The four-fold layout was later reinterpreted in Islamic terms by Muslim Arabs after the 7th-century conquest of Persia, becoming associated with the Abrahamic concept of paradise and the Garden of Eden. : 8 The Spartan General Lysander who joined Cyrus as a mercenary reported to Xenophon how Persian kings "excelled in not only in war but also in gardening, creating paradeisos" where they collected plants, especially fruit-bearing trees and animals encountered during foreign campaigns. This included gardens watered by an aqueduct – the earliest known record of gravity-fed water rills and basins arranged in a geometric system. In the 5th century, at the time of the invasion of Persia by Cyrus the Younger, Xenophon described a complex of palaces and pavilions belonging to Artaxerxes.
The Assyrians in turn had inherited their landscaping techniques from the Babylonians. It is believed that the Achaemenid kings built paradise gardens within enclosed royal hunting parks, a tradition inherited from the Assyrians, for whom the ritual lion hunt was a rite that authenticated kingship. Gardens outside of the Palace of Darius I of Persia in Persepolis, an example of Achaemenid paradise gardens In 330 BC Alexander the Great saw the tomb of Cyrus the Great and recorded that it stood in an irrigated grove of trees. : 8 In the Achaemenid Empire, gardens contained fruit trees and flowers, including the lily and rose. These watercourses formed the principal axis and secondary axes of the main garden at Pasargadae, prefiguring the four-fold design of the chahar bagh. : 7 Likely planted with cypress, pomegranate and cherry, the garden had a geometrical plan and stone watercourses. It is the oldest intact layout that suggests elements of the paradise garden. The oldest Persian garden of which there are records belonged to Cyrus the Great, in his capital at Pasargadae in the province of Fars to the north of Shiraz. The idea of the enclosed garden is often referred to as the paradise garden because of additional Indo-European connotations of "paradise". In Persian, the word pardis means both paradise and garden. : 8 This term is used for the Garden of Eden in Greek translations of the Old Testament. Originally denominated by a single noun denoting "a walled-in compound or garden", from " pairi" ("around") and " daeza" or " diz" ("wall", "brick", or "shape"), philosopher and historian Xenophon of Athens borrowed the Old Iranian *paridaiza(h), Late Old Iranian *pardēz ( Avestan pairidaēza, Old Persian *paridaida, Late Old Persian *pardēd) into Greek as paradeisos.