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This Tree Has Seen Everything
What would it be like to live through 2,900 years of history?
There’s an ancient olive tree in Vouves, Crete. It is somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 years old; the most likely conclusion is that it started its life 2,900 years ago. This estimate is based on the age of a graveyard surrounding the tree, for which it may have been planted. The ancient tree is quite healthy — it has a stout trunk 15 feet in diameter and it still produces olives. Its branches were used to make wreaths for winners in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics.
It’s hard for humans to comprehend a lifespan that long. A normal human life is something like two or three percent of this tree’s time on Earth, and, of course, the olive tree is still kicking. It may outlast everyone who’s currently on the planet. What has this tree lived through?
When the tree of Vouves was planted, stories like the Iliad and Odyssey were still being performed orally. They wouldn’t be written down for a few decades. This was partially because modern systems of writing had yet to be developed. Writing in most parts of the world was done with ideograms, stylized pictures of the things people were trying to write about. Several groups in the Middle East had begun to experiment with alphabets that represented sounds, but they were incomplete — vowels didn’t yet exist…
