The central object in the Assyrian "grove" is a male date-palm, which was well known as an emblem of Baal, the sun, the phallus, and life. This remarkable tree, Tamar in Phoenician and Hebrew, the phoenix in Greek, was formerly abundant in Palestine and the neighbouring regions. The word Phoenicia (Acts xi. 19, xv. 8) is derived from phoinix, as the country of palms; like the "Idumeo palmo" of Virgil. Palmyra, the city of the sun, was called in the Hebrew Tamar (1 Kings ix. 18). In Vespasian's famous coin, "Judoa capta," Judoa is represented as a female sitting under a palm-tree. The tree can at once be identified by its tall, straight, branchless stem, of equal thickness throughout, crowned at the top with a cluster of long, curved, feather-like branches, and by its singularly wrinkled bark. All these characteristics are readily recognised in the highly conventional forms of the religious emblem, even in the ornament on the king's robe, fig. 174. The date-palm is dioecious, the female trees, which are sometimes used as emblems, being always distinguished by the clusters of date fruit. "Thy stature is like to a palm-tree, thy breasts to clusters" (Cant. vii. 7). "The righteous shall flourish like the palm-tree" (Ps. xcii. 12), fruitful and ever green. "They are upright as the palm-tree, but speak not" (Jer. x. 8-5). The prophet is evidently describing the making of an Asherah. There was a Canaanite city called Baal-Tamar, = Baal, the palm-tree, designated so, it is probable, from the worship of Baal there "under the form of a priapus-column," says Fuerst, Heb. Lex. The real form was doubtless an "Asherim," a modified palm-tree, as we have already shown. Palm-branches have been used in all ages as emblems of life, peace, and victory. They were strewn before Christ. Palm-Sunday, the feast of palms, is still kept. Even within the present century, on this festival, in many towns of France, women and children carried in procession at the end of their palm-branches a phallus made of bread, which they called, undisguisedly, "la pine," whence the festival was called "La Fete des Pinnes." The "pine" having been blest by the priest, the women carefully preserved it during the following year as an amulet. (Dulaure, Hist, des differens Cultes.)