History(continued)
In ancient Persia, only royalty could eat the fruit referred to as the Royal Walnut. Iraq (known as Mesopotamia in the history books) boasted walnut groves in the famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon about 2,000 BCE. The Chaldeans left clay tablet inscriptions that accounted for these orchards. These inscriptions are the earliest surviving written records mentioning walnuts. About 1795 BCE, Hammurabi, the 6th king of the 1st dynasty of Babylon ( the ruins of Babylon are about 80km south of Baghdad (set down a code of laws which mentioned walnuts in the section governing food.
In the Old Testament King Solomon is quoted: "I went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruit of the valley." These words are said by some to refer to flourishing walnut groves. However, the likelihood of these nuts being other than almonds is very remote because of the almond nut image that was used as symbols commonly in Hebrew icons and stone carving displays in Jerusalem inside Solomon’s temple. The adaptability of almonds is such that it is much more likely for almond trees to succeed than walnut trees in the climate and soils of Israel.
Although the first cultivation of walnuts is attributed to the ancient Greeks, it may well have been the Persians who first cultivated a superior variety. When the Greeks encountered Persian walnuts (larger and better than theirs) they began to improve their variety by cultivation. The ancient Greeks also used walnuts as a medicine and as a dye for hair, wool, and cloth. The walnut appears in Greek mythology in the story of Carya, with whom the god Dionysus fell in love. When she died, Dionysus transformed her into a walnut tree. The goddess Artemis carried the news to Carya's father and commanded that a temple be built in her memory. Its columns, sculpted in wood in the form of young women, were called catyatides, or nymphs of the walnut tree.
