saw as being another of the many positive achievements of their great but much admired opponent. Xenophon reports a dialogue of Socrates on the subject; according to the philosopher, the king of Persia was very much involved in gardens and gardening:

In whatever province he resides, and wherever he travels, he takes care that there may be gardens, such as are called paradeisoi, stocked with everything good and valuable that the soil will produce; and that in these gardens he himself spends the greater part of his time.8

The historical and archaeological evidence reveals that while the Tomb of Cyrus now appears stark and solitary in the dry and uncompromising landscape of Pasargadae, this had not been the case during the Achaemenid period itself. It appears that at the time of the visit of Alexander the Great, following his victory over the Persians, the tomb was sheltered by a larger structure and was surrounded by beautiful gardens with many trees. Archaeological excavations have revealed that there were qanats around the whole area and that supplies of water were being brought down from the northern slopes of the Zagros mountains.

From the outset it had been necessary for the Persians to do something to improve their land if their great migration from Central Asia was to be at all worthwhile. Neither the bare and rocky mountains nor the desert and semi-desert below were of great attraction for human settlement but the bringing of water from the one to the other produced conditions that could hardly have been bettered. It was the protection of the cultivated land from the hot, dry plateau afforded by trees and walls that then enabled the pairidaēza to flourish. When these were laid out to surround villages and towns and the great palaces of the kings they created an integrated human landscape of buildings and gardens. Its huge contrast with the bare land outside would have made this landscape even more astonishing to visitors. Gardens of this sort would certainly have surrounded Persepolis and added greatly to the beauty, impressiveness and sense of power of the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenids.

There was no ‘paradise lost’ for the Persians, since they had migrated from an environment that was becoming ever more challenging. The paradise they ‘found’ was something that they themselves created, and it was eventually to become one of their most impressive legacies.

While the Persian paradise later became transformed into a religious idea in the Christian world, Persian Islamic writers have maintained that it also had a role in Zoroastrianism. In Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the religious idea of paradise is very much present. Ferdowsi describes how the prophet Zoroaster created a paradise:

He reared throughout the realm a tree with beautiful foliage,

and men rested beneath its branches.

and whoever ate of its leaves became learned,

in all that regards the life to come,

But whoever ate of its branches

Became perfect in wisdom and faith.9

It was the translation of the Persian pairidaēza into its Greek form paradeisoi that first introduced the word to the Greek and later the European world. The Septuagint translators of the Bible in Alexandria used the word as a synonym for the Garden of Eden and early Christian writers later used it as synonymous with Heaven. The water for the Persian garden, after being stored in tanks, was usually separated into four parts, thus dividing the garden into four separate spaces. Remarkably, this was replicated in the description of the Garden of Eden where, according to the biblical text, ‘a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads’ (Genesis 2:10). It has even been suggested that the resemblance is so close that the layout of the Persian garden may have been something that the Jews observed during the Babylonian Captivity.

A 19th-century reproduction of the Hereford Mappa Mundi. Paradise with its rivers is in the east (top) and Babylon is located beneath it. Jerusalem is at the centre of the world.

The concept of paradise continued on into the Middle Ages, but it became transformed into an earthly paradise open only to the virtuous. While the Christian writers of this time saw Cyrus as being symbolic of the way in which emperors destroy their creations by being too ambitious for ever more conquests, they nevertheless took the idea of the Persian garden as symbolic of the place of perfection and they made it an essential part of the Christian story.

This can all be seen very clearly by an examination of the mappae mundi, the world maps produced in medieval Europe. These are essentially idealized representations of the world as it was envisaged at the time. In one of the best-known of these – the Hereford Mappa Mundi, dating from the thirteenth century – Paradise is an island in the east, which is at the top of the map. It has four rivers flowing through it and a tree growing in the middle of them. This is the Tree of Life, and the tale of Adam and Eve takes place in this paradise. (They are, of course, eventually expelled from it because of their transgressions.) The picture is completed in the Hereford map with Paradise surrounded by a wall. The resemblance between this Christian Paradise and that of the Persians is so close that the influence of the pairidaēza is very obvious. Not far below it on the map is Babylon, complete with the Tower of Babel, which is, not surprisingly, seen as being the centre of iniquity.

In this and many other ways, the idea of paradise as originated by the Persians was taken up by medieval Christianity. Cyrus, the great lover of gardens, may have been reviled by Christians for his ‘restless ambition’, but the paradise he had created, and was said to love so much, was still considered to be an earthly ideal.

The Christian ideal of how humanity should behave and the moral code to which human beings should adhere bore certain resemblances to the ideals of the Achaemenids. They held to the firm belief that in building their empire they were engaged in doing the work of Ahuramazda (God) and that what they did was firmly based on Spenta Mainyu (Good Spirit) and Asha (Goodness).

The invention of the pairidaēza was certainly one of the Achaemenids’ most important achievements, and the beauty of what they created became closely associated with their ideal of goodness. This then became an enduring part of the Achaemenid legacy, and its incorporation into later religious and other ideals was a demonstration of its perceived uniqueness and value well after the ancient empire had passed into history.

The qanats possessed two parallel functions. They enabled the emergence of beauty in what would otherwise have been barren ugliness and provided a microclimate that was more suitable for the human beings who lived in it. Even more important, they enabled the production of the agricultural resources that allowed the Persians to create and sustain their vast empire. D. R. Lightfoot, a professor of geography, asserted that ‘a history of qanat irrigation provides a catalyst for understanding how successive waves of empire made the lands they occupied life-sustaining.’10 The Parthian and Sasanid successors to the Achaemenids continued to develop the qanat network both in Persia itself and in the conquered lands. This Persian control over the water supply, in what was naturally a harsh environment, goes a long way towards explaining the endurance of Persia and the strength of its identity throughout the ages.