Cedar

The cedar of Lebanon is Cedrus libani, a great aromatic conifer whose timber is fragrant, straight-grained and strongly resistant to rot and insects, the practical facts behind its sacred standing. Those qualities made it the prestige building material of the ancient Near East: Solomon's Temple and palace were built of Lebanese cedar floated down the coast, as the books of Kings describe in detail, and the cedar recurs in the Hebrew Bible as an image of strength, height and righteousness, the righteous flourishing like the cedar of Lebanon in Psalm 92. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the hero's great transgression is the felling of the guarded Cedar Forest and the killing of its guardian Humbaba.

The cedar forests that supplied Solomon and the ancient Near East have been reduced by millennia of logging to a small fraction of their original extent, and the best-known surviving stand, the Cedars of God in the Kadisha Valley of Lebanon, is now a UNESCO World Heritage site and a nature reserve, protecting some of the last old-growth trees of a species that once covered whole mountainsides, a modern conservation postscript to a tree that supplied empires. Several of the reserve's oldest cedars are themselves reckoned many centuries old, living relics of the forest that furnished the Phoenician ships and Solomon's Temple alike.

Egyptian practice used aromatic cedar oil in embalming and in temple rites, valuing exactly the preservative, decay-resisting quality that made the wood a natural emblem of permanence and incorruption. It is worth knowing that the English word cedar is applied loosely to a range of unrelated aromatic conifers, various junipers, the North American western red cedar (a Thuja), and others, so that a correspondence table listing cedar may mean any of several trees. The true cedars of the genus Cedrus are the Lebanese, Atlas, Cyprus and Himalayan (deodar) species; the deodar's Sanskrit name devadaru means timber of the gods, giving the tree a parallel sacred standing in India.

That same preservative, insect-resisting quality still has an entirely secular modern use: cedar-lined chests, closets and blocks are sold today specifically to deter clothes moths, a direct, unbroken descendant of the same chemistry the Egyptians relied on for embalming, even though almost no one buying a cedar chest today thinks of it as continuous with three-thousand-year-old funerary practice. The scent itself, largely due to compounds called cedrol and thujopsene, is genuinely repellent to many insects, giving a real chemical basis to a domestic habit most people follow purely out of inherited custom.