Persian Gardens and Paradise: From Cyrus’s Garden to the Taj Mahal
Stand at the southern end of the terrace at Pasargadae, in the late afternoon of a Fars winter, and the garden layout that David Stronach’s excavations have reconstructed since the 1960s still reads as a design. The two great stone columned pavilions — the so-called Palace S and Palace P, of which the foundations and a few column bases survive — frame a rectangular precinct about 350 by 280 metres. Two stone water channels cross the rectangle at right angles. There is a sacred grove. There is a path. The four-fold garden, the chahar bagh, in its older sense — four quadrants divided by two water channels, with a central point — is here, in the sixth century BCE, in the Achaemenid foundation deposit.
I want to begin with this site because it is the earliest surviving example of the form, and because the question of the form is, in my view, the most interesting question in the field. The standard explanation — that the chahar bagh is a Zoroastrian cosmological diagram, the four cardinal directions with a cosmic centre — is in part right and in part wrong. It is right in the sense that the Vendidad describes a four-fold world with four cardinal rivers flowing from a cosmic mountain, and the Achaemenid garden plan can be read as a representation of that diagram. It is wrong in the sense that the Achaemenid garden was also a practical response to the climate of the Iranian plateau: the irrigation of fruit trees and shade-giving trees in an arid environment requires water management, and the four-fold plan distributes the water efficiently. The garden is both a cosmological diagram and a piece of hydraulic engineering, and the two are not separable. The form is a marriage of theology and irrigation.
The most useful treatments in English are Stronach’s excavation reports on Pasargadae; the older but still valuable essays in Elisabeth Moynihan’s Paradise as a Garden in Persia and Mughal India (1979); and Penelope Hobhouse’s Gardens of Persia (2003), the best single-volume treatment for the general reader. The wider context is in the Persian Culture and Society pillar.
The Pasargadae garden in detail
The Pasargadae garden, as Stronach has reconstructed it, was a formal four-fold garden with pavilions, water channels, and rows of trees. The Hellenistic Greek historians, including Strabo (Geography XV.3.7) and Arrian (Anabasis VI.29), describe the site in some detail, and Quintus Curtius’ account of Alexander’s visit (V.6) records the Macedonian king’s admiration. The Roman gardens of the Empire, including the imperial gardens of Rome, were sometimes said to have been inspired by the Persian model. The tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae, a small stone chamber on a six-stepped platform, was itself a garden building, and the surrounding precinct was a sacred grove.
What is striking, on the ground, is the engineering. The two water channels at Pasargadae are aligned to the cardinal directions, and the water supply is taken from a qanat — the underground irrigation channel — driven from the high ground to the north. The qanat technology is older than the Achaemenid period (the technique is known from the Achaemenid-era Achaemenid period, and probably from the late Assyrian period before that), and the combination of the qanat, the ab anbar (the underground cistern), and the badgir (the wind-catcher tower) made possible the cultivation of the classical Persian garden even in the most arid regions. The Pasargadae garden is the earliest surviving example of a water-managed garden plan in the Iranian tradition, and the engineering principles established here were to govern the tradition for two and a half millennia.
The garden in the Persian religious tradition
The garden in Persian religion is not only a Zoroastrian theme; it is also a theme of the Achaemenid royal cult, the Parthian and Sasanian royal cults, and the Islamic Persian tradition. The Achaemenid reliefs at Persepolis show a procession of tribute bearers in a sacred precinct, and the visual message is that the king’s garden is the centre of the world. The Sasanian rock reliefs, particularly the investiture reliefs of Ardashir I at Naqsh-e Rostam and the great relief of Shapur I at Bishapur, show the king in a garden setting, receiving the ring of authority from Ahura Mazda or from a goddess. The Sasanian royal garden was a cosmological diagram, a setting for the rituals of kingship, and an image of paradise on earth.
The Zoroastrian concept of the afterlife, as described in the Arda Viraf Namag and the later Pahlavi texts, is closely connected to the garden. The Chinvat Bridge, the bridge over which the soul passed after death, was described in the Zoroastrian texts as a narrow path bordered by flowers, and the righteous soul was led across the bridge by a beautiful maiden, the daena, who was the personification of the soul’s faith. The garden of the righteous in the afterlife was a place of fruit trees, flowing water, and eternal spring, and the image of the garden as a place of reward for the just became one of the most influential images in the Persian literary tradition.
The Avestan word for the garden, pairidaeza, is the same as the Old Persian paridaeza, the Greek paradeisos, and the English “paradise.” The word is composed of pari (around, surrounding) and daeza (wall, enclosure), and the literal meaning is “an enclosure, a wall around, a walled garden.” The word is used in the Avestan scripture to describe the pairidaeza of the Airyana Vaejah, the “expanse of the Aryans,” which is described in the Vendidad as the original homeland of the Iranian people. The Avestan word is the older word; the Old Persian paridaeza is the Iranian plateau form of the Avestan term.
The garden in Persian poetry
The image of the garden is one of the most pervasive in Persian poetry. The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi begins and ends in gardens, and the heroes of the epic, from Jamshid to Bahram Gur, are repeatedly described in their gardens. The Masnavi of Rumi, the great mystical poem of the Persian tradition, opens with the image of the reed flute, cut from the bed of the garden, lamenting its separation from the reed-bed of the original garden. The Divan of Hafez is full of garden imagery: the rose, the nightingale, the wine, the cupbearer, the cypress, the tulip, the narcissus, the bagh, the garden.
The garden in Persian poetry is, at the same time, a literal garden, a symbol of the divine order, a metaphor for the heart, and a representation of the world. The image of the nightingale bewailing the rose, of the cypress standing straight, of the rose laughing in the garden, of the nightingale drunk with love, is a set of images that, in Persian poetry, has a precise meaning for the initiate. The nightingale is the lover; the rose is the beloved; the cypress is the upright man; the tulip is the martyr; the narcissus is the eye of the lover. The garden is the world, the bower of love, the paradise of the blessed, the heart of the mystic.
The garden convention is a vocabulary, and the use of the vocabulary is a sign of the poet’s competence. Hafez’s ghazals can be read as commentaries on the garden convention, in which the literal and the figurative are layered: the bagh-e del (the garden of the heart) is also the bagh-e jahan (the garden of the world), and the rose of the literal garden is the rose of the divine presence. The Persian ghazal, in its mature form, is a poem in which the garden convention is the medium and the mystic path is the message, and the surface meaning of the poem is a love poem about a wine, a tavern, a beloved, and a rose.
Sasanian and Islamic gardens
The Sasanian dynasty, which ruled Iran from 224 to 651 CE, developed the garden into a major art form. The Sasanian royal gardens, including the great garden of Ctesiphon, the Sasanian capital, were among the wonders of the late antique world, and the carpet of Khosrow, the so-called “Spring of Khosrow” or Bahar-e Khosrow, was a carpet that depicted a royal garden in flower. Whether a specific carpet of this name ever existed is a question scholars still debate; the Arab historians al-Tabari and al-Masʿudi both report the tradition, and there is no strong reason to reject it, but a surviving textile of that scale and date is not in the archaeological record.
The Islamic gardens of Iran, from the Seljuk period to the Safavid period, continued the Sasanian tradition. The great gardens of Isfahan, Shiraz, and Kashan, including the Bagh-e Chehel Sotun (the Garden of the Forty Columns), the Bagh-e Eram (the Garden of Paradise), the Bagh-e Shahzadeh (the Garden of the Prince, in Mahan, Kerman), and the Bagh-e Fin (the Fin Garden of Kashan), are all examples of the four-fold plan developed under the Achaemenids and refined under the Sasanians. The Bagh-e Chehel Sotun, in Isfahan, was begun under Shah Abbas I in the early seventeenth century; the wooden columned pavilion, the reflecting pool, the qanat-fed water channels, and the cypress avenue are the surviving elements of a garden plan that the Safavid engineers inherited from the Sasanian tradition. The gardens of the Alhambra in Granada, the Generalife, are the most famous examples of the form outside Iran, and the Court of the Lions and the Court of the Myrtles are direct adaptations of the Persian four-fold plan.
The Mughal adaptation
The Mughal emperors of India, who ruled from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, were enthusiastic patrons of the Persian garden, and the great Mughal gardens — the Humayun’s Tomb garden in Delhi, the Taj Mahal garden in Agra, the Shalimar Bagh in Lahore, the Nishat Bagh in Kashmir — are direct adaptations of the Persian four-fold plan. The Taj Mahal garden, with its four parts divided by four water channels, its central pool, its plane trees and cypresses, and its marble pavilions, is one of the great gardens of the world, and its plan is a direct descendant of the Pasargadae garden of Cyrus the Great.
The Mughal tradition of the garden also spread to the Central Asian khanates, the Ottoman court, and the European courts. The Versailles of Louis XIV, the Sanssouci of Frederick the Great, the Peterhof of Peter the Great, and the gardens of the English landscape tradition all show the influence of the Persian model, and the term “paradise garden” is still used to describe a particular type of Western garden that descends from the Persian original. The Italian Renaissance villa garden, the giardino all’italiana, is in part a descendant of the Persian four-fold plan via the Alhambra, and the surviving Italian villa gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show a recognisable adaptation of the form.
The etymology of paradise
The word “paradise” is, in its origins, a Persian word. The Old Persian paridaeza, “an enclosure, a garden, a park,” became the Avestan pairidaeza, the Median pardiz, the Greek paradeisos, the Latin paradisus, the Arabic firdaus, and the modern English “paradise.” The Greek paradeisos was used by Xenophon in the Anabasis to describe the parks of the Persian kings, and the word passed into the Greek of the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew gan, the Garden of Eden, and from the Greek into the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions as the place of the blessed.
The journey of the word from the Old Persian to the English “paradise” is one of the most remarkable etymological stories in the history of language. The Greek historian Xenophon, who served as a mercenary in the Achaemenid army and saw the royal parks of the Persian kings, used the word paradeisos to describe them in his Anabasis, and the word entered the Greek vocabulary. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, used paradeisos to translate the gan of Eden, and from the Septuagint the word passed into the New Testament, the Latin Vulgate, the Quran, and the modern European languages.
The use of the Persian word paridaeza in the Greek, Latin, and Arabic traditions is one of the most striking examples of the influence of the Persian language on the religious vocabulary of the world. The word, which originally meant “an enclosed garden,” has become the standard term in three of the world’s great religious traditions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — for the place of the blessed, the heaven of the afterlife.
A site, a form, a word
A site, a form, and a word. The site is the garden of Cyrus at Pasargadae, with its two cross-aligned water channels, its columned pavilions, and its sacred grove. The form is the four-fold plan, the chahar bagh, that the site established for the Persian garden tradition. The word is paridaeza — “an enclosure” — which became the Greek paradeisos, the Latin paradisus, the Arabic firdaus, and the English “paradise.” The three are not independent. The site produced the form; the form gave the word its physical referent; the word carried the form into the religious traditions of Western Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe. The garden of Pasargadae is a foundation deposit of an entire cultural tradition.
The long-tail page on the etymology treats the word journey in more detail.