Umumnya orang mengasosiasikan kurma dengan tanah Arab,
sekalipun kurma dari Tunisia dan Maroko rasanya enak.
Bahkan ada kurma dari .... Australia dan California
yang tak kalah enaknya. Alkisah, dulunya tanah Judea
banyak pohon kurmanya sampai-sampai dalam Mazmur 92
diibaratkan orang yang diberkati sampai usia tua masih
produktif sebagai pohon kurma. Sekitar 2000 tahun
yang lalu bangsa Romawi yang menduduki Palestina
(ingat film Ben Hur) membasmi pohon-pohon kurma
Sekarang Israel ikut menghasilkan buah kurma, dan itu
dulu bijinya didatangkan dari California. Begitu
pentingnya kurma, sehingga gambarnya dicetak dalam
uang logam recehan shekel.
Secara kebetulan, para ahli yang bergabung dalam
penggalian arkeologi di Masada (dimana 930 orang
memilih harakiri pada tahun 93 Masehi daripada
menyerah kepada tentara Romawi) menemukan biji kurma
jauh dibawah permukaan tanah. Irisan buah kurma
dikirim ke Switzerland yang melalui prosedur
radiocarbon dating menemukan biji itu berumur 1,900
tahun (plus minus 50 tahun) atau antara 35 SM sampai
tahun 65 Masehi atau menjelang tentara Romawi
mengepung Masada. Iseng-iseng, biji kurma ditanam di
pot dengan peredur khusus. Ternyata biji itu
mengeluarkan akar dan tumbuh. Pada saat artikel ini
ditulis, tinggi pohon kurma sudah 75 cm dan ada 7 daun
salah satunya diambil untuk pengujian DNA.
Salam,
RM
------------------------------------------------------(Dari
The New York Times)
June 12, 2005
After 2,000 Years, a Seed From Ancient Judea Sprouts
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Correction Appended
JERUSALEM, June 11 - Israeli doctors and scientists
have succeeded in germinating a date seed nearly 2,000
years old.
The seed, nicknamed Methuselah, was taken from an
excavation at Masada, the cliff fortress where, in
A.D. 73, 960 Jewish zealots died by their own hand,
rather than surrender to a Roman assault. The point is
to find out what was so exceptional about the original
date palm of Judea, much praised in the Bible and the
Koran for its shade, food, beauty and medicinal
qualities, but long ago destroyed by the crusaders.
"The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree,"
says Psalm 92. "They shall still bring forth fruit in
old age. They shall be fat and flourishing."
Well, we'll see. Dr. Sarah Sallon, who runs a project
on medicinal plants of the Middle East, notes that the
date palm in ancient times symbolized the tree of
life. But Dr. Elaine Solowey, who germinated the seed
and is growing it in quarantine, says plants grown
from ancient seeds "usually keel over and die soon,"
having used most of their nutrients in remaining
alive.
The plant is now 11.8 inches tall and has produced
seven leaves, one of which was removed for DNA
testing. Radiocarbon dating in Switzerland on a snip
of the seed showed it to be 1,990 years old, plus or
minus 50 years. So the date seed dates from 35 B.C. to
A.D. 65, just before the famed Roman siege.
Three date seeds were taken from Level 34 of the
Masada dig. They were found in a storeroom, and are
presumably from dates eaten by the defenders, Dr.
Sallon says.
Mordechai Kislef, director of botanical archeology at
Bar-Ilan University, had some date seeds from Ehud
Netzer, who excavated Masada in the 1970's. "They were
sitting in a drawer, and when I asked for one, he
said, 'You're mad,' but finally gave me three," Dr.
Sallon said. "Then I gave them to Elaine, who's an
expert on arid agriculture and dates." Dr. Solowey
said: "Well, I didn't have much hope that any would
come up, but you know how Sarah is."
Dr. Sallon, who is a pediatric gastroenterologist
trained at University College, London, came to Israel
20 years ago. She is the director of the Louis L.
Borick Natural Medicine Research Center at Hadassah
Medical Organization, which she set up 10 years ago to
study natural products and therapies, from Tibetan and
Chinese medicine to the indigenous medicinal plants of
the Middle East. The idea is to preserve these plants
and their oral histories in a modernizing region, but
also to domesticate them, evaluate them scientifically
and then try to integrate them into conventional
medicine.
Dr. Solowey, who teaches agriculture and sustainable
farming at the Arava Institute for Environmental
Studies, based at Kibbutz Ketura in the southern
Negev, works on finding new crops for arid and saline
areas like Jordan, Gaza and Morocco. She also works
with Dr. Sallon to domesticate indigenous plants that
appear to have medicinal uses.
Dr. Solowey grew up in the San Joaquin Valley in
California and studied horticulture, then turned away
from commercial agriculture in disgust, coming here in
1971. "I don't come to organic agriculture from the
hippie side, but as a frustrated agricultural
scientist," she said.
"We've bred for yield and taste, but not hardiness, so
we have a lot of plants as hardy as French poodles, so
we have to spray to protect them, and then we pay the
price," she said. "There isn't a cubic centimeter of
water in the San Joaquin Valley that isn't polluted
with something."
She planted the date seeds at the end of January after
trying to draw them out of their deep dormancy. She
first soaked the seeds in hot water to soften the
coat, then in an acid rich in hormones, then in an
enzymatic fertilizer made of seaweed and other
nutrients.
"I've done other recalcitrant seeds," she said. "It
wasn't a project with a high priority. I had no idea
if the food in the seed was still good, but I put them
in new pots in new potting soil and plugged them into
drip irrigation and kind of forgot about them."
About six weeks later, she said, "I saw the earth
cracked in a pot and much to my astonishment, one of
these came up."
The first two leaves looked odd, she said, very flat
and pale. "But the third looked like a date leaf with
lines, and every one since has looked more and more
normal - like it had a hard time getting out of the
seed."
Lotus seeds of about 1,200 years of age have been
sprouted in China, and after the Nazis bombed London's
Natural History Museum in World War II and a lot of
water was used to put out the fire, seeds of 500 years
of age also germinated.
"But no one had done it from 2,000 years old," Dr.
Sallon said.
In the time of Pliny, forests of date palms covered
the area from Lake Galilee to the Dead Sea and made
Jericho famous; a date palm features on ancient
coinage, as it does on the current Israeli 10-shekel
coin.
The date palm symbolized ancient Israel; the honey of
"the land of milk and honey" came from the date. It is
praised as a tonic to increase longevity, as a
laxative, as a cure for infections and as an
aphrodisiac, Dr. Sallon said. But the dates of Judea
were destroyed before the Middle Ages, and what dates
Israel grows now were imported in the 1950's and 60's
from California and originated elsewhere in the Middle
East.
The Prophet Muhammad considered the date of great
importance for medicine, food, construction and
income, and it is described in the Koran as a "symbol
of goodness" associated with heaven.
Dates need to grow 30 years to reach maturity and can
live as long as 200 years.
But it is the female date that is considered holy, and
that bears fruit. "Men are rather superfluous in the
date industry," Dr. Sallon said.
"O.K, I have a date plant," Dr. Solowey said. "If it
lives, it will be years before we eat any dates. And
that's if it's female. There's a 50-50 chance. And if
it's a male, it will just be a curiosity."
Correction Monday, June 13, 2005
A headline yesterday about the successful germination
of a 2,000-year-old date seed by Israeli doctors and
scientists referred erroneously to the location of the
project, at the Arava Institute for Environmental
Studies based at Kibbutz Ketura. It is in the southern
Negev, not in Jerusalem
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy
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