84. Gioele Zisa: The plant world

Gioele talks about the PlANET Project (Plants in the Ancient Near East Texts). How do texts and archaeobotanical evidence combine to explain the economic and functional roles of plants? And what symbolic values did they have? To what extent did they play active roles?

3:27  the PlANET project
5:23  what do we know about plants?
7:57  combining sources
11:13  project goals
13:35  attitudes to environmental change
15:18  interdisciplinary
17:30  identifying plants
21:07  environmental humanities
26:15  plants as actors
29:06  gender studies in plant studies
32:59  BioANE project and PlANET project
33:49  analogical thinking
37:43  current research
40:59  favourite plant

PlANET at La Sapienza 

Music by Ruba Hillawi

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Transcript

Jon Taylor: 0:15

Hello, and welcome to the Thin End of the Wedge, the podcast where experts from around the world share new and interesting stories about life in the ancient Middle East. My name's Jon.

Ellie Bennett: 0:26

And my name is Ellie. Each episode we talk to friends and colleagues and get them to explain their work in a way we can all understand.

Jon Taylor: 0:36

The plant world is often viewed simply as a source of commodities for food or manufacture, or even tuned out completely as background noise. focus on people, buildings, or animals maybe. What about their symbolic values, and how these relate to the economic? And did plants exercise any kind of agency in the Mesopotamian conceptual world? Our guest is trained as an Assyriologist and anthropologist. He brings together textual and palaeobotanical evidence and interprets the evidence through an anthropological lens. He explores how plants were viewed and used, and how people interacted with their environment.

Ellie Bennett: 1:19

So, get yourself a cup of tea, make yourself comfortable, and let's meet today's guest.

Jon Taylor: 1:33

Hello, and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.

Gioele Zisa: 1:36

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Jon Taylor: 1:39

Could you tell us, please: who are you, and what do you do? Of course, over the years, I have worked on Mesopotamia

Gioele Zisa: 1:43

My name is Gioele Zisa. I'm an Assyriologist and cultural anthropologist. I currently work between Sapienza University of Rome and University of Pennsylvania, where I'm principal investigator of the PlANET project, so"Plants in the Ancient Near Eastern Texts". The project's funded by the European Commission through Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action. So, my academic background combines basically philology and cultural anthropology. So, I obtained a PhD in assyriology at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and then completed the second PhD in cultural anthropology at University of Palermo, where I also taught cultural anthropology. So my academic path has been somewhat unusual. medicine, Sumerian mythology, and masculinity and male So I ended up doing two PhDs, apparently because one form of academic suffering and one identity were simply not complicated enough. sexuality in scholarly and love literature. But my current research focuses on the relationships between humans and not human world in ancient Mesopotamia, especially plants and trees. So, what fascinates me most is that plants are everywhere in ancient Mesopotamian cultures, so in medicine, religion, literary texts, magic, politics. Yet for a long time they remain almost invisible in historical research. So through PlANET I try to bring them back to the centre of history.

Ellie Bennett: 3:27

So, can you explain what PlANET is and what its main goal is?

Gioele Zisa: 3:31

Of course. One of the most fascinating things about history is that plants are everywhere, but yet we almost never notice them. So, when we think about ancient Near East, we usually imagine kings, wars, temples, and of course empires, but rarely the plants that fed people, shaped landscapes, inspired myth, and sustained entire economies. So PlANET starts from this simple question: what happens if we place plants at the centre of ancient history instead of treating them as mere background? So, the project explores the cultural, religious, psychological, and political roles of plants in ancient Mesopotamia, especially during the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods. So, what interests me most is that plants were never just natural resources. Of course they were essential for food, medicine, and construction, but they were also deeply symbolic. Certain trees and plants were associated with kingship, healing, or ritual purifications or divine protection. In many texts, plants almost appear as active participants in human life rather than passive objects. To study these PlANET combines different kinds of evidence: cuneiform texts, archaeobotanical remains such as seeds and charcoals, botanical data and visual culture. So in many ways PlANET tries to rethink ancient history from a more than human perspective. For not only what humans did to plants, but also how plants shape human societies and imagination.

Jon Taylor: 5:23

So what's the history of research here, then? How much do we know about plants in Assyriology?

Gioele Zisa: 5:28

So, plants have actually been studied in Assyriology for a long time, especially in relation to agriculture and medicine. A landmark contribution in this field was the Bulletin of Sumerian Agriculture. So, beginning in the 80s, this series created an important disciplinary dialogue between assyriologists, archaeobotanists, and palaeoecologists. Its impact was enormous because it encouraged scholars to look behind texts alone and to integrate environmental and botanical evidence into the study of Mesopotamian society. So scholars have worked on irrigation systems, cereal crops, date palms, orchards, of course, timber importation. Another major area of research concerns Mesopotamian medicine. One major challenge has always been understanding exactly which plants ancient texts refer to. Some of the pioneering work was done almost a century ago by Reginald Campbell Thompson in his Dictionary of Assyrian Botany. Although extraordinarily erudite, this study was sometimes too much confident in his plant identification, often relying primarily on etymology. But remarkably, after Thompson, no scholar attempted a similarly comprehensive synthesis of Mesopotamian medicinal plants. So research has focused not only on identifying plants, but also on understanding why specific vegetal ingredients were selected in therapeutic and ritual contexts, whether because of empirical efficacy or because of symbolic associations. So traditionally plants were often treated as economic resources or medical ingredients. What interests me instead is how plants also shape religion, gender, and political ideology. As Gebhard Selz observed, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the symbolism of plants and trees in Mesopotamian literature. A pioneering study in this respect is offered by the work of Anna Perdibon, and the title is Mountains and Trees, Rivers and Springs: Animistic Beliefs and Practices in Ancient Mesopotamian Religion.

Ellie Bennett: 7:57

So, you've mentioned before that the project is going to be using a huge variety of different ancient sources. That seems like it's going to be a really complicated project. Can you say some more about the sources and evidence that you're going to be using?

Gioele Zisa: 8:14

Of course, so one of the most exciting aspects of PlANET is the diversity of sources it brings together. So the project combines textual evidence with archaeobotanical and environmental data. Of course, on the textual side, I mainly work with cuneiform sources from the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian period, so between the tenth and fifth centuries BCE. This includes, of course, lexical lists mentioning trees, plants, and reed, and other vegetal materials. But also medical and pharmacological texts describing plant-based remedies. And ritual incantations, in which plants are used against disease, misfortune, evil entities, such as witches and demons. Certain plants were considered purifying, protective, or symbolically powerful. Even in myths and epics, trees can symbolise kingship, cosmic order, or divine power. So, the project focuses also on royal inscriptions, where rulers describe military expeditions undertaken to obtain valuable woods, such as cedar from distant mountains. So, these texts reveals how plants and woods were deeply connected to imperial ideology, trade, and political power. And finally, the economic documents provide evidence for the practical use of plants in everyday life, in agriculture, craftsmanship, textiles, perfumes, and etc. etc. But the project does not rely only on texts, as you mentioned. Archaeobotanical evidence is equally important. I work with archaeobotanical reports from the second and first millennium Mesopotamian sites, especially the study of seeds, fruits, charcoals, and other plant remains recovered during excavations. They are not numerous, since the awareness of the importance in ancient Near Eastern archaeological research raised when the Iraqi war made excavations impossible. But fortunately, in recent years, new archaeological missions, which involve archaeobotanical studies, have returned to Iraq. There is a lot of material now to work with. So, now, what I find particularly fascinating is bringing these different sources into dialogue. It's interesting that sometimes a plant appears constantly in texts, but rarely in the archaeobotanical or archaeological record. In other cases, archaeobotanical evidence reveals the presence of plants that are almost invisible in written sources. And it's precisely in this tension between texts and archaeobotanical and pollen evidence that we can begin to reconstruct the ancient vegetal world more fully.

Jon Taylor: 11:13

It's a wonderfully rich topic. Could you say something about the main goals of the project, please?

Gioele Zisa: 11:19

Yeah, so PlANET starts from a rather radical but important idea. Plants are not simply passive elements in the background of human history. And this perspective is inspired by fields such as critical plant studies and environmental humanities. These approaches ask us to reconsider how plants participate in the co-creation of social practices, symbolic systems, and of course historical processes. So, the project has three major objectives. The first one is to explore the symbolic, religious, and political and gendered meaning of plants in Mesopotamian cultures. The second one is to examine the economic and material importance of these plants. Woods such as cedar or cypress were essential for construction and therefore for long distance trade. Other plants were used in agriculture, medicine, and craftsmanship. But one thing I find especially interesting is how symbolic value and economic value often overlap. And the third goal connects the ancient world with a very contemporary concern--to the environmental change. Mesopotamian states transformed landscapes on a massive scale through irrigation systems, agriculture, and the exploitation of forests and vegetal resources. These developments supported, of course, an urban civilisation, but they also created ecological pressures, such as deforestation and resources depletion. For example, the enormous demand for cedar wood used for palaces, temples, and ships contributed to the depletion of forests in regions such as the Levant. So, in many ways, PlANET is also about asking what ancient society can teach us about human relationships with the environment. Some of the environmental challenges that we consider modern--like over-exploitation of resources, ecological imbalance, climate stress--actually have very deep historical roots.

Ellie Bennett: 13:35

This is really fascinating. I have a side question. You're mentioning about these huge environmental and landscape changes. So far have you found any examples of opinions of how these environments have changed, like how we talk about how changes in the environment are across the board a terrible thing? Do you see anything that's kind of similar, or are they happy about the environment changing, or is there nothing in the textual record to indicate that?

Gioele Zisa: 14:04

So the case of the Levant it's very clear, especially regarding the cedar forest. We know from textual sources, especially royal inscriptions, that Assyrians and Babylonians were used to cut the forest to bring the cedar timber in Mesopotamian cities. So we have a lot of information about it, especially during the first millennium. We know that the same, the Egyptians, did cedar forests in the Levant. Actually, this exploitation of forest resources is also tested in archaeobotanical and even in palaeontological record. We know then, thanks to the study of pollen evidence, that there was actually a strong over-exploitation of cedar starting from the Holocene, and then continuing to the middle Holocene, and then especially doing the bronze and iron age. So, in this case, there is a very good example of how to compare textual data with archaeobotanical and ecological evidence.

Ellie Bennett: 15:18

That's a really, really nice example. And it's a really nice example of the interdisciplinarity that you're using for the project, and the different methodologies you're using. Could you maybe go into those in some more detail?

Gioele Zisa: 15:32

Yeah, sure. Interdisciplinarity is really at the heart of PlANET. One of the project's main goals is to bring together disciplines that do not always speak to one another directly. So that means Assyriology, archaeobotany, cultural anthropology, and environmental humanities. One particularly important aspect of the project is the lexicographic cross-checking between textual data and the archaeobotanical evidence. This means comparing plant names mentioned in a cuneiform text with the botanical remains identified archaeologically. Economic texts, for example, are especially valuable in this respect, because they often contain practical information about planting, irrigation, harvesting, storage, and trade, like in the example of the cedar, and of course processing of vegetable products, such as fruits, leaves, wood, and so on. So they help us understand not only what plants exist, but also who used them and how they were used--in which social or economic contexts. Archaeobotanical reports, meanwhile, allow us to verify whether those plants were actually available in a given region or period, and whether the ecological and botanical characteristics correspond to the uses described in the texts. So this comparison is crucial, because the identification of a Mesopotamian plant is always very, very complex and difficult. In some cases, traditional identifications may turn out to be uncertain or even incorrect. So, by combining the philological or archaeobotanical evidence, the project can refine or reconsider these identifications and reconstruct a more accurate image of ancient landscapes.

Jon Taylor: 17:30

So one of the primary challenges in your research seems to be the identification of plants. Could you tell us why is identifying ancient Mesopotamian plants so difficult?

Gioele Zisa: 17:42

Yeah, this is actually one of the most delicate methodological challenges in the study of ancient plant terminologies. There is often a strong temptation to establish a direct one-to-one correspondence between an Akkadian or a Sumerian plant name and a modern botanical species. Yet such identifications can easily be misleading and risk imposing modern scientific categories onto very different ancient systems of thought. So modern botany, as you know, is grounded in standardised taxonomies, you know, that classify plants according to universal biological criteria. Ancient Mesopotamian classifications operate very differently, so plants were not perceived simply as biological species in the modern sense, but as entities embedded within a network of practical, symbolic, religious, economic relationships. A plant could be named in Akkadian or Sumerian according to its colour, smell, therapeutic function, geographical origin, or even its perceived resemblance to animals or parts of the human body. For example, lishan kalbi, the name of the plant literally means"the dog's tongue". For example, some Akkadian plant names refer directly to the medical use, such as the plant for a certain disease, no? This suggests that ancient plant terminology was often functional and relational rather than strictly taxonomical, like the modern science. As a result, ancient plant names rarely correspond to a single modern botanical species. So, from a theoretical perspective, anthropology has shown that we should avoid projecting modern Western ideas of nature onto ancient culture. Scholars, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, or Philippe Descola, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, have emphasised that different societies organise and classify the living world according to radical different ontologies and systems of meaning. So for this reason we should remember that identifications must remain hypotheses rather than certainties. Establishing reliable correspondences between Sumerian and Akkadian plant names and modern botanical species requires much more than etymology alone, like in the case of Campbell Thompson. It demands contextual analysis. That means how and where a plant was used, its physical description, when available. I was thinking about the text shammu shikinshu, the Akkadian text describing the appearance of the features of a specific plant. But also the ritual medical use of the plant, whether archaeobotanical evidence reports its presence in a particular environment. Only by combining philology, archaeology, and environmental data can we begin to reconstruct how ancient Mesopotamians themselves perceived and categorised the vegetal world.

Ellie Bennett: 21:07

So, you mentioned the environmental humanities. What did these approaches contribute to the planet project?

Gioele Zisa: 21:13

Traditionally, history has been written from a very human-centred perspective. So, plants usually appear as a background scenery or resources, but rarely as active participants in historical processes. So, critical plant studies, the very recent anti-anthropocentric studies within environmental humanities, siting betwixt and between plant sciences and humanities, challenge this way of thinking. So one concept I find particularly useful is what scholars call plant blindness. So, the tendency humans have to overlook plants, even when they completely dominate the environment around us. I often give a simple example from a course I taught at the University of Pennsylvania. I showed the students a painting by Henri Rousseau, one of those dense jungle scenes almost entirely filled with vegetation. Then asked them to describe what they saw. Nearly everyone mentioned the small human figure or the animals. Almost nobody mentioned the plants, even though they covered nearly the entire painting. So that moment perfectly illustrates plant blindness. Now plants disappear from perception, because we are culturally, if not biologically, trained not to see them as meaningful presences. So critical plant studies emerge precisely as a response to this historical invisibility. So, this field asks a deceptively simple question: who acts in the world? So, we usually associate agency with intention, movement, and conscious decision making. Humans act, animals act, but plants, according to traditional Western thought, simply exist passively. But contemporary research challenges this assumption. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan invites us to reconsider a very simple scene: a bee, a bee pollinating a flower. The bee acted because it's attracted by the flower. Yet at the same time the plant shapes the behaviour of the insect and reproduces through that interaction. So agency in this case does not belong exclusively to the animal or to the human observer, but emerges through a relationship between living beings, including the plant. Similarly, in How Forests Think, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn challenges the idea that meaning and communication belong exclusively to humans. Forests are presented as complex living worlds composed of interaction of human and non-human beings, all participating in networks of signs, perception, and relationships. It's very interesting the way in the first millennium BCE Gilgamesh Epic, the Cedar Forest is described nowhere. Huwawa, the birds, the monkeys, the trees themselves communicate with each other. It's a very, like a sort of orchestra. It's really in a way poetically it's described the way in which the Cedar Forest speaks, from a Mesopotamian perspective. So, in critical plant studies, agency does not necessarily mean conscious intention. It can also mean the capacity to generate effects, relationships, and transformations within the world. So, plants have no central brain. They have no clear separation between inside and outside, no rapid movement, and not obvious individuality in the way animals do. But daily life is distributed relationally, deeply interconnected with soil, fungi, bacteria, insects, water, and climate. But the recent scientific studies have transformed our understanding of plants. So research in plant signaling and plant behaviour shows that plants can perceive light, gravity, humidity, touch, chemical, and even signals from neighbouring plants. It is something that we found in incantation ... from Mesopotamian incantations describing the plant as a medicinal ingredient. So they respond dynamically to the environmental changes, adapt to stress, and communicate to complex biochemical networks. Of course, this does not mean that plants think like humans. So critical plant studies is not about anthropomorphising plants. Rather it asks us to recognise forms of life and relationality that operate differently from human consciousness.

Ellie Bennett: 26:15

I really like this idea of plants being more than just background noise in the service of human life and the human world. And I really like this phrase you have, that they are active beings. Could you go into more detail about that?

Gioele Zisa: 26:31

Sure. Here's one of the topics I explore in my

article, "Plants as Persons: 26:34

First-Millennium Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Botany". So, the starting point is that in Mesopotamia anti-witchcraft rituals, plants were not understood simply as a passive medicinal ingredient. They were often treated as active collaborators endowed with specific powers and protective capacities. So, certain plants were made to purify, to repel evil, dispel witchcraft, or mediate between humans and divine forces, no? These texts suggest a worldview in which plants participate actively in the cosmic and social order. So, what interests me particularly is that these plants seem to occupy relational roles that blur the modern distinction between object and subject. So their efficacy derives not only from possible chemical properties, but also from the position within a cosmological network. And plants and language itself play a crucial role in activating this power. In many rituals, the efficacy of plants is produced through recitation of the incantations. So, the incantations use sound repetitions, alliterations, parallelisms, and wordplays connected to the names of the plants themselves. So the power of a plant is not only contained in the materials of plants, but also emerges through ritual speech. So the verbal performance activates and directs the plant's protective capacity within the ritual. In this sense, my work dialogues closely with critical plant studies. Of course, Mesopotamians did not formulate a theory of plant agency in modern philosophical terms, but their ritual practices reveal a world in which plants could act, protect, purify, mediate, and participate in social cosmic life. So when I speak about plants as persons, I don't mean that plants were literally humanised. Rather I argue that Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals attributed to plants forms of agency, efficacy, relationality that challenge our modern separation between a passive nature and active human subject.

Jon Taylor: 29:06

Thank you. So, you previously worked on gender studies. Is there anything from your work there that carries forward into this project?

Gioele Zisa: 29:14

Absolutely, in many ways, gender and plants were deeply interconnected in the Mesopotamian cultures. One of the aspects I investigate is precisely how botanical imagery contributed to the formation of normative gender models. So in Mesopotamian love literature, mythological texts, and rituals, the human body, especially the female body, is frequently described throughout the agricultural and vegetal metaphors. So fields, gardens, canals, and plants become ways of imagining sexuality and gender relations. In one of my studies on divine sexuality in Sumerian and Akkadian love literature, I examined how the bodies of goddesses are often represented as a cultivated landscape. For example, the vulva of the goddess may be described metaphorically as a field to plough, a canal to irrigate, or the vegetal product itself. Meanwhile, the male god is represented as a farmer or canal digger. So these metaphors are not innocent poetic decorations. They communicate very precise gender ideologies, no? The landscape itself becomes sexualised: rivers, canals, marshes, gardens, and plants and seeds are transformed into metaphors for desire and sex.

Ellie Bennett: 30:46

These texts and these descriptions and metaphors are absolutely fascinating, but I'm wondering, how you became interested in ... how you pivoted from gender studies into this different realm of plants in ancient Mesopotamia?

Gioele Zisa: 31:02

Yeah, it's interesting, because my first research on plants in ancient Mesopotamia focused on medicinal plants and their symbolic medical dimension within the therapies for the recovery of male sexual desire--the so-called nish libbi or sha-zi-ga rituals, where, of course, ancient medicine and gender studies were interconnected. From there, I became interested in the broader cultural role of plants and trees in Mesopotamian societies. So, I later worked on the ideological and religious significance of trees in Sumerian mythology, particularly on royal narratives involving the cutting and control of the forest. For example, the cutting of the halub-tree in the Sumerian composition Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld, where there is again also a gender dimension where the sexual relation is described again through agricultural metaphors and the relationship between Inanna and Gilgamesh, and more generally, the kingship. Again, I worked on vegetal agricultural metaphors in Sumerian and Akkadian love literature. And more recently I worked on how analogical thinking shapes the selection of vegetal ingredients used to treat specific diagnostic categories. But at the same time I become convinced that the study of ancient plants cannot be separated from contemporary debate about ecology and environmental crisis. This is important because it means that we need to create a sort of dialogue between humanities and natural sciences. This condition Biodiversity in the Ancient Near East was founded in 2021 as a collaboration between the Institute of Heritage about the importance of this interdisciplinary dialogue led me, together with the Ancient Near Eastern archaeologist Science of the Italian National Research Council and Sapienza Silvana Di Paolo, to found the project Biodiversity in the Ancient Near East. University of Roma. Over the years, Biodiversity in the

Jon Taylor: 32:59

What is that project about, and how does it connect Ancient Near East has organised several interdisciplinary to PlANET? initiatives, including lecture series, conferences, and workshops that brought together Assyriologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, paleoecologists, historians of religion, and specialists in environmental studies. Among these events was the conference Human Societies and the Plant

World in the Ancient Near East: 33:33

Practices, Knowledge, and Symbols in Rome, as well as the workshop Trees and Shrubs in the Ancient Near East held during the 68th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in Leiden. In many ways, PlANET

Ellie Bennett: 33:49

a really interesting phrase. Could you grew out of this intellectual environment. A particularly important outcome of this collaboration is the volume Plants and Humans in the Ancient Near East: Roots of Multispecies Connections, edited by Silvana Di Paolo and myself and published as volume 6 of the wEdge series by Zaphon. explain what "analogical thinking" in Mesopotamian medicine is when regarding plants?

Gioele Zisa: 34:29

Yeah, one of the most fascinating aspects of Mesopotamian medicine is that therapies were often based on analogical thinking. So the choice of medicinal ingredients did not depend only on empirical observation, but also of networks of associations between plants, symptoms, and organs. In other words, Mesopotamian healing operated through correspondences. Plants could be selected because of the colour, shape, symbolic value or because their names resonate phonetically or semantically with a disease of a part of the body. Bile therapies are a very good example of this way of thinking. In several medical texts, excess bile is associated with jaundice, that is, the yellow green discoloration of eyes and skin and digestive disorders. Now, in medical incantations, bile and jaundice are metaphorically conceptualised as a plant because of the colour. Bile and jaundice plant are yellow/green, so the texts describe bile or jaundice almost as something that grows or spreads inside the body, like vegetation emerging from the soul. So this vegetal imagery shapes both the diagnosis and the therapy. And it is exactly where plants enter daily process. One particularly interesting case is the use of the thyme, hashu in Akkadian, in remedies against bile and jaundice. The choice of thyme, hashu, was probably not based only on pharmacological effects, but also on analogical associations operating at different levels. First the bile disorders and jaundice were associated with digestive systems of entrails and internal organs. The Akkadian word hashu, the thyme, does not only designate the plant, it's also a homonym for lung and entrails. So, the medical plant linguistically mirrors the part of the body affected by the disease. But there is another level that is an analogy that works graphically. The logogram used to write hashu, the hashu-plant, is HAR.HAR, shares the same sign used for the liver, so the organ associated with jaundice and bile disorders. The logogram of the liver is HAR that must be read ur5. So HAR.HAR is the logogram for the hashu-plant, and HAR read ur5 is the logogram for the liver. Mesopotamian scholars were extremely attentive to these orthographic connections, but there is an even more subtle level of reasoning. In standard Babylonian, the verb hashu can also mean "to chop plants". This becomes highly significant because jaundice and bile are metaphorically conceptualised as a plant.

Jon Taylor: 37:43

Yeah, that's very interesting. What are you working on at the moment?

Gioele Zisa: 37:47

At the moment, I'm focusing on the cedar tree, erin, in Sumerian sources. The cedar was far more than simply a valuable source of timber. In Sumerian texts, it appears as a deeply symbolic and politically charged tree associated with kingship and imperial expansion, temples, and divine power. So, what interests me particularly is how the cedar operates simultaneously on multiple levels. On one hand, it was a real and strategic resource. Since southern Mesopotamia lacked a large forest, rulers organised expeditions to the mountains to obtain cedar wood for temples and palaces. On the other hand, the cedar also had a profound cosmological and religious significance. Literary texts, gods, temples, and kings are compared to cedars. Now the tree becomes a symbol of vitality, secretness, capability, and protection, of course, royal authority. For example, some kings describe temples as a fragrant cedar forest, while kings themselves are metaphorically portrayed as a majestic cedar planted among other trees. Of course, the cutting or uprooting of a cedar could symbolise political collapse or royal death. So my current work tries to reconstruct not only the economic history of cedar exploitation, but also the symbolic imaginations surrounding the tree. So how the cedar forest became a space of power, danger, sickness, and imperial desire within the Mesopotamian culture. Another important topic, of course, is the location of the famous Cedar Forest in Sumerian sources. So the sources are actually quite complex and sometimes contradictory, because most historical descriptions seem to place the Cedar Forest in the northwestern regions, especially in the Amanus mountains, where the Cedrus libani naturally grew. But some traditions appear to locate the Forest in the east toward the Zagros, where the cedar do not grow naturally. So this raises fascinating historical and philological questions about geography, memory, and symbolism. And of course, related to this topic, another important concern is the identification of the Sumerian term erin. Traditionally, erin has been often translated as"cedar", and we are sure that in Akkadian erennu is the cedar. However, some scholars have proposed that in certain contexts the Sumerian term erin may have referred instead to a species of juniper, in particular the Juniperus polycarpus that grows in the Zagros mountains. So my research reexamines this debate by combining philology, archaeobotanical, and of course ecological data.

Ellie Bennett: 40:59

So far, what's your favourite plant that you've read about?

Gioele Zisa: 41:04

I'm sure that is the palm. The palm is a very complex tree. In ancient Mesopotamia, it's the basis of the economy. All the plants are, economically-speaking, are compared to the palm. There are these beautiful debates in Akkadian and Sumerian that have the palm as protagonist, as main character debating with another tree, for example, the tamarisk. Of course, the palm is always the winner. So, because of the economic importance, palm has always symbolic and political power that must be stressed. It is stressed in all the Mesopotamian sources from the third millennium to the first millennium. So it's a very powerful tree.

Jon Taylor: 41:56

Thank you very much indeed.

Gioele Zisa: 41:57

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Ellie Bennett: 42:00

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Ellie Bennett: 43:35

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Jon Taylor: 43:50

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Ellie Bennett: 44:03

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Jon Taylor: 44:19

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