From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

According to M. Mayo, however, all those who would place humanity’s first hearthstone in Asia, or in Europe, or in America were entirely mistaken. In an ingenious study on “Les Secrets de Pyramides de Memphis”[466] he argues that the desert of Sahara embraces what was once the Garden of Eden. True, it is now a bleak and arid desert, but he believes it was once a land of marvelous beauty and fertility. There was a time, he avers, when it was watered by large rivers and meandering streams; when it was covered with rich verdure and luxurious vegetation; when it was densely populated and the happy home of a peaceful and prosperous people. A new reading of Genesis, in the light of certain hieroglyphical inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty regarding the pyramid of Cheops will, he assures us, solve the mystery that has so long enshrouded the famed monument of Gizeh and reveal the reason why all attempts hitherto made to localize the Paradise of Scripture have proved futile. The Nile, he will have it, formerly flowed through the Sahara where it divided into four branches, constituting the quadrifurcate river of Genesis. At this time the people of Egypt, who even then were a powerful and highly civilized nation, suffered from lack of water and cast about to increase their supply of this all-important element. They obtained it by deflecting the course of the Nile and directing it through their own country. By making a large cut or ditch through an elevation near Khartoum they appropriated to themselves the waters of the great reservoirs of equatorial Africa and shut off from their neighbors in the Sahara the only source of irrigation on which their country could depend. It was thus, according to this quixotic Frenchman, not God but man who closed Paradise and made entrance into it impossible by taking from it the water that gave it fecundity and life.

“Fudge,” vociferates Ignatius Donnelly. “Amen,” ejaculates Unger. Paradise according to these worthies was not situated in any of the existing continents, for its seat, as can be proved, was in the lost Atlantis. Accepting Plato’s account of the Atlantis, as given in the Timæus, as veritable history, the paradoxical Donnelly attempts to show that Atlantis was not only the Garden of Eden but also the only possible center of distribution for the various races which now people the Old and the New World. And more than this. Not only, he asseverates, “was it the original home of mankind but it was likewise the focus whence have eradiated all our cereals and most useful plants and fruits and all our domestic animals.”[467] Here, too, he claims, many of the most valuable inventions which ever blessed our race had their origin. In a word, if we are to believe this plausible author, Atlantis was the home of art, science, and literature and the people who inhabited it not only enjoyed all the peace and happiness of which the ancient poets speak as being the lot of the privileged mortals of the Golden Age but they were the prototypes of the gods, demi-gods, and heroes of a later and less fortunate period.

“Nonsense,” exclaim Dr. Warren, Count Saporta, and the German astronomer, Herr Kohl. Basing their opinions on certain forced interpretations of various ancient legends and traditions and on the results of scientific explorations of the regions within the Arctic Circle, these gentlemen reach the startling conclusion that the first home of our race was in the circumpolar North.

The investigations of botanists, they remind us, declare the singular, but as yet inexplicable fact, that “all the floral types and forms revealed in the oldest fossils in the earth, originated in the region of the North Pole and thence spread first over the northern and then over the southern hemisphere, proceeding from north to south.” The same may also be said of numerous and important representatives of the world’s fauna. Why then, they inquire, are we not justified in placing humanity’s birthplace where the animals and plants which serve man and on which he subsists and which have accompanied him on his migrations over the earth’s surface are known to have originated? “Only from the circumpolar regions of the North,” affirms Count Saporta, “could primitive humanity have radiated as from a center to spread into the several continents at once and to give rise to successive emigrations toward the south. This theory best agrees with the presumed march of the human races.”[468]

At the North Pole of the earth, therefore, “the sacred quarter of the world,” “the navel of the earth,” “the mesomphalos,” “the umbilicus orbis terrarum,” are we to look for the long lost Eden, for the cradle of mankind. There where the aurora borealis is seen in all its splendor, under a canopy formed by palpitating and wafting draperies, quivering curtains and shining streamers of primatic hues of varying intensity and matchless brilliancy our first parents spent the first happy days of their existence and there, amid a frozen desolation lie buried the “hearthstone of Humanity’s earliest and loveliest home.”[469]

But the views of those who have located Paradise in “the fairie North” have been no more satisfactory than the contentions of those who have placed it on the elevated plateau of the Andes, or on the top of a cloud-piercing mountain of farther India or beneath the shifting sands of the Sahara or in the fabled Atlantis or in some mythical Hyperborean land which has been ice bound for a million years or more. Far from it. So fascinating, however, is the subject that men of science still continue the quest of humanity’s original dwelling place and still elaborate theories respecting its location that are quite as fantastic as were those of the speculators and paradox mongers of the past. Thus, according to Hasse, it was in Prussia on the shores of the Baltic; Herder imagined it to have been in Cashmere; Livingstone sought it in equatorial Africa and hoped to find it at the headwaters of the Nile, if he could be fortunate enough to discover them. Daumer maintained that it was in Australia whence man emigrated to America and thence, by way of Behring’s Straits, to Asia and Europe.

The eminent anthropologist, Quaterfages de Bréau, is disposed to consider the lofty plateau of Pamir as the original hearthstone of mankind.[470] This is also the view of the distinguished Orientalist, François Lenormant, whose investigations have led him to believe that the four rivers—the Phison, the Gehon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates—which watered Gan-Eden, or Paradise, were what are now known as the Indus, the Oxus, the Tarin, and the Jaxartes.[471]

Here, too, curiously enough, on this “Roof of the world”; on this “central Boss of Asia,” is the spot where the puranas locate the holy Mount Meru, the primeval Aryan Paradise; the center, according to the traditions of the Parsees, whence radiated the first Aryan migrations, and one of the regions of the earth which even Mohammedan teaching has assigned as the cradle-land of our species.[472]

From the foregoing opinions entertained by divers authors the reader can infer how prominent a part wild conjecture, unbridled fancy, and love of learned paradox have played in the numerous investigations which at various times have been made with a view of determining the geographical seat of Paradise. And, be it remembered, allusion has been made to only a few of the opinions that have in times past been promulgated respecting humanity’s pristine home. Nearly a hundred different theories regarding the birthplace of our race have been advocated at one time or another, practically all of which are now discarded as highly fanciful or supremely ridiculous.

Must we, then, as many have done, look upon the Garden of Eden as a religious or a philosophic myth? Has modern research—especially research in the domain of the new science of Assyriology—done nothing toward clearing up the mystery which has so long enveloped the site of the Biblical Paradise, or are we forever to renounce all hope of even an approximate solution of the great enigma? Not at all. We can still say with the Florentine Poet, Leonardo Dati: