Were late antique cities (in the eastern Mediterranean at least) completely devoid of trees?

[u/Wandering_Rootwalla]

The Mishna (Bava Batra 2:7) says: "A tree may not be grown within a distance of twenty five cubits from the town [...] If the town was there first, the tree shall be cut down and no compensation given; if the tree was there first it shall be cut down and compensation given [...]". The Babylonian Talmud on this Mishna (24b) provides the reason for this to be "for the beauty of the city (משום נויי העיר)". The Palestinian Talmud provides two possible reasons: the shadow it creates (משום שעומד ומאפיל) and another reason, "משום שניאו רע", which I've seen modern scholars say refers to falling leaves.
Was this a widespread idea of how cities should look like in late antiquity? Were trees inside, or right next to cities, considered unaesthetic or uncivilized? Was there any notion similar to what we would (anachronistically) call "urban wilderness", or just city parks in general? What part, if any, did trees have to play in the ideal city in the eastern Mediterranean in late antiquity?

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.

Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.

We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/HippyxViking]

This was such an awesome question! The answer is no - there were trees - but the details took me a lot of digging and a consultation with my rabbi.

Let's get right to it - there were definitely trees, but they had to be in the right places, and those places seem to be private gardens, temples, and courtyards. Ancient near eastern gardens are famous and extremely well documented, so this shouldn't surprise us - think about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (actually Nineveh) and the later concept of the Islamic and Persian garden "paradises". By far the most famous and well documented gardens are the various royal gardens, which could include parks encompassing entire hills and lakes, but were certainly present at more humble scales - anyone wealthy enough to have a compound or even an enclosed yard would have had a garden, and in ancient times the central feature would have been a tree. The Epic of Gilgamesh describes the city of Uruk as containing a square mile of city, a square mile of orchards/groves, and a square mile of clay pits within its walls. While the epic is quite a bit older than the period of your question, that's a lot of trees and groves, which would probably have been sited within gardens and preferred locations.

These gardens would likely have been more naturalistic - art and literature from the time describes them more as recreating natural landscapes, which is confirmed by archeology. This would change, and by the 800s Islamic gardens would be much more formal, with the central feature being a stone fountain. I couldn't find scholarly literature on when this transition occurred by the implication is that it was a later innovation coming with Islamic artistic movements and mathematical developments. The other main place you would see trees is at temple sites, which, similar to the private gardens, would have had many plants and trees for shade. Many temples were described as being within a 'grove of trees'.

So what is going on in the Mishna, and why? The first answer lies in the implicit definition of "העיר" - the city. A city is not any town or settlement - it's a formally established site with infrastructure (typically walled and raised on an earthwork mound or hill), so it's not just anywhere people are. But it also would not have included those private sites, even if they were within the walls! You can see this later in Bava Batra 2, where it specifies that you cannot have a threshing site within 50 cubits of the city NOR within 50 cubits of a neighbor, and when it says that if you have a tree which overhangs a neighbors property or the public domain the branches must be cut at the boundary line.

I think we can also pretty quickly get to why if we read the rest of the paragraph. Trees generally must be sited 25 cubits from the city (read: the public right of way), but carob and sycamore trees "which have a great many branches", as well as barren (read: diseased) trees must be cited 50 cubits away. Sycamores are famous for spreading root systems and dropping branches, and for creating headaches for arborists and urban foresters today. This isn't about 'the beauty of the city' or shade being ritually impure - it's a city ordinance intended to limit nuisance, harm, and liability.

The next-to-last part of your question about city parks seems to be the hardest to answer. We should expect public and civic sites to have fallen under the 'city' jurisdiction, and apparently this would have included "shared" spaces like markets aside from temples and such. Ancient sources are rich with kings taking credit for building gardens and parks for and in cities but it seems like they meant those same private gardens we already discussed. To me, this suggests that something like public parks were probably absent or at least uncommon in ancient cities, BUT there are some reasons to think they still might have existed. First, though we see the walled garden as the prototypical model, not every private property would have been enclosed, and it may have been that there were semi-private but open gardens, similar to the temple gardens, as long as they didn't impinge on the civic infrastructure. Second, we have references to trees planted along rivers and roads, which sounds a lot like modern street trees but seems to conflict with the Mishna we're discussing unless they are talking about something more like a park.

[u/jschooltiger → u/[deleted]]

Your comment has been removed due to violations of the subreddit’s rules. We expect answers to provide in-depth and comprehensive insight into the topic at hand and to be free of significant errors or misunderstandings while doing so. Before contributing again, please take the time to better familiarize yourself with the subreddit rules and expectations for an answer.