Ancient Egyptians slashed sycamore figs to ripen them, and the cuts survive in tombs
The sycamore fig was ancient Egypt's tree of life, sacred to Hathor, Isis and Nut, and its timber went into mummy caskets. Dried fruits found in tombs still bear knife gashes, evidence that Egyptians knew how to force ripening, a vital trick once the fig's pollinating wasp vanished from Egypt.
Ficus sycomorus grows up to 20 metres tall with a broad, dense crown and bark that peels in papery strips to show yellow beneath. Its rough, heart-shaped leaves resemble a mulberry's, hence the name fig-mulberry, from Greek words for fig and mulberry, or possibly from the Hebrew name shiqmah. The O spelling, sycomore, is reserved for this tree; sycamore with an A is also applied to an unrelated maple and to plane trees. Edible figs 2 to 3 centimetres across grow in thick clusters and can come in five successive crops a year.
Its native range covers Africa between the Sahel and the Tropic of Capricorn, as well as Lebanon, Cyprus, southern Arabia and pockets of Madagascar, usually on rich riverside soils. Sexual reproduction depends on the wasp Ceratosolen arabicus. Where that wasp thrives, the fig anchors a miniature ecosystem of wasps, nematodes and predators, and its irregular fruiting keeps them in constant attendance.
Botanists Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf describe cultivation as almost exclusively Egyptian. Remains appear from predynastic times and abound from the start of the third millennium BC. Gardeners planted the trees around ornamental pools; love poems name them as meeting places, and funerary texts mention twin turquoise sycamores from which the sun god Ra emerges. Two main varieties persist in Egypt, and in modern times many Egyptians would still mark a ring of cuts around their trees once a year.
Philistines are thought to have brought the tree to the southern Levant in the Iron Age, together with the opium poppy and cumin. It appears seven times in the Hebrew Bible, and Beirut's Gemmayzeh district takes its name from it. At El Matareya a replanted Tree of the Virgin marks where tradition says the Holy Family sheltered, and for the Kikuyu of Kenya, whose name derives from the tree, sacrifices to the creator Ngai were made beneath it.
Source: Ficus sycomorus
