Dates: History and Origins

Table of Contents

1. The Oldest Date Stones
2. Where the Palm Was Tamed: What the Genomes Say
3. Mesopotamia: Gardens, Laws and Hand Pollination
4. Egypt and the Nile
5. The Name: Fingers, Tamr and the Stages of Ripeness
6. Scripture and Tradition
7. The Judean Date and the Methuselah Seed
8. Across North Africa to al-Andalus
9. Dates Come to the Americas
10. Cultivars, Clones and the Bayoud Blight
11. Dates Today
12. Key Research Papers
13. Connections
14. Featured Videos

The Oldest Date Stones

The hard part of writing the history of any fruit is that fruit rots. What survives of a date is the stone — the single hard seed at its centre — and the study of such remains is called archaeobotany, the recovery and identification of ancient plant material from excavated soil.

The oldest securely dated date stones come from the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf. On Dalma Island, off the coast of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, excavators recovered carbonised date stones from a Neolithic settlement whose radiocarbon dates place it in the sixth millennium BCE; the find was published by Mark Beech and Elizabeth Shepherd in Antiquity in 2001. Similar early remains have come from a Neolithic site in Kuwait. A 2019 genomic study led by Jonathan Flowers, which also surveyed the archaeobotanical record, summarises the position: the oldest evidence of date exploitation is the seed remains from Dalma Island and Kuwait, from the Arabian Neolithic about 7,000 years before present.

Two cautions belong here. A date stone in a camp shows that people were eating dates, not that they were growing them; the people of Dalma may have been gathering from wild stands. And the first appearance of a thing in the ground is only the earliest found so far. The same survey places the first evidence of date palm cultivation somewhat later, in Mesopotamia at roughly 6,700 to 6,000 years ago and in the Levant at about 5,700 to 5,500 years ago, where Chalcolithic (Copper Age) sites such as Nahal Mishmar in Israel have yielded dates. Claims of much older dates from Pakistan or the Sahara circulate widely, but specialists treat them as insecure; the Flowers paper sets aside a pair of stones from south-western Libya, possibly 9,000 years old, as probably intrusive — fallen into an older layer from a younger one.

Back to Table of Contents

Where the Palm Was Tamed: What the Genomes Say

For most of the twentieth century the date palm had a puzzle at its heart: nobody could find its wild ancestor. Every palm examined, from Morocco to Pakistan, was a cultivated tree, a feral escape, or too close to either to tell apart. Tree crops are like this: unlike wheat, which visibly changed when humans began harvesting it, a fruit tree alters little under domestication and keeps swapping genes with anything wild nearby.

In 2017 a team led by Muriel Gros-Balthazard reported in Current Biology the discovery of genuinely wild date palm populations in the mountains of Oman, growing in places no one had planted them, and showed by their genetics that they were not feral escapes. Comparing these wild palms with cultivated ones pointed to a domestication history with two centres of diversity: the Middle East, from which the wild Omani palms descend, and Africa. In 2015 Khaled Hazzouri and colleagues re-sequenced 62 cultivars and found a major genetic divide between the date palms of North Africa and those of the Middle East and South Asia, with mixed ancestry in the palms of Egypt and Sudan, exactly where the two worlds meet.

Where, then, did the North African palm come from? The 2019 PNAS paper by Flowers, Hazzouri, Gros-Balthazard and colleagues answered this by sequencing not only date palms but five of their closest wild relatives. The North African date palm turned out to be a hybrid: mostly Middle Eastern P. dactylifera, but with as much as 18 percent of its genome traceable to Phoenix theophrasti, the Cretan date palm, a wild species now confined to Crete and a few spots in south-western Turkey. Somewhere along the southern Mediterranean, cultivated palms moving west crossed with the wild Cretan palm, and growers kept the offspring. The archaeobotanical record agrees: the date palm arrives late in the Maghreb.

A 2021 study in Molecular Biology and Evolution added a timestamp. Oscar Pérez-Escobar and a large team sequenced DNA from a date palm leaf about 2,100 years old recovered at Saqqara, the necropolis of ancient Memphis in Egypt. The leaf was genetically close to modern North African palms and already carried admixture from both P. theophrasti and P. sylvestris, the wild sugar date palm of India. So by the last centuries BCE the hybrid North African date palm was fully formed: a tree first domesticated around the Persian Gulf, spread west by people, and remade on the way by the wild palms it met.

Back to Table of Contents

Mesopotamia: Gardens, Laws and Hand Pollination

The date palm is dioecious: each tree is either male or female, only females bear fruit, and a female left to the wind sets a thin crop. The farmers of southern Mesopotamia solved this thousands of years ago by pollinating the trees themselves, climbing each female palm and tying a sprig of male flowers into the female cluster. It is still how almost every commercial date is produced.

We know the Babylonians did this because the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, described it. In Book 1 of the Histories (section 193) he says the Babylonians had date palms growing over the whole plain, most of them fruit-bearing, from which they made solid food, wine and honey, and that they tended them as they did fig trees: they took the fruit of the palms the Greeks called male palms and tied them onto the date-bearing palms. Herodotus thought the point was to let a small fly enter the fruit, as in the fig; he had the biology wrong, but what he recorded is artificial pollination, and it is the earliest clear written description of it.

Long before Herodotus, the Code of Hammurabi, the Babylonian law collection carved in stone in about the 1750s BCE, treated the date garden as a standard piece of property with its own rules. In L. W. King's translation, Law 59 fines a man half a mina of silver for felling a tree in another's garden without the owner's knowledge. Law 60 governs the creation of a new orchard: a man who gives a field to a gardener to plant as a garden must let him work it for four years, and in the fifth year owner and gardener divide it. Law 64 sets the rent for an established garden worked by a gardener at two-thirds of the produce to the owner, one third to the gardener. A newly planted offshoot takes several years to begin bearing, which is the logic of the four-year term: these are the practical rules of a society whose staple sweet was the date.

The palm was more than food: trunk for timber in a land without forests, fronds for roofing and matting, fibre for rope, stones for animal feed. The date syrup Herodotus called honey is still made across the region as dibs.

Back to Table of Contents

Egypt and the Nile

Egypt today is one of the two largest date producers on Earth, so it is a surprise that the Nile Valley was a late convert. Date remains occur in Egypt from the predynastic period, more than 5,000 years ago, but the archaeobotanists who have looked hardest suspect that systematic cultivation did not begin until the Middle Kingdom, roughly 4,000 years ago, some two millennia after the gardens of southern Mesopotamia.

Once established, the palm became part of Egyptian life: the fruit was eaten at harvest and fermented into date wine, and the frond became a religious and decorative motif. The Saqqara leaf sequenced in 2021 is a relic of this world: a piece of a real Egyptian date palm from about 2,100 years ago, preserved by the desert, and it shows that the palms of Ptolemaic Egypt were already the hybrid North African type.

Back to Table of Contents

The Name: Fingers, Tamr and the Stages of Ripeness

The English word date has nothing to do with the calendar. It comes, through Old French and Latin, from the Greek dáktylos, "finger" — a long, slightly curved date looks like one — and the same word sits inside the botanical name Phoenix dactylifera, "the finger-bearing phoenix", from Latin fero, to bear. Before the French word arrived, Old English had made its own literal version of the Greek: fingeræppel, "finger-apple".

In Arabic the words track the fruit's ripening, and growers and cooks still use them. The FAO's cultivation manual gives the standard sequence: khalal, the full-sized fruit still crisp and yellow or red; rutab, when it turns amber and soft and very sweet; and tamr (or tamar), the fully ripe, darkened, wrinkled date that keeps for months. A soft Medjool is close to rutab; a firm Deglet Noor is tamr. Some cultivars are prized crunchy, at khalal, and never reach a Western supermarket at all.

Two famous cultivar names are Arabic too. Medjool (majhūl) means "unknown" — a variety, the FAO manual notes, whose origin was not recorded. Deglet Nour, in the Algerian Arabic of its home oases, is usually rendered "date of light", for the translucent amber flesh you can hold up to the sun. In English the second is spelled Deglet Noor.

Back to Table of Contents

Scripture and Tradition

The date palm runs through the scriptures of the three Abrahamic faiths, as you would expect of the tree that fed the land where they were written. In the Hebrew Bible the palm is a recurring image of uprightness and plenty, and Jericho, the oasis city in the Jordan valley, is called the city of palms. When Rome crushed the Jewish revolt of 66–70 CE, Vespasian's Judaea Capta coins showed the defeated province as a date palm with a mourning woman beneath it; the modern Israeli ten-shekel coin reuses an ancient design of a palm with two baskets of dates.

The Qur'an gives the date its most tender scene. In the chapter named for her, Sūrat Maryam (19:23–26), Mary is seized by the pains of labour beneath a palm tree and cries out that she wishes she had died; she is told to shake the trunk so that fresh ripe dates fall, and to eat, drink and be comforted. Dates are named some twenty times in the Qur'an.

From that tradition comes the practice most people encounter: breaking the daily fast of Ramadan with dates. It is done in emulation of the Prophet Muhammad, who according to hadith broke his fast with fresh dates, or dried ones, or water if he had neither; the custom of eating three is widespread but not obligatory. It is a tradition, recorded here as one; it also makes plain sense for someone who has not eaten since dawn.

Back to Table of Contents

The Judean Date and the Methuselah Seed

The dates of ancient Judaea were famous across the Roman world. Pliny the Elder, in Book 13 of his Natural History, ranks the varieties of the East and says that although palms grow abundantly in many places it is in Judaea that they enjoy the greatest repute — not throughout the whole territory, but particularly at Jericho (his Hiericus), with the dates of Archelais, Phaselis and Livias in the same valley also highly esteemed. He singles out the large, juicy caryotae as the most prized kind and the source of the principal palm wines. This Judean date palm was a distinct regional crop of the hot Jordan rift, and it did not survive: by the late Middle Ages the famous groves were gone.

Then, in a story that sounds invented but is documented in the journals, it came partly back. Excavations at Herod's fortress-palace of Masada in the 1960s recovered date stones, which sat in storage for forty years. In 2005 the physician and researcher Sarah Sallon and Elaine Solowey of the Arava Institute planted several of them. One germinated. Radiocarbon dating placed the seed in the first century CE, making it, as the 2008 paper in Science reported, the oldest directly dated seed ever grown into a living plant. The seedling was named Methuselah. It turned out to be male, so it could never bear fruit alone.

The team kept going. In 2020, in Science Advances, Sallon, Emira Cherif, Solowey, Gros-Balthazard and colleagues reported six more ancient seedlings raised from roughly 2,000-year-old seeds found at Masada, Qumran and Wadi Makukh in the Judean desert, and given biblical names — Hannah, Adam, Judith, Boaz, Jonah and Uriel. Their DNA matches Pliny: the older seeds carried a more eastern (Middle Eastern) genome and the younger ones more western (North African) ancestry, a gradient suggesting Judean growers deliberately brought in stock from both worlds. The ancient stones were also significantly longer and wider than those of modern cultivars, supporting the classical reports of the Judean date's unusual size. Hannah, a female, was pollinated with Methuselah's pollen and produced her first small crop of dates in 2021 — the first Judean dates eaten in many centuries.

Back to Table of Contents

Across North Africa to al-Andalus

The westward journey the genomes record — Gulf palm meets Cretan palm, hybrid palm settles the Maghreb — was carried by people, and most of it happened in the last two and a half thousand years. The oldest reliable records of cultivation in Libya are only about 2,800 to 2,400 years old, and the palm is unknown elsewhere in the Saharan Maghreb until later; the great palm gardens of Algeria's Ziban and Tunisia's Djerid, and of Morocco's Tafilalt and Draa valleys, came later, and it was the Arab expansion of the seventh and eighth centuries CE that turned the string of Saharan oases into a connected date-growing world. In the caravan economy that followed, the dried tamr kept indefinitely, weighed little and fed camel drivers across the desert, while the palms shaded the gardens that made the oases habitable.

Europe's one true date grove is a legacy of that expansion. At Elche (Elx), near Alicante in south-eastern Spain, a landscape of irrigated palm orchards survives from the Islamic centuries of al-Andalus. Local tradition holds that Carthaginian settlers planted the first palms in the fifth century BCE, which may be so, but the grove as it exists — field layout and irrigation channels — is a work of the Muslim agricultural system of the tenth century onwards. UNESCO inscribed the Palmeral of Elche on the World Heritage list in 2000 as the only palm grove of North African type in Europe and the northernmost large one in the world; the historic orchards hold roughly 70,000 palms.

Back to Table of Contents

Dates Come to the Americas

The date crossed the Atlantic with Spain: by the eighteenth century mission gardens in Sonora, Sinaloa and Baja California had palms. The first date palms in what is now the United States were seedlings planted by Franciscan missionaries after the founding of Mission San Diego de Alcalá in 1769. Seedling palms are a lottery, though: half are male, and the females rarely match their parent. Mission dates never became a crop.

The crop came with the offshoot. A date palm produces suckers at its base that can be cut away and planted as exact clones of the mother tree; every named cultivar is one female palm copied this way for centuries. According to Roy Nixon's 1950 USDA review of imported varieties, the first importation of offshoots from which any palms survived was made in 1890 by the Department of Agriculture's Division of Pomology, and the results were poor. The decisive step came in 1900, when the USDA botanist Walter T. Swingle brought Deglet Noor offshoots from Algeria and planted them near Tempe, Arizona, in cooperation with the state experiment station. In 1903 another USDA horticulturist, Bernard Johnson, planted Algerian offshoots near Mecca in California's Coachella Valley, and the valley's date industry traces itself to those plots. Private growers followed: Julia Morton's Fruits of Warm Climates records that in 1912 the brothers Paul and Wilson Popenoe bought some 16,000 offshoots in Algeria, eastern Arabia and Iraq for California.

The Medjool came last and by the narrowest margin. Nixon records that in 1927 Swingle obtained from Morocco a few offshoots of the Medjool, then the leading export date of that country; Morton gives the number as eleven, taken from the Bou Denib oasis in what was then French Morocco. The usual account adds that the young palms were quarantined for years at an isolated site in southern Nevada before the survivors — nine of the eleven, by most tellings — were moved to the Coachella Valley; those details rest on fewer sources than the rest of this page and are given as the standard telling rather than settled fact. What is not in doubt is that essentially every Medjool palm in North America descends from that handful of offshoots.

The Coachella Valley now grows roughly 95 percent of the dates produced in the United States. Deglet Noor, the Algerian date Swingle carried across in 1900, was the backbone of the Californian crop for most of the twentieth century; its popularity in America was boosted, of all things, by sugar rationing in the Second World War, when dates stood in for sweets.

Back to Table of Contents

Cultivars, Clones and the Bayoud Blight

Because a cultivar is a single cloned female, there are an enormous number of them, most known in only one oasis. Classic surveys counted about 250 named varieties in Saudi Arabia alone in the 1950s and some 400 in the 1970s, and the total across the Middle East and North Africa is far higher. Growers sort them by texture at full ripeness: soft (Medjool, Barhi), semi-dry (Deglet Noor, Zahidi) and dry or bread dates (Thoory). Only a few dozen have mattered commercially, and outside the producing countries the trade is dominated by two: Deglet Noor from Tolga in Algeria, spread through the Algerian and Tunisian oases from the late medieval period, and Medjool from the Tafilalt of Morocco.

Clonal crops share a weakness: a disease that kills one tree can kill every copy of it. The date palm's version is bayoud, a wilt caused by the soil fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. albedinis, named from the Arabic word for white after the pale, dying fronds it leaves. It was first reported in Morocco in 1870 and spread through the Moroccan oases and into western Algeria over the following century, killing palms on a scale that reshaped the region's date culture; a clonal variety in its path can be lost entirely, which is why a handful of Medjool offshoots carried abroad in 1927 turned out to matter so much. Bayoud has not been reported outside Morocco and Algeria, and keeping it that way is one reason imported date material is quarantined.

The remedy, as with the apple and the banana, is diversity: the wild Omani palms found in 2017 and the old cultivars of remote oases are the raw material for breeding resistant trees.

Back to Table of Contents

Dates Today

The date has never stopped being what it was in Babylon: a staple of the arid belt from the Atlantic to the Indus. World production in 2024 was about 9.9 million tonnes, according to the figures compiled by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and the top four producers — Saudi Arabia (about 1.9 million tonnes), Egypt (1.8 million), Algeria (1.3 million) and Iran (1.2 million) — together grow about 63 percent of it, with Pakistan and Iraq next. Iraq, once the largest producer of all with more than twenty million palms, has fallen down the table after decades of war, drought and salt.

What has changed is who eats them. In the producing countries dates remain everyday food: eaten fresh at khalal and rutab, pressed into blocks, boiled to syrup, stuffed with almonds, served with coffee to every guest. In Europe and North America the date spent most of the twentieth century as a Christmas-time box of dried fruit and has re-emerged as a whole-food sweetener, with soft Medjools sold at a premium and date paste replacing sugar in bars, baking and blended drinks. Almost all of it is still hand-pollinated, palm by palm, as Herodotus described.

The nutrition that made the date a caravan food is now measured rather than assumed. A widely cited 2008 review by Mohamed Al-Farsi and Chang Yong Lee put the flesh at about 314 kilocalories per 100 grams, mostly glucose and fructose, with around 8 grams of dietary fibre, useful potassium, magnesium and copper, and a good supply of phenolic antioxidants. What that means for blood sugar, digestion and late pregnancy is the subject of the Dates hub page; this page's claim is only historical: a fruit dense in sugar and minerals, which dries on the tree and keeps for a year, was exactly what a desert people needed, and they worked out how to grow it seven thousand years ago.

Back to Table of Contents

Key Research Papers

The evidence behind this page: the archaeobotany of the earliest date stones, the genomics that found the wild ancestor and the North African hybrid origin, the Judean seed germinations, and the standard horticultural and nutritional overviews.

1. Beech M, Shepherd E (2001). Archaeobotanical evidence for early date consumption on Dalma Island, United Arab Emirates. Antiquity. — doi:10.1017/s0003598x00052765
2. Tengberg M (2012). Beginnings and early history of date palm garden cultivation in the Middle East. Journal of Arid Environments. — doi:10.1016/j.jaridenv.2011.11.022
3. Gros-Balthazard M, Galimberti M, Kousathanas A, Newton C, Ivorra S, et al. (2017). The Discovery of Wild Date Palms in Oman Reveals a Complex Domestication History Involving Centers in the Middle East and Africa. Current Biology. — doi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.06.045
4. Flowers JM, Hazzouri KM, Gros-Balthazard M, Mo Z, Koutroumpa K, et al. (2019). Cross-species hybridization and the origin of North African date palms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. — doi:10.1073/pnas.1817453116
5. Hazzouri KM, Flowers JM, Visser HJ, Khierallah HSM, Rosas U, et al. (2015). Whole genome re-sequencing of date palms yields insights into diversification of a fruit tree crop. Nature Communications. — doi:10.1038/ncomms9824
6. Pérez-Escobar OA, Bellot S, Przelomska NAS, Flowers JM, Nesbitt M, et al. (2021). Molecular Clocks and Archeogenomics of a Late Period Egyptian Date Palm Leaf Reveal Introgression from Wild Relatives and Add Timestamps on the Domestication. Molecular Biology and Evolution. — doi:10.1093/molbev/msab188
7. Sallon S, Solowey E, Cohen Y, Korchinsky R, Egli M, et al. (2008). Germination, Genetics, and Growth of an Ancient Date Seed. Science. — doi:10.1126/science.1153600
8. Sallon S, Cherif E, Chabrillange N, Solowey E, Gros-Balthazard M, et al. (2020). Origins and insights into the historic Judean date palm based on genetic analysis of germinated ancient seeds and morphometric studies. Science Advances. — doi:10.1126/sciadv.aax0384
9. Chao CT, Krueger RR (2007). The Date Palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.): Overview of Biology, Uses, and Cultivation. HortScience. — doi:10.21273/HORTSCI.42.5.1077
10. Al-Farsi MA, Lee CY (2008). Nutritional and functional properties of dates: a review. Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition. — PubMed PMID: 18949591

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Date palm domestication and origin
2. PubMed: Date palm archaeobotany and ancient seeds

External Authoritative Resources

• Purdue University NewCROP — Julia Morton, Fruits of Warm Climates: Date (origin, distribution and the American introductions)
• FAO — Date Palm Cultivation (Plant Production and Protection Paper 156): botany, ripening stages and cultivar descriptions
• FAOSTAT — world date production by country and year
• Yale Avalon Project — the Code of Hammurabi (L. W. King translation), Laws 59–65 on gardens and gardeners
• Wikisource — Herodotus, Histories Book 1 (Macaulay translation), section 193 on Babylonian palms
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Palmeral of Elche

Back to Table of Contents

Connections

• All Food
• Dates Hub
• Dates Nutrient Profile
• Figs
• Pomegranate
• Pomegranate: History and Origins
• Grapes
• Apples: History and Origins
• Bananas: History and Origins
• Almonds
• Honey
• Potassium

Back to Table of Contents

Featured Videos