Another point on which I must touch briefly is that of the sacred grove or cluster of trees. These often represent, I take it, the trees planted in the _temenos_ or sacred tabooed space which surrounds the primitive tomb or temple. The _koubbas_ or little dome-shaped tombs of Mahommedan saints so common in North Africa are all surrounded by such a walled enclosure, within which ornamental or other trees are habitually planted. In many cases these are palms--the familiar sacred tree of Mesopotamia, about which more must be said hereafter in a later chapter. The well-known _bois sacré_ at Blidah is a considerable grove, with a _koubba_ in its midst. A similar _temenos_ frequently surrounded the Egyptian and the Greek temple. I do not assert that these were always of necessity actual tombs; but they were at any rate cenotaphs. When once people had got accustomed to the idea that certain trees were sacred to the memory of their ancestors or their gods, it would be but a slight step to plant such trees {149}round an empty temple. When Xenophon, for example, built a shrine to Artemis, and planted around it a grove of many kinds of fruit trees, and placed in it an altar and an image of the goddess, nobody would for a moment suppose he erected it over the body of an actual dead Artemis. But men would never have begun building temples and consecrating groves at all if they had not first built houses for the dead god-chief, and planted shrubs and trees upon his venerated tumulus. Nay, even the naïve inscription upon Xenophon’s shrine--“He who lives here and enjoys the fruits of the ground must every year offer the tenth part of the produce to the goddess, and out of the residue keep the temple in repair”--does it not carry us back implicitly to the origin of priesthood, and of the desire for perpetuity in the due maintenance of the religious offices? I shall say nothing here about the evolution of the great civilised tree-gods like Attis and Adonis, so common in the region of the eastern Mediterranean, partly because I have already treated them at some length in the essay on Tree-Worship to which I have alluded above, and partly because they would lead us too far afield from our present subject. But a few words must be devoted in passing to the prevalence of tree-worship among the Semitic peoples, intimately connected as it is with the rise of certain important elements in the Christian cult.