Figure 27.1. Adam and Eve in the terrestrial Paradise, from the Hereford Mappa mundi (Map of the World), ca. 1300 AD . Note the four rivers of Paradise, each one named, which emerge from a fountain of four heads positioned in front of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, complete with the Serpent of Temptation.
Identifying these four rivers has always been key to locating the terrestrial Paradise, and two of them are easily found. The last one mentioned, the Phrat (Kurdish Firat, Armenian Aratsani, Greek and Roman Arsanias), is the Euphrates, the longest river in Western Asia. It has two main branches, the Kara Şu, or Western Euphrates, and the Murad Şu, or Eastern Euphrates, which rise, respectively, to the north and northwest of Lake Van in the Armenian Highlands. They then snake their way through southeast Turkey and merge together before passing into northern Syria and entering the Mesopotamia Plain in what is today Iraq. Just before emptying into the Persian Gulf, the Euphrates joins the Tigris River.
There can be little question that the Euphrates was one of the four rivers of Paradise, and this information alone should always have been enough to establish the geographical position of Eden as being somewhere along its course. Yet we find again and again that this was often not the case, with the Garden of Eden being placed not just in the Bible lands but also in every other part of the ancient and new world. Ceylon, the Americas, equatorial Africa, Australia, and even the North Pole have all been proposed as the setting for the terrestrial Paradise, based on arguments that seem more related to personal theories and the beauty of the place than to the facts presented in the Genesis account.
THE HIDDEKEL
Another river of Paradise easy to identify is the Hiddekel, which flows to the “east of Asshur”; that is, Assyria, in what is today northern Iraq. This is unquestionably the River Tigris (from the Persian
tigra,
meaning “arrow”), originally called the Hiddekel (from the Akkadian
id Idikla,
“the river of Idikla”), which does indeed flow through the eastern parts of the ancient kingdom of Assyria. The river, which takes its rise northeast of the city of Diyarbakır, immediately south of the main sources of the Euphrates, is fed by a series of tributaries that rise in the Eastern Taurus Mountains of eastern Turkey.
The Tigris then leaves Turkey and flows southeastward through Iraq, parallel with the Euphrates on its western side. The two rivers bend toward each other in the vicinity of Baghdad, close to the site of the ancient city of Babylon. Yet instead of coming together they run parallel for a few miles before parting again, only to merge finally into one giant estuary that empties into the Persian Gulf.
So if both the Euphrates and the Tigris form two of the four rivers of Paradise, this should confirm that the Garden of Eden was either where they take their rise in the Eastern Taurus Mountains and Armenian Highlands or where they come together in southern Iraq; no other possible location should even be considered based on the evidence provided by the book of Genesis. Indeed, the matter can be pinned down still further by pointing out that the Garden of Eden was situated at the
source
of the four rivers, meaning that the terrestrial Paradise can only have been located in historical Armenia, modern eastern Turkey. Where exactly is provided by the identities of the remaining two rivers.
GIHON AND THE LAND OF CUSH
Identifying the Gibon or, more commonly, the Gihon, another of the rivers of Paradise, is slightly more of a challenge, although the fact that it is said to flow “around the whole land of Cush” is a major clue. Usually, the land of Cush is identified with an ancient kingdom of this name in Ethiopia, the reason the word
Ethiopia
appears instead of
Cush
in the King James Bible. It is also why the Gihon is identified with the River Nile, which rises in Ethiopia and was called the Geion by the Coptic Christians of Egypt.
5
Yet these identifications are fundamentally wrong, and very misleading too. Cush, or Kush, is more likely to be a kingdom named in Assyrian inscriptions as Kusu. It was the land of a people called the Kusai, who lived “in the celebrated hill country to the north of Syria, whence came the Kusai breed of horses.”
6
Indeed, it was apparently from Kusu that the Assyrians obtained their horses.
7
English Assyriologist George Smith (1840–1876), in
The Chaldean Account of Genesis
(1876), notes that in the book of Genesis the father of Nimrod, the builder of the Tower of Babel, is given as Cush, and that this too might be an allusion to the land of Kusu.
8
Nimrod is a legendary figure of Armenian folk history said to have cast the patriarch Abraham into a fiery furnace because he would not bow down to pagan idols. This is supposed to have taken place in the ancient city of Edessa, modern Şanlıurfa, celebrated as the birthplace of Abraham. It is also, as we have seen, just 8 miles (13 kilometers) away from Göbekli Tepe, a connection that should not be forgotten. If Kusu was north of Assyria, then it must have been located somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Van and the Armenian Highlands.
Historical Armenia was overrun by the Turkish Ottoman Empire in the mid-fifteenth century, and although it kept its cultural, religious, and geographical identity until the twentieth century, the entire country was wiped off the face of the map following the Armenian Genocide of 1915. In antiquity, however, it was a kingdom in its own right, with the separate kingdom of Armenia Minor to its west. Today the modern Republic of Armenia, the former Soviet Armenia, is the only remaining part of Greater Armenia (or Armenia Major), with the rest of “historical Armenia” now being simply the eastern provinces of Turkey.
Back in the first millennium BC, at the height of the Assyrian Empire, the kingdom of Armenia was famous for its horses. The Greek geographer Strabo reported that it was very good for “horse pasturing” and that “Nesaean horses,” favored by the Persian kings, were bred there.
9
Moreover, Strabo recorded that every year the Persian king was sent by way of a tribute from Armenia twenty thousand foals.
10
He noted also that: “The passion for riding and the care of horses characterize the Thessalians, and are common to Armenians and Medes.”
11
The Medes were the inhabitants of Media, a kingdom located on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, northeast of Armenia, in what is today Azerbaijan and northwest Iran.
So the land of Kusu, where Kusai horses came from, was almost certainly a reference to the Armenian Highlands, which makes sense, for the Gihon River has long been identified with the Araxes (the modern Aras) River. Along with a major branch of the Western Euphrates, the Araxes takes its rise on Bingöl Mountain, the center of the obsidian trade, located some 30 miles (48 kilometers) south of the city of Erzurum. It then flows eastward, past the base of Mount Ararat, joining eventually another great river called the Kur before emptying finally into the Caspian Sea. Its mouth is near Baku, the capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, ancient Media, close to Gobustan, the site of the incredible rock art described in chapter 23.
Where exactly the name Gihon came from is unclear, although during the Arab invasion of the Caucasus in the eighth century the river was known as the Gaihun,
12
with nineteenth-century Persian dictionaries referring to the Araxes as the Jichon-Aras.
13
Moreover, American theologian and educationist John McClintock (1814–1870) recorded in his multivolume biblical encyclopedia that the Gihon “to this day bears the same name among the Arabs. This [i.e., the Araxes] is a large river in Armenia Major, which takes its rise from a number of sources in Mount Abus (the present Bin-Gol), nearly in the centre of the space between the east and west branches of the Euphrates.”
14
Strangely, not only was the Araxes identified with the Gihon by Dutch philologist and scholar Hadrian Reland (1676–1718) more than three hundred years ago, but he also proposed that the land of Cush, through which it passed, was “the country of the Cussaei of the ancients,”
15
a perceptive observation that is almost certainly correct.
So from the evidence provided so far we can be pretty certain that if one specific location
is
being identified as the site of the terrestrial Paradise then it is the Armenian Highlands, where the Euphrates and Araxes take their rise, with the source of the Tigris just a short distance to the south.
IN SEARCH OF THE PISON
The final river of Paradise, called the Pison, or Pishon, is a little more tricky to identify, so the clues offered by the book of Genesis are worth examining a second time: “the name of the one [is] Pison, it [is] that which is surrounding the whole land of the Havilah where the gold [is], and the gold of that land [is] good, there [is] the bdolach and the shoham stone.”
To begin with, the land of Havilah is completely unknown, although Havilah as a personal name also appears in the book of Genesis, where it is cited, like Nimrod, as being a son of Cush (Gen. 10:9). If these names are, as seems possible, references both to kingdoms and their founders, then the fact that Cush is synonymous with the land of Kusu, an ancient name for Armenia, suggests that this is where we should look for the Pison River.
THE LAND OF GOLD
Adding weight to this conclusion is the fact that Armenia was well known for its gold, as is recorded by Strabo, who in the section of his
Geography
on Armenia speaks of the gold mines of “Syspiritis and Caballa, to where Menon was sent by Alexander with soldiers, and he was led up to them by the natives.”
16
Dutch chemist and science historian Robert James Forbes proposed that the mines of “Syspiritis and Caballa” were on the Black Sea near Batumi in southwest Georgia, the site of Colchis, legendary land of the Golden Fleece.
17
It is an interesting theory. However, the site of Caballa is completely lost to us. Syspiritis, on the other hand, is a little more easy to track down, for although some classical scholars like to see its gold mines as existing somewhere in the vicinity of the ancient city of Erzurum, north of Bingöl Mountain, Syspiritis was most likely close to Adiabenê.
18
This is a former kingdom and Assyrian city (the modern Arbil, or Erbil) located between the Upper Zab and Lower Zab rivers of northern Iraq, which flow down from the direction of the Thospites, or Arsene Lake,
19
ancient names for Lake Van, and merge eventually with the Tigris River. Interesting in this respect is the fact that Robert Forbes mentions that “other deposits [of gold] known are south of Lake Van,”
20
doubly confirming that Syspiritis is to be looked for here, and not farther north.
21
SEAT ON THE RIVER OF EDEN
This information becomes a major clue to the identity of the last river of Paradise, for the ancient Assyrian Church, also known as the Nestorian Church, recognized the Greater Zab as the River Pison. This information comes from the seat of their patriarch and head bishop, or Catholicos, located from the seventeenth century until the Assyrian Genocide of 1915 at Kotchanes (modern Konak) in the Hakkari. This is a remote region in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in the southeast corner of Turkey, close to the borders with Iraq and Iran. Here the patriarch would sign off his letters “from my cell on the River of the Garden of Eden.”
22
Valuable clues like this should not be taken lightly, as the Assyrian Church was one of the oldest forms of Christianity existing in the region, being founded as early as the first century.
23
This seems to affirm that the land of Havilah, through which the Pison flowed, was an area defined by the course of the Greater Zab, which embraces the Turkish provinces of Van and Hakkari, as well as the Iraqi governorate of Arbil.
The “bdolach” that we are told was found in the land of Havilah can easily be identified as a resinous exudation produced by shrubs of the
Astragalus
genus, called gum tragacanth or astragalus manna.
24
This was collected in the Mush, Erzurum, and Lake Van districts of Greater Armenia
25
and then transported to the city of Mosul, close to where the Greater Zab joins the Tigris.
26
However, the province most commonly associated with the
Astragalus
shrub is the Hakkari,
27
the suspected heartland of the land of Havilah.
As for the shoham stone mentioned in the Genesis account, this is probably a reference either to onyx (its usual identity), which is found in the Ararat district of Armenia, or to obsidian, which was very often confused with onyx in ancient times. Having made all these statements, there is one further tradition regarding the identity of the Pison that, due to its compelling yet conflicting implications, is best left until chapter 29.
RELAND’S CHOICE
The Genesis account of the Garden of Eden indicates, very clearly, that if it
did
exist as a physical location, then it was to be found somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Van and the Armenian Highlands, where the sources of the four rivers of Paradise take their course (see figure 27.2). It is a conclusion that anyone can achieve, simply by following the clues on offer, and it was something that Dutch scholar Hadrian Reland worked out at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
28
However, having identified the Euphrates, Tigris, and Araxes as three of the rivers of Paradise, he chose to correlate the final one, the Pison, with the Phasis, a river mentioned in ancient Greek sources, which is usually associated with the Rion, or Rioni, which rises in Georgia and empties into the Black Sea.