Do Not Cut These Trees!

Low-tech people tend to be good at preserving commons. They have to be, because they don’t have a global supply chain to save them if they wreck their environment. And so for thousands of years people have conserved the cedar forest on Mount Lebanon and saved its wood for special purposes. Ancient inscriptions tell the story.

The information regarding Assyrian names for wood is not much better than for Egyptian names. It is believed that erenu is Cedrus libani, although the arguments are complicated; dapranu is a kind of juniper, as is burasu, although the latter has also been identified as cypress; and surmenu is probably cypress (see essay by Postgate in Postgate and Powell, eds., 1992). … GIŠ.ERIN.MEš (=cedar) seems more certain than the others, however, particularly because of the Wadi Brisa inscription of Nebuchadrezzar: in it he claims to have built a road and a canal to carry “mighty cedars, high and strong, of precious beauty and of excellent dark quality (?), the abundant yield of the Lebanon, as [if they be] reed stalks [carried by] the river” (Wadi Brisa inscription of Nebuchadrezzar in Brown, 1969, p.199). On the other hand, if it were not for the immediate proximity of Wadi Brisa to the cedar forest, the text could refer to Juniperus excelsa, which also has red or “dark” wood, as well as to cedar. The Assyrian inscription in Wadi Brisa is of additional interest because only 50m away, on the wall of the wadi, a Roman inscription (one of about two hundred that encircle the remaining cedar forest but now about 1.5km downhill from the forest edge) from near the end of the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian, (c. AD 134) delimits the forest boundary. Hadrian’s procurators had marked this off as a very special forest, and the public was officially informed that four genera were not to be cut. Whether these are the same four genera mentioned in the Assyrian text only 50m away is not known. At any rate, the cedar forest boundary did not change significantly, at least in Wadi Brisa, for more than seven hundred years. The present deforestation is a post-Roman phenomenon.

Peter Ian Kuniholm, “Wood,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, ed. Eric M. Meyers, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 347-349

Thomas R. Trautmann tells a similar story about how kings may have saved the Indian elephant from extinction where elephants in other forested areas near cities died out. A raja needed a herd of elephants to show he was a proper raja in war and peace, so he could not let the elephants be hunted out of his territory. If he did, the other rajas might not share!

Right now there is a lot of despair because so many things have been taken over by giant global systems and so many issues are too difficult to understand unless you devote your life to them and the old systems for building consensus have collapsed but new ones have not replaced them. The trees of my home province are in trouble due to mountain pine beetles, fires, rapid logging, and climate change. If you are feeling despair think of the ancient woodkeepers and kings who protected the cedars of Lebanon for seven hundred years.

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Further Reading

Rocío Da Riva in Barcelona has written several articles on these inscriptions, she gave an interview about her adventures in Jordan and Lebanon to the IAA

(scheduled 22 September 2024)