From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

The first one who ventured to state precisely in what part of Babylonia Eden was located was Pierre Daniel Huet, the learned bishop of Avranches. This he did in his celebrated Tractatus de Situ Paradisi, a book which had so great a vogue that it passed through many editions and was translated into several languages. So clear to him were the indications of the Genesiac narrative respecting the site of Paradise that he declares “I have often marveled that interpreters have shut their eyes to them and have worried with many and so various conjectures which were so little in keeping with the plain words of the Sacred Text.” As for himself he had no doubt about the site of the Garden of Eden. He was sure he could indicate the exact spot where the first pair lived before the fall. It was, he opined, in a bend of the river now known as the Shat-el-Arab and at a point which, according to Ptolemy’s map, is located in latitude 32° 39´ and in longitude 80° 10´. This, as the map drawn to illustrate his view shows, was near Aracca—the Erech of Scripture.

Huet’s view as to the location of Paradise was essentially the same as that of Calvin whose theory was closely followed not only by the theologians of Louvain but also by Joseph Scaliger—the father of modern chronology—and by other scholars innumerable. But, although the good bishop thought he had determined the exact spot where the first human pair first saw the light of day and, although very many of his contemporaries seemed to share his views, it was not long until other hypotheses were promulgated regarding the much disputed site of humanity’s original home. Not counting, however, the fanciful and ingenious speculations of certain authors already mentioned, the general consensus of scholars, since the time of Dom Calmet, seems to have favored southern Babylonia as the land in which “the Lord God planted” the ever-mysterious, the ever-elusive Garden of Eden.

This is particularly true since investigators have had the powerful aid of the new and all-important sciences of geology and Assyriology. They have eliminated many fantastic notions that so long marred the works of the most serious men of science and have shown that certain assumptions formerly made by exegetes must now be regarded as quite impossible. And the general trend of these two sciences has been to illumine and corroborate the much debated statements of the second chapter of Genesis in the most unexpected manner.

Thus, one of the oldest accounts of Creation, as given in a cuneiform inscription discovered some decades ago by the noted Orientalist, T. F. Pinches, “carries us directly to Babylonia. In this the creation of the earth is but a preparation for that of the Garden which stood eastward in Eden, in the center, it would seem of the world. The garden was watered by a river which after fulfilling its work was parted into ‘four heads’ and flowed in four different streams. Of these two were the great rivers of the Babylonian plain, the Tigris and the Euphrates; the others bear names which have not yet been identified with certainty.

“The scenery, however, is entirely Babylonian. The Eden itself, in which the garden was planted, was the plain of Babylonia. This we know from the evidence of the cuneiform texts. It was called by its inhabitants Edinu, a word borrowed by the Semites from the Accado-Sumerian edin, ‘the (fertile) plain.’ To the East of it lay the land of the ‘nomads,’ termed Nod in Genesis and Manda in the inscriptions. The river which watered the Garden was the Persian Gulf, known to the Babylonians as ‘the river,’ or more fully ‘the bitter’ or ‘salt river.’ It was regarded as the source of the four other rivers whose ‘heads’ were the spots where they flowed into the source which at once received and fed them.”[477]

Regarding the rivers which are mentioned in the Edenic narrative, Mr. Sayce, the distinguished Orientalist, seems to have no doubt. Chief among them are the Tigris and the Euphrates whose names date back to early Accadian times. “Though it is questionable,” he writes, “whether the names of the Pison and the Gihon have hitherto been detected on the cuneiform monuments, it is not difficult to determine the rivers with which they must be identified.“[478] These rivers, he endeavors to show, must have been the Kerkhah, the Choaspes of the classical writers, and a stream which is now represented by the Pallakopas Canal. In the first of these two rivers he sees the Gehon of Genesis which ”compasseth the whole land of Cush,” while in the second he recognizes the Phison which “compasseth the whole land of Havilah.”

As to the location of Eden it was, according to Accado-Sumerian inscriptions, near the sacred city of Eridu which, some six thousand years ago, was “the great seaport of Babylonia,” but of which nothing now remains but “the rubbish heaps of Abu-Shahrein.” “When Eridu still stood on the seacoast,” continues Sayce, “not only the Tigris but other rivers also flowed into the Persian Gulf. The great salt ‘river,’ as it was termed, received the waters of four in all at no great distance from the walls of Eridu.”[479]

As seen from the foregoing paragraphs, Sayce like Calvin, Huet, and many other scholars, also places the Garden of Eden in southern Babylonia and only about twenty miles from the spot so confidently indicated by the scholarly bishop of Avranches as the site of the Terrestrial Paradise.

No less interesting than Sayce’s view, which is based entirely on the teachings of Assyriology, is the conclusion arrived at by the noted Canadian investigator, J. W. Dawson, from data supplied by the science of geology of which he was a recognized master. With Sayce he agrees that the Kerkhah is the Gehon of Genesis but contends that the river Karun, instead of the Pallakopas Canal, as his English confrère maintains, is the Phison.

We thus find, that if we place our ancient geographer [the author of the second chapter of Genesis] where he places himself, and suppose he refers to the Euphrates and the three principal rivers confluent with it near its entrance into the Persian Gulf, we obtain a clear idea of his meaning and find that, whatever the sources of his information respecting the antediluvian Eden, he had correct ideas of the Idinu of his own time and of its surrounding inhabitants. According to him, the primitive seat of man was in the south of the Babylonian plain, in an irrigated district of great fertility and having in its vicinity mountain tracts abounding in such mineral products as were of use to primeval man.[480]