The development of the idea of paradeisos in the Islamic world reached its peak with the Persian gardens of the Safavid empire, the most important dynasty that emerged since the Muslim conquest of Persia in the seventh century A.C. Of particular importance to our topic is the Chahar Bagh, a garden style whose origins go back to the Achaemenid dynasty, to which belonged Cyrus the Young (0.3), Xerxes and Cyrus the Great, whose palace-city of Pasargadae contains the oldest ruins of this type of garden.

The Chahar Bagh is built on a two-axis geometric template that forms four quadrants, whose configuration “was based on the pre-Islamic Iranian division of the earth into four quarters, which may have been inspired by the geometrical motifs of Mesopotamia and Sindh Valley civilizations.”¹ Upon entering into contact with Islamic culture, the two perpendicular lines that divide the garden become channels that represent the four rivers of earthly paradise which flow from a central fountain, the spring of Eden (6.2).

Since the sovereign is the person in which the material and immaterial converge, that is, the bridge between the divine and the human (1.1, 1.5, 1.7), it is only natural that the park—primordial locus of sovereignty (0.27)—also fulfilled this function. Indeed, for Persian culture the basic geometry of the Chahar Bagh represented the union of the material and immaterial in a specific place. For this reason, this type of park “became a powerful metaphor for the organization and domestication of the landscape, itself a symbol of political territory.”² Now, since Biblical Genesis presents us with one of the earliest accounts of power and supremacy (1.13), it is not at all strange to find that the topology of one of its most important places, the Garden of Eden, is the origin of a politically ordered territory (0.28).

On the relationship of geometry and sovereignty: the capacity to measure is closely related to the power of judgement of the sovereign, because “in order to estimate or adjudge something, we must be able to measure it; and more particularly: whoever would gain patriarchal supremacy over the mother… must be able to measure the earth; geometry is, after all, ‘earth measurement’.”³ Thus, the sovereign is that who is capable of measuring the earth (terra) and turning it into territory. This desire to territorialize—to domesticate the earth and turn it into a human domus—makes the paradeisosnot only a place of recreation but the origin of the first zoological gardens.

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1. Leila Mahmoudi Farahani, Bahareh Motamed, Elmira Jamei, “Persian Gardens: Meanings, Symbolism, and Design”, 3. ↩︎
2. D. Fairchild Ruggles, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes, 39. ↩︎
3. Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, 84. ↩︎