A date seed from Masada sprouted

A date seed excavated at Masada, radiocarbon-dated to the first century, was germinated in 2005 and grew like an ordinary date seedling.

Sarah Sallon and colleagues germinated a seed of Phoenix dactylifera recovered from Masada and dated, by radiocarbon, to the first century of the common era. The seedling’s first two years looked like any other date palm’s. The population it came from is gone. The genes are a sample of a crop that Roman Judea grew and that later cultivation replaced. The Dead Sea basin is brutally dry, which is the boring and sufficient reason a seed can wait: metabolism nearly stops when there is no water.

It is one seed, from one of the driest places on Earth, handled by people who knew what they were trying. It is not a method for waking an arbitrary ancient grain, and it is not evidence that seeds in general are immortal. It is evidence that ‘ancient’ and ‘dead’ are not the same word. A date from the century of the siege became a tree in a modern greenhouse, and the paper watched it for twenty-six months.