In one part at least of Chaldea properly so called, to the south of Babylon, it appears as though it were no longer the type we have just been considering that was employed to represent the tree of life. It was the palm, the tree that furnished the majority of the inhabitants of the district with food, and with fruit from which they distilled a fermented and intoxicating liquor, a kind of wine; the tree to which they were wont to attribute in a popular song as many benefits as there are days in the year--this palm it was that was there considered the sacred, the paradisiacal tree. We have the proof of this in cylinders that show us the palm surmounted by the emblem of the Supreme God, and guarded by two eagle-headed genii. Moreover, the essential character of the tree of life lies in its fruits affording an intoxicating juice, the beverage of immortality; and accordingly the books of the Sabians or Mendaites associate it with the tree Setarvan, "the perfumed vine," Sam Gufro, above which hovers "the Supreme Life" in the same way as does the emblematic image of divinity in its highest and most abstract form above the plant of life in the monumental representations of Babylon and Assyria.
And, further, the fact that in the cosmogonic traditions of the Chaldeans and Babylonians respecting the tree of life and paradisiacal fruit, there was contained a dramatic myth, closely resembling in form the Biblical narrative of the Temptation, appears to be as positively established as may be in the absence of written texts, by a cylinder of hard stone preserved in the British Museum.[67] There we actually see a man and woman, the former wearing on his head the kind of turban peculiar to Babylonians,[68] seated opposite each other on either side of a tree, from whose spreading branches two big fruits hang--one in front of each of the figures who are stretching out their hands to gather it. A serpent is rearing himself behind the woman. This representative might serve as a direct illustration of the narrative in Genesis, nor as M. Friedrich Delitzsch has observed, can it lend itself to any other interpretation.
M. Renan has no hesitation in agreeing with ancient commentators in finding a vestige of the same traditions among the Phenicians in the fragments of the Book of Sanchoniathon, translated into Greek by Philo of Byblos. In point of fact it is there told, in connection with the first human pair, that Aion--which seems a rendering of Havah--"invented feeding on the fruits of the tree." The learned academician even thinks he discovers in this passage an echo of some type of Phenician figured representation, retracing a scene such as that recorded in Genesis, and visible on the Babylonian cylinder. Certain it is that, at the epoch of the great influx of Oriental traditions into the classic world, we see a representation of the kind figure on several Roman sarcophagi, where it indicates positively the introduction of a legend analogous to the narrative of Genesis, and associated with the myth of the formation of man by Prometheus. One famous sarcophagus in the Capitol Museum displays in the neighbourhood of the Titan, son of Japetos, who is performing his work as modeller--a pair--man and woman--in the nudity of primeval days, standing at the foot of a tree, the man's gesture showing that he means to gather its fruit.[69] We meet with the same group in a bas-relief built into the wall of the small garden of the Villa Albani in Rome, only here it is in still closer conformity with the Hebrew tradition, as a huge serpent is coiled round the trunk of the tree beneath which the two mortals are standing. It is this plastic type that was imitated and reproduced by the earliest Christian artists, when they attempted the representation of the fall of our first parents, which formed so favourite a subject with them, both in sculpture and painting.