As Such The Trees Of
The Sun And Moon Are Represented On Several Extant Ancient Medals, E.G. On
Two Struck At Perga In Pamphylia In The Time Of Aurelian.
And Eastern
story tells us of two vast cypress-trees, sacred among the Magians, which
grew in Khorasan, one at Kashmar near Turshiz, and the other at Farmad
near Tuz, and which were said to have risen from shoots that Zoroaster
brought from Paradise.
The former of these was sacrilegiously cut down by
the order of the Khalif Motawakkil, in the 9th century. The trunk was
despatched to Baghdad on rollers at a vast expense, whilst the branches
alone formed a load for 1300 camels. The night that the convoy reached
within one stage of the palace, the Khalif was cut in pieces by his own
guards. This tree was said to be 1450 years old, and to measure 33-3/4
cubits in girth. The locality of this "Arbor Sol" we see was in
Khorasan, and possibly its fame may have been transferred to a
representative of another species. The plane, as well as the cypress, was
one of the distinctive trees of the Magian Paradise.
In the Peutingerian Tables we find in the N.E. of Asia the rubric "Hic
Alexander Responsum accepit," which looks very like an allusion to the
tale of the Oracular Trees. If so, it is remarkable as a suggestion of the
antiquity of the Alexandrian Legends, though the rubric may of course be
an interpolation. The Trees of the Sun and Moon appear as located in India
Ultima to the east of Persia, in a map which is found in MSS. (12th
century) of the Floridus of Lambertus; and they are indicated more or
less precisely in several maps of the succeeding centuries. (Ouseley's
Travels, I. 387; Dabistan, I. 307-308; Santarem, H. de la Cosmog. II.
189, III. 506-513, etc.)
Nothing could show better how this legend had possessed men in the Middle
Ages than the fact that Vincent of Beauvais discerns an allusion to these
Trees of the Sun and Moon in the blessing of Moses on Joseph (as it runs
in the Vulgate), "de pomis fructuum Solis ac Lunae." (Deut. xxxiii. 14.)
Marco has mixt up this legend of the Alexandrian Romance, on the
authority, as we shall see reason to believe, of some of the recompilers
of that Romance, with a famous subject of Christian Legend in that age,
the ARBRE SEC or Dry Tree, one form of which is related by Maundevile and
by Johan Schiltberger. "A lytille fro Ebron," says the former, "is the
Mount of Mambre, of the whyche the Valeye taketh his name. And there is a
Tree of Oke that the Saracens clepen Dirpe, that is of Abraham's Tyme,
the which men clepen THE DRYE TREE." [Schiltberger adds that the heathen
call it Kurru Thereck, i.e. (Turkish) Kuru Dirakht = Dry Tree.] "And
theye seye that it hathe ben there sithe the beginnynge of the World; and
was sumtyme grene and bare Leves, unto the Tyme that Oure Lord dyede on
the Cros; and thanne it dryede; and so dyden alle the Trees that weren
thanne in the World.
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