the_stairway_to_heaven

204 The Stairway to Heaven And so it was that Gilgamesh—denied permission to mount a Shem, and seeking therefore only to converse with his ancestor Ziusudra—set his steps to Mount Mashu in Tilmun—the Mount of Moshe (Moses) in the Sinai peninsula.

Modern botanists have been amazed by the variety of the peninsula's flora, finding more than a thousand species of plants, many unique to the Sinai, varying from tall trees to tiny shrubs. Where there is water—as in oases, or below the surface in the coastal sand dunes, or in the beds of the wadis— these trees and shrubs grow with impressive persistence, having adapted themselves to the particular climate and hydrography of the Sinai.

The Sinai's northeastern parts could well have been the source of the craved-for onions. Our name for the variety with the long green stem, scallion, bears evidence to the port from which this delicacy was shipped to Europe: Ascalon on the Mediterranean coast, just north of the Brook of Egypt.

One of the trees that adapted itself to the Sinai's unique circumstances is the acacia, which accommodates its high transpiration rate by growing only in the wadi beds, where it exploits the subsurface moisture down to many feet. As a result, the tree can live for almost ten years without rain. It is a tree whose timber is a prized wood; according to the Old Testament, the Holy Ark and other components of the Tabernacle were made of this wood.

It could have well served as the prized wood which the kings of Sumer imported for their temples.

An ever-present sight in the Sinai are the tamarisks—bush-like trees that trace the wadi courses year round, for their roots reach down to the subsurface moisture and they can grow even where the water is saline and brackish. After especially rainy winters, the tamarisk groves fill up with a sweet, granular white substance which is the excretion of small insects that live on the tamarisks. The Bedouin call it by its biblical name, manna, to this very day.

The tree with which Tilmun was mostly associated in antiquity, however, was the date palm. It is still the Sinai's most important tree economically.

Needing minimal cultivation, it provides the Bedouin with fruit (dates); its pulp and kernels are fed to camels and goats; the trunk is used for building and as fuel; the branches for roofing; the fibers for rope and weaving.

We know from Mesopotamian records that these dates were also exported from Tilmun in antiquity. The dates were so large and tasty that recipes for the meals of the gods of Uruk (the city of Gilgamesh) specified that "every day of the year, for the four daily meals, 108 measures of ordinary dates, and dates of the Land Tilmun, as also figs and raisins . . . shall be offered to the deities." The nearest and most ancient town on the land route from Sinai to Mesopotamia was Jericho. Its biblical epithet was "Jericho, the city of dates."