gobekli tepe - genesis of the gods (41 page)

Reader, if you love piety, if you know how to value learning, you should know what a treasure lies under this stone, Marmaduke Carver, formerly rector of the Church of Harthill, but very well versed in . . . chronology and geography, an accomplished linguist, a fine speaker—the man, to wit, who . . . pointed out to the world the true place of the terrestrial paradise, (yet in death) made of the object of his admonitions, the celestial (paradise) which he recommended to the praise of his hearers to attain which we are filled with great longing. He was translated on this day of August 1665.
⁹

During his stay in York, Carver had apparently spent much of his time conducting research for his book in the cathedral library, which is the largest of its kind in the country. It has a collection of around 120,000 volumes, 25,000 of which were printed before 1801, including 115 incunabula (tracts printed before 1501).

So it seemed only fitting that I should find that York Minster Library has two of the only remaining copies of Carver’s book in the country. Some cunning persuasion helped overturn the librarian’s decision not to allow me to view the title at such short notice, so I sat down ready to read what I hoped would provide me with some valuable insights regarding the true whereabouts of the Garden of Eden. I was not to be disappointed.

THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON

The small, leather-bound book placed before me on the reading desk felt very special indeed. It was printed in April 1666 by James Flesher of London and sold by one Samuel Thomson “at the Bishop’s head in St. Paul’s Church-yard” (see figure 28.1). Now, it is important to conjure a vision of the time, for 1666 was the year of the Great Fire of London, which burned from the second to the fifth of September and started in a bakery in Pudding Lane. This is just over 1,000 yards (1 kilometer) away from Saint Paul’s Cathedral, where Samuel Thomson had his bookshop at the sign of the Bishop’s Head (probably located in the inn’s thoroughfare). So unless this copy of Carver’s book had sold in the months leading up to the fire, it must have been among the stock salvaged after the fire had swept through Saint Paul’s churchyard, razing the old cathedral to the ground. I almost expected the book to exude a residual aroma of smoke and fire as I began to digest Carver’s findings on the true location of the terrestrial Paradise.

Figure 28.1. The cover of A Discourse of the Terrestrial Paradise, by the Reverend Marmaduke Carver, published in London, England, in 1666. It was arguably the first book to build a solid case for the terrestrial Paradise being located in historical Armenia.

A MERE UTOPIA

The tract’s opening address, dedicated to Gilbert Sheldon, the archbishop of Canterbury, makes it clear that the author has written the book in an attempt to dispel antiscriptorial thinking, begun in earnest by Martin Luther (1483–1546), which asserted that the Garden of Eden was “a mere
Utopia,
a Fiction of a place that never was, to the manifest and designed undermining of the Authority and Veracity of the Holy Text.”
¹⁰
After this, in a long forward, Carver makes his case against the current most popular theory on the location of the terrestrial Paradise, that it was located where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers converge in Lower Mesopotamia, a view held, he says, not only by Calvinist reformers, but also by some Papist, or Catholic, scholars.
¹¹

Having successfully rebutted this theory, Carver proceeds, in a sound, scholarly manner, to build a case for Eden being located in Armenia Major, now part of eastern Turkey. Significantly, he explores ancient evidence suggesting that the Euphrates, Tigris, and Araxes rivers all derive from the same source.
¹²
This, he says, was a single “fountain” in the “forests of Armenia,”
¹³
situated in the vicinity of a lake known anciently as Thonitis, or Thospites,
¹⁴
called also Arianias, or Arsissa,
¹⁵
all names usually associated with Lake Van.

Carver cites the belief of various classical writers, including Strabo
¹⁶
and Pliny,
¹⁷
that some kind of proto-river, the true source of the Tigris, emerged from a primordial fountain, then discharged into the Thospites, or Lake Van, its waters so rapid, so powerful, that they did not mix with those of the “nitrous lake.” The proto-Tigris then reemerged beyond the lake’s southwest corner and sank down into a subterranean cave, only to reappear on the south side of the Eastern Taurus Mountains in the former Armenian province of Sophene, north of Diyarbakır. This then becomes the open source of the Tigris, which is known today as the Tigris Tunnel, or Birkleyn, from the Arabic
birqat al-’ayn,
“source of the river.”

Carver believed it was this primordial fountain, the true source of the Tigris, that brought forth the four rivers of Paradise.
¹⁸
With this in mind, he concludes his scholarly discourse by proposing that the site of Eden, or “Heden” as he marks it on the accompanying map (see figure 28.2), was to be found between Sophene “and the fountains of Tigris, in the midst whereof, and upon the bank of the river, stood the
Tree of Life. . . .
Just about which place . . . we see . . . the nitrous Lake Thospites.”
¹⁹

CHERUBIM WITH THE FLAMING SWORDS

Carver points out that after the proto-Tigris passes through the Thospites, it was said by the classical writers to reemerge in the region of Mount Niphates.
²⁰
This is the ancient name for Nemrut Dağ, the volcanic caldera situated just beyond Van’s western shoreline. Having concluded that the Fountain of Paradise lay between here and Sophene, or immediately south of the plain of Mush, he proposes that the cherubim, which God set up to guard the Tree of Life with flaming swords turning every way, were in fact the “flashings issuing out of some Lakes.”
²¹

This is a very clever solution. Such “flashings” might easily describe the volcanic activity attached to Nemrut Dağ, which has erupted periodically since ancient times, the last time being in 1891, when the summit started “vomiting forth flames and lava,” destroying the villages at the base of the mountain.
²²

On this same matter, the Reverend W. A. Wigram and Sir Edgar T. A. Wigram in their book
The Cradle of Mankind,
published in 1914 following their celebrated travels in Kurdistan (eastern Turkey, northern Syria, northeast Iraq, and western Iran), observed:

It is held by many commentators that the site of the Garden of Eden was near modern Van and Bitlis, round about the headwaters of the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Araxes, and the Zab. If so, then the Garden of Eden now lies buried beneath the lava of these volcanoes; and where could we find fitter antitypes of the Cherubim with the flaming swords?
²³

It is unlikely that the Wigrams were aware of Carver’s work when they wrote their book. However, their statements suggesting that the volcanoes, as natural boundaries to the Garden of Eden, were themselves the cherubim wielding the flaming swords echo Carver’s thoughts completely.

And if the Garden of Eden is not encased in volcanic lava, then it could equally have been drowned, for one old Armenian legend asserts that it lies “at the bottom of Lake Van,” where it has been since the time of the Great Flood.
²⁴
This conclusion reflects the medieval belief that even if a terrestrial Paradise
had
once existed, then it would surely have been destroyed at the time of the Flood, which covered everything to the height of the highest mountains.

CARVER’S MAP OF PARADISE

Turning next to Marmaduke Carver’s detailed, though rather fantastic, map of Greater Armenia (see figure 28.2), we see the terrestrial Paradise marked under the Latin legend
Heden regio quae et anthe
(Eden region and caves). These words are sandwiched between the Thospites, or Lake Van, in the east, and Sophene in the west. Indeed, the inscription appears in the vicinity of the Eastern Taurus Mountains, which lie immediately beneath the plain of Mush, with
eden
deriving most probably from the Akkadian word
edinu
(Sumerian
eden
), meaning “plain” or “steppe.”
²⁵
Having said this, a recent academic trend sees
eden
as stemming from the West Semitic root
‘dn,
meaning “to enrich, make abundant,”
²⁶
which remains possible, although less likely.

MOUNT ABUS

Passing across Thospites Lake on Carver’s map are two parallel lines that run north-south, representing the proto-Tigris flowing unaffected through its waters. They continue as dotted lines beyond the lake’s northern shores, indicating that this is the incoming subterranean river alluded to in the writings of classical writers, such as Strabo and Pliny, and that at its source was the primordial foundation from which all four rivers of Paradise took their course. Geographically, the lines originate from between a line of mountains, one of which is marked with the legend “Abus Mons.”

Abus Mons, or Mount Abus, also spelled Monte Abas,
²⁷
or Aba,
²⁸
is mentioned in the works of both Pliny
²⁹
and Strabo, the latter of whom writes that from its summit “flow both the Euphrates and the Araxes, the former towards the west and the latter towards the east.”
³⁰
This can only be a reference to Bingöl Mountain, of which it is said: “The Araxes rises near Erzurum (Turkey) in the Bingöl Dağ region: there is only a low divide separating it from the headwaters of the Euphrates river.”
³¹
We should recall that Bingöl was the center of the obsidian trade in the Armenian Highlands in the proto-Neolithic age and can also be identified with Gaylaxaz-ut, or Paxray, the Wolf Stone Mountain of Armenian folklore (see chapter 24).

Figure 28.2. Section from Marmaduke Carver’s A Discourse of the Terrestrial Paradise showing “Heden,” or Eden, between Lake Van (the Thospites, in the center) and the ancient kingdom of Sophene. Note the proto-Tigris coming down from the north, close to Abus Mons (Bingöl Mountain), and flowing uninterrupted through the lake.

THE SOURCE OF MANY RIVERS

Dutch scholar of Semitic studies Martijn Theodoor Houtsma (1851–1943), in the
Encyclopaedia of Islam,
made it even clearer in 1927, when he wrote: “No fewer than six important water-courses rise in this erosion [i.e., Bingöl Mountain’s innumerable glacial pools], in which Armenian tradition for this reason places the site of the biblical Paradise.”
³²
These “water-courses” are broken down in the following manner: in the northwest is the source of the Araxes, in the west is the Tuzla Şu, which becomes a major branch of the Western, or Northern, Euphrates, and the Bingöl (or Peri) Şu, which, as we saw in chapter 24, was known to the native Armenian population as the Gail, or “Wolf,” River. It too rises on the west side of Bingöl Mountain, then heads off in the direction of Baghir and Shaitan Dağ. In the southwest part of the massif rises the Gönük Şu; in the south, the Çabughar Şu; and in the east and northeast, the Khınis Şu. The last four mentioned rivers, including the Peri Şu, all join the Eastern, or Southern, Euphrates.