Dates in Egypt and Arabia: the date palm has been grown in these parts for time out of mind, since archeologists tell us that the ancient Egyptians were eating dates thousands of years ago. They ate their dates fresh, like candy; they ate them dried; they pressed dates into bricks and preserved them that way. Meanwhile in Arabia, the Bedouin were hanging up clusters of ripe dates and using the syrup which dripped from them as a sweetener; they called this sweet yellow syrup drip-honey. Thus the Muslim metaphor which turns up in Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights: sweet as drip-honey, a man could say of his sweetheart.

Here is how dates used to be cultivated by the Arabs of the lower Euphrates and Arabia proper. Every date tree had an owner; a date is a valuable possession. Both male and female trees flower at the end of February. The flower grows from the stem, between the uppermost branches or leaves; it looks like a bunch of white wheat. The flower of the male tree is sweet, and the Arabs eat it as bread, either green or roasted; that of the female tree is bitter and nauseous, but it is only the female flower that bears fruit. About mid-March, when the trees are completely in flower, they are pruned; some Arabs take sprays of blossom from the male tree and graft them into the crown of female trees. The fruit ripens in August and September. When ripe, it is pulled. Some dates are strung on lines made of goats' hair and dried in the sun; some are preserved moist, packed immediately in baskets of palm-leaves, where the sugar in them keeps them from spoiling. The date is the greatest of blessings from God, yielding food for man, horses, and dogs, and there are said to be three hundred and sixty different uses for it.

And in Napoleonic times the Muslims of Egypt were still pressing their dates into bricks: they were cutting unripe dates, pressing and drying them, and using them as a food for travelers on caravans. Such bricks of dried dates could be so hard that the traveler who wanted to make a meal from them had to hack them up with a hatchet first; all this comes from the account of the French naturalist C. S. Sonnini, who traveled throughout Egypt in the year 1780. He found date-trees growing everywhere he went, from the southern Theban area to the Delta of the Nile. These were phoenix dactylifera, the date-bearing greater palm or Indian date-tree . . . and this is what he has to say about this date-palm, in the style of the time which was eccentric in its S'es. I quote his own words because they are frankly fun to read:

". . . although it requires little or no culture, it yields a confiderable profit, on account of the immenfe confumption of its fruit. The date varies in quality ; that which is produced in the environs of Roffeta is delicious, and boats are laden with it for the market of Cairo. The whole clufter of fruit is cut before it is quite ripe, when it is thruft into bafkets made for the purpofe, and having no other opening than a hole, through which the branching extremity of the clufter projects. In this fituation the dates fucceffively ripen. By pounding and kneading them, thick and folid black cakes are made, for the ufe of the caravans in their journies through the deferts. Thefe cakes are fo hard, that they muft be cut with a hatchet ; pieces of them, fteeped in water, afford a cooling, and, at the fame time, a nutritious beverage.

". . . The dates are not the only produce of this fpecies of palm-tree ; by hard beating its bark, its branch-like leaves, as well as the rind of its clufters of fruit, filaments are obtained, from which are manufactured ropes and fails for boats. The leaves ferve likewife for making bafkets and other articles. The very long rib of the branches, or leaves, is called in Arabic dsjerid. From its combined lightnefs and folidity, it is employed by the Mamaluks, in their military excercifes, which they throw at each other from their horfes when at full fpeed."

Sources:

Sir Richard Burton, The Arabian Nights

Source: Kinnear, A Geographical Memoir of the Persian Empire.

Sonnini, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt

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