Divina Centore, Egyptologist at the Egyptian Museum of Turintakes us for a walk through the gardens of ancient Egypt, which he described in Pharaohs and Flowers. The wonder of the gardens of ancient Egypt, publisher il Mulino. In 2022 he oversaw the staging of “Open courtyard: flora of ancient Egypt”, then “Egyptian Gardens: the vegetable garden and the funerary garden”.
At the end of 2025 it participated in the excavation campaign of the Turin museum near Saqquara. He tells us about the gardens of ancient Egypt in a conversation that sheds new light on the botanical skills of men and women who lived so far back in time.
The gardens of ancient Egypt and the Nile
Were there gardens, plants, flowers in ancient Egypt?
«When we talk about ancient Egypt, we always end up quoting a very famous definition, by the ancient historian Herodotus, “Egypt, gift of the Nile”. A reading that puts nature, the Nile and its exceptional floods that bring fertility, at the center. Even beyond the historical fact: without the ingenuity and effort of the people who lived thousands of years ago such an advanced civilization would not have blossomed. And it was their ingenuity that took them beyond the crops intended for sustenance – wheat, lentils, broad beans, vines, barley, onions, date palms. In a land where water was very precious – even six thousand years ago the climate was arid – designing gardens and filling them with botanical wonders required great skills and solutions that today we would call “sustainable”».
Is there any news of famous gardens of ancient Egypt?
«As regards the ancient Babylonians, settled approximately in present-day Iraq, everyone has heard of the hanging gardens, built by Nebuchadnezzar II around 590 BC, there are no such symbolic images of the gardens of ancient Egypt. But field work and the study of paintings of tombs and temples have made us aware of the gardens of ancient Egypt cultivated in temples, in private homes, in the frescoes that decorated the tombs and even in literature where talking trees are found!
The secret garden of Nebamun
A famous example of ancient Egyptian gardens?
«Perhaps the most famous garden of the Egyptians today is that of Nebamun, a high official of the temple of the god Amon who lived during the 18th dynasty, around 1350 years BC. C. It is depicted in a fragment of a wall painting of his and his wife’s tomb, a Luxor, ancient Thebes. It is a secret garden, a mud brick wall protects it from the gaze of strangers, and is designed respecting criteria of symmetry and harmony: it develops starting from a central rectangular basin where birds and fish are kept. It is flanked by aquatic plants which, moving away from the body of water, become trees and shrubs always arranged in parallel rows.”
Water lilies (and not lotus flowers) are the symbol of the Nile
«In the pond you can recognize the water lilies, those which have mistakenly been called lotus flowers, with blue petals, repeated in low and high reliefs as a symbol of Lower Egypt, that of the Nile Delta. On the green lawn there are vines, non-native plants from Ancient Egypt and therefore true status symbols for those who own them. You can recognize the date palms, with the straight trunk, and those with the trunk split in two, the Dum palms still visible in Egypt.”
Title: a fresco present in one of the tombs of the artisans’ valley in Kurna, in the archaeological area of Luxor. We note, next to the deceased and his wife offering gifts, a green tree full of fruit, and on the offering tray blue water lilies. (Photo Luisa Brambilla)
The capital in the desert
Did the pharaohs also have gardens?
«It is known that the city that Pharaoh Akhenaten, who died in 1332 BC, had built to celebrate the new divinity, the only god Aton, the god and also himself, in the middle of the desert had plants and gardens. He was the god of solar rays, and to celebrate his life-giving force his capital, in the place now called Amarna, it had been moved to the middle of the desert. A prohibitive choice due to the climatic conditions in which the botanical wonders could live and thrive, but optimal for archaeologists because the center was immediately abandoned and therefore the village was preserved with precious information about the daily life of ancient Egypt.”
Pharaohs and flowers. The wonder of the ancient Egyptian gardens of Divina Centore, The Mill€18
The literary gardens
«The literary genre of love poems, which arose from around 1500 BC, includes poems known as grove songs. In these texts it is the trees that speak and sing to their mistress. Some of these texts are preserved in a papyrus from Valley of the Kings and Queens, and found in the artisans’ village of Deir El – Medina. The one very well represented at the Egyptian Museum in Turin. Also belonging in some way to the gardens of ancient Egypt, three trees take the floor: the first could be a pomegranate or a fig, the second is an adult sycamore, the third is a young sycamore. The first complains about how his mistress neglects him to keep up with her new love, he is so frustrated that he threatens to reveal the affair. The second is also dissatisfied with the treatment received from the mistress. The third, the young sycamore, is described as a tree of extraordinary beauty “its leaves shine like turquoise, the trunk shines like crystal, its branches are green and full of bright red fruits” and it asks for nothing but offers its shadow as a refuge for amorous meetings.”
The botanical wonders of ancient Egypt and us
Is there anything we can learn from the ancient Egyptians’ way of farming?
«Excavating in inhabited areas, in funerary contexts, in Akhenaten’s capital, we found grid gardens, designed to save money by adopting a square grid cultivation technique, today known as Waffle Garden. An example of this kind is the funerary garden attached to a noble tomb (1539 BC -1292 BC) found in 2017 by a Spanish mission in Dra Abu el Naga. The soil was lined with silt, taken from the fertile banks of the Nile, and the growing areas were separated, to grow plants with different irrigation requirements. So far, archaeobotanists have found coriander seeds, a variety of melon and parts of flowers similar to daisies.”