The August silly season continues…

“My first approach to the Garden of Eden was from the west while tracking a lion”  so opens an account by a respected British explorer and archaeologist when he found Eden in Somaliland in the 1890s.  Not far away he found the stone tools made and used by Adam. Some of them can still be seen in museums all round Britain.

Of course he was mistaken because the Garden of Eden was in China wasn’t it?  Sorry, my mistake  it was actually in Venezuela – but no I really meant the Seychelles or was it Kashmir?

I’m sure you think I’m joking because obviously [if it existed at all] Eden was in the Middle East  [after all that’s where the Bible was written] but honestly I’m not. Plenty of people have “proved”  that it was elsewhere, even in parts of the world that were unknown  to the authors of the Book of Genesis.

Read on to find out more about the Garden of Eden and where it actually is/was/might have been, and some of the “interesting” people who thought they’d found it.

 

First a bit of serious stuff. There is a huge amount of scholarly  research out there about Eden’s location, and as a quick Google search will show you even more  non-scholarly comment, supposition and downright fantasy. This was recognized in the late 19thc with Prof John Haupt of Johns Hopkins University speaking in 1895 about the theories that led to 80 different locations being proposed -from the Baltic to Polynesia, and from the Canaries to Kashmire before then  adding “all these theories are deficient”.  So I’m entering dangerous territory  with this post!  To start with trying to find Eden on the ground or on a map makes the assumption that it was a real place on Earth.  There are those who think it was, others who think it still exists somewhere but is probably invisible, while still others  think it was destroyed in the Great Flood. On the other hand maybe it never existed at all and it’s just a nice symbolic way of explaining the Creation and man’s place in it in simple pre-Darwinian terms.

Let’s look at what Genesis actually  tells us, at least according to the King James  version of the Bible, but be warned there are so many translations that choosing one over the other is fraught with  difficulties, because lots of groups claiming divine authority for their own particular interpretation.

“A  river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became four heads.”  The first of these four rivers is Pison “which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold…And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.”  The second river is  Gihon, “the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.”  The third is Hiddekel “which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.”

So armed with that the bare description of the four rivers we should be able to make some sort of rough guess as to where it is/was/was thought to be.   For many the naming of the Euphrates would suggest modern day Iraq. But what about the other rivers and the clues they offer.

Where is the land of Havilah? Nobody knows, although it is mentioned later in Genesis as being near the land of the  Ishmaelites,   “east of”  Egypt “in the direction of Assyria”. What about the river Gihon?  The King James Bible  says it’s in Ethiopia but many other translations say that the river “winds through the entire land of Cush.” We might know where Ethiopia is,  but where’s Cush? Unsurprisingly there are all sorts of theories about that  too, although most seem to suggest Sudan bordering the Red Sea but again there’s no certainty.  The fourth river, Hiddikel is also mentioned by the prophet Daniel  and  its generally assumed to be the Tigris which flowed through Babylon where he was held captive.

 

So we have quite a lot of unknowns, although most theories still point to Eden being in the Bible lands in the widest sense. Certainly most of mediaeval Christendom shared that view and maps of the world  often included Eden.

Not everyone at the time agreed. For example In 1358, Giovanni di Marignolli, a Florentine monk and papal ambassador to China stopped off on his way home  in Sri Lanka.  He believed he had come close to Eden after visiting  the island’s second highest mountain, the conical Adam’ s Peak, which rises to 7,360 feet.

The site on the very summit was already a place  of pilgrimage when Marignolli visited because of what appears to be a fossilised footprint. Muslim and Christians on the island thought it was that of Adam who took his first step down from Paradise there, but  of course that’s controversial with Hindus claiming it belongs to Shiva while the Buddhists claim it belongs to the Buddha.

Marignolli  claimed that from the mountain he was  “so close to the earthly paradise that from its top one could see paradise were it not for the cloud cover that hides it from view.”  The locals told him its was possible sometimes to hear the sound of falling water coming from paradise and he thought that this was the sound  of the four rivers which he identifies as the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Nile and Yellow River in China.   It was audible because Paradise itself was on an island between Sri Lanka and India and the most elevated place on earth,  so high it touched the Moon.  So convinced was he that he built a stone column “in the corner of the world” – the southern tip of India – and “over against Paradise” – , complete with an inscription, a cross and his as well as the pope’s coats of arms.  This is supposed to have survived until 1866 when it was swept away by the sea.

For more on Marignolli the best place to start is Jana Valtrová’s 2010 article “Beyond the Horizons of Legends”

The search for Eden continued and still attracted a lot of Biblically based speculation right through until well  into the 18thc, and as you can see from these two examples it’s  good to know that the Almighty liked formal garden layouts and lots of “wilderness”!

 

However in the mid-19thc things began to change for two reasons. The first was Darwin. After all  if his theory of evolution was true then the earth couldn’t have been created in just seven days and the Eden story could only be seen as a nice symbolic rather than literal story. Secondly geologists had begun to override the literal truth of Noah’s Flood and establish the real age of the earth. This made the second half of the 19thc  a difficult time for those who believed in the creation story spelled out in  the Bible. This did not stop them looking. As  Brook Wilensky-Lanford says in Paradise Lust, her book about the search for Eden: “No sooner did one authoritative account come along than another popped up to supplant it.”

What she was too polite to simply say some of them were probably just cranks.

Amongst the more rational seekers  was Sir William Willcocks, who spent his life as an irrigation and reservoir engineer mainly in the Middle East. His approach to finding Eden was very practical and straightforward. He searched for areas where irrigation could have been a serious possibility, checking on geology and the movement of rivers. He also had the advantage of speaking Arabic and was able to use that knowledge of place names to make his own comparisons with Genesis. In the end he felt there were only two potential sites for substantial gardens, one around Babylon and another nearer the head of the Persian Gulf. In a neat bit of semantics he concluded there were actually two gardens, writing this all up in a book on early Biblical history From the garden of Eden to the crossing of the Jordan published in 1920.

One of his schemes was to construct “a great barrage at Hindieh to divert the waters of the Euphrates River into its old channel by the site of ancient Babylon” it was  a “magnificent plan that [allowed] for the reclamation of this, the traditional site of the Garden of Eden.”

In the 1990s Saddam Hussein attempted to drain much of the southern Iraqi marshland which was  Willcocks  the second possible Eden site. Although he succeeded in destroying 90% of the largest wetland in Western Asia, the remaining part survived and the whole area is now a national park and is being slowly returned to its natural state. For more information of that see this online article Restoring the Garden of Eden, Iraq [ 2012]

 

But there were plenty of others, including several distinguished people who subscribed to perhaps to put it politely less credible theories.

Amongst them was General Charles “Chinese” Gordon. In 1881 he was given command of the Royal Engineers in Mauritius, a colony which then included the  Seychelles. After visiting the Seychelles  he became  convinced  that the Vallée de Mai  on the island of Praslin, was the Garden of Eden.

Apart from promoting his idea through extensive correspondence, when he suggested to the government that the Seychelles become a separate colony  he even designed a flag for the islands that incorporated his theory.  It featured the giant tortoise  that lived there as  ‘the last remnant of the Antediluvian age’ [ie before the Great Flood]  and  the indigenous coco de mer tree which Gordon believed was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. You’ll also see the serpent wrapped around the trunk because he thought it used the  fruit to tempt Eve. Actually there is a slight practical flaw to that idea because the seeds are not exactly light, they’re actually the largest and heaviest known in the wild, weighing up to c40kg!

In 1882 Gordon wrote a lengthy account of   Eden and its two sacramental trees,  [unfortunately not available on-line] employing some creative and logic to connect some underwater clefts on  the seabed with the four rivers mentioned in the Book of Genesis.

Gordon  also carried out the first serious study of the coco de mer, corresponding with William Thiselton-Dyer, the director of Kew about it. He also  lobbied the British government to purchase and protect parts of Praslin and its coco de mer forests and they are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

For more on Gordon and his ideas about Eden see Laura Burgazzi’s 2023 blog article on Finding Eden : General Gordon and Seychelles

 

A few years after Gordon was killed in Khartoum another intrepid  British army officer, explorer and amateur archaeologist was on an expedition in the Horn of Africa.  He explained what happened in an interview for the New York Journal in December 1897. [The images come from there]

 

Heywood Seton-Karr is the kind of imperial age figure now largely forgotten.  A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society he’d travelled widely making nineteen expeditions to tropical Africa, more than twenty to India, and the same to Arctic Europe and writing books such as Ten Years’ Wild Sports in Foreign Lands, and Bear Hunting in the White Mountains. His interest in archeology  led him to add searching for sites in Africa to his big game hunting trips and he was the first to discover stone age sites in Somaliland where his finds showed that our human ancestors in Europe were directly linked to those in Africa.  For his contributions to archaeology, Seton-Karr was awarded the Galileo gold medal by the University of Florence. However he must also have been ever so slightly eccentric  since from an early age he also claimed to possess the power of passing messages from the dead to those remaining.

For more on his theories and why he was absolutely convinced he’d found Adam’s home, as well the tools that he had made see the rest of the interview.

Another intelligent eccentric explained how while he “was studying   the Bible and Ancient Chinese History, on Sunday the 25th October, 1914 it suddenly dawned upon me, like a flash of light, that the Cradle of the Human Race was not where it is now reputed and believed to be, but, in Chinese Turkestan in the plateau of Eastern Asia, and also that the Chinese race originated there.”  This revelation came to Tse Tsan Tai,  a Chinese Christian revolutionary, who not only designed airships but  helped found  the South China Morning Post. He started writing  The Creation, the Garden of Eden and the Origin of the Chinese that night and finished it 3 days later.  In it he argued that the Garden of Eden was located in modern-day Xinjiang and that after the Flood Noah went to Mongolia.

Having read the book I can only conclude that maybe he was just a little deluded.

 

 

The more I looked the more eccentrics I found, and so instead of just one post I’m doing two and if you thought this week’s round-up  was a little odd just wait until next week when I take a look at another group…  this time all from America.

For more information the best places to start are the well-researched  and very readable Paradise Lust or any of the many articles on the web written by Brook Wilensky-Lanford   and if you want something really detailed and academic but still accessible without a huge amount of prior knowledge then try Jean Delumeau’s History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition. [sadly not available digitally but I picked a copy on-line for just a couple of £]