History of Persian Paradise

A Little History of Persian Paradise Commentary by Andrew Hui Cite Share Show Bible Passage Read by Ben Quash The history of the Persian carpet might be as old as the Bible. Already in the Achaemenid Empire (sixth–fourth centuries BCE), highly skilled weavers were producing rugs of the highest quality. Recent scholarship dates the Hebrew Bible canon to the Second Temple post-exilic period (from 516 BCE). Indeed, it is now believed by many scholars that it was during the age of Persian dominance that Judaism was organized into a distinct, unified religion. Paradise in Hebrew is pardes and in the Persian Old Avestan language pairidaēza-, meaning ‘a wall enclosing a garden or orchard’. When the writers of Genesis were imagining the original home of our first parents, might they have been remembering the parks where Persian nobles delighted in hunting wild game or the wilted, overgrown ruins of their former masters? Garden and geometric designs are fundamental to Persian carpets. This splendid example from the Victoria & Albert Museum takes the traditional chahar-bagh structure (from the Persian chahar, meaning four, and bagh, meaning garden). Persian garden makers used the fourfold matrix long before their conversion to Islam, and when Muslim architects came along, they transposed the chahar-bagh to the Qur‘anic four rivers of Eden. It is not only the design of Persian carpets that mimics real gardens. So do their materials. The coloured dyes of these opulent works were made from vegetal ingredients: pomegranate peels, eucalyptus leaves, indigo, black curd, turmeric, herbs, acorn shells, and alum. Since so much of the Middle East is a desert, to unfurl a carpet or construct a garden in the arid land was to gesture to an unattainable transcendental locus, a visible yearning for something invisible. If gardens are fixed green monuments, then scriptures and carpets are portable gardens, nomadic objects that offer refuge from inhospitable neighbours and harsh surroundings. References Burns, James D. 2010. Visions of Nature: The Antique Weavings of Persia (New York: Umbrage Editions) Stone, Peter F. 2013. Oriental Rugs: An Illustrated Lexicon of Motifs, Materials, and Origins (North Clarendon: Tuttle Publishing)