Did we plough up the Garden of Eden?

First Post ^ | October 17, 2006

[NYer]

[NYer]

Catholic Ping - Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list

[edcoil]

Since Eden only had Adam and Eve, I don't think its Eden.

[Sybeck1]

Eden's in Iraq. Noah's Ark is in Turkey.

[NYer]

Read more here.

[Alouette]

Paved paradise, put up a parking lot.

[redgolum]

Very interesting.

[muawiyah]

Guy wants the Nile Valley brought into the picture, but, alas, the Nile was a raging river at the time and the Sahara was a beautiful grassland filled with game.

There was NOTHING along the Nile at that time, but there were towns in Ukraine (on the other side of the Black Lake since the Black Sea didn't yet exist).

[John Carey]

Call me when they find the apple core....

[twigs]

I think the best guess is that Eden is near where Basra is today.

[DBrow]

Farming is a much more secure and easy way to get sustenance.

If you ever do extended survival training, you'll find that it takes a lot of work to get food by finding it here and there throughout the year. Plus, it is not assured that you'll find enough in any one place.

The story of King David is about switching from a nomadic life to one of agriculture- of finding a spot and settling there, growing food there, and flourishing.

I'll have to think about Adam and Eve as being an allegory for moving from a hunter-gather setup to farming.

The pictures of the carvings are stunning- if they are as old as they are supposed to be, they are revolutionary.

[Condor51]

Hmmm ... I don't recall reading about Adam and Eve building a Temple? (must have missed that chapter in catechism?!?)

[Pride in the USA]

Whatever its significance, it is a remarkable and very ancient discovery.

[Hegemony Cricket]

Yep. You just don't know what you've got 'til its gone...

[Teófilo]

The Discovery Channel had a similar search in one of its documentaries, called In Search of Eden, which showed a location I thought more plausible. The location is near the headwaters not only of the Tigris and Euphrates, but also the Gishon and Pishon rivers, near the border of Iran and Turkey and close to the Plain of Urartu--which we know as "Ararat." It is a place with a lot of resonance. Today, there's a lot of red dirt and an Iranian city built on the place. -Theo

[pepsi_junkie]

This site proves that hunter-gatherers were capable of complex art and organised religion, something no-one imagined before."

Hold on a minute. Hunter-gatherers are inherently nomadic. They go where the food is. How could they build a temple of stone anywhere, and what good would it be since they couldnt expect to be in proximity to it much of the time? Perhaps we should question some assumptions about the behavior of people 10,000 years ago rather than viewing them through the prism of conventional wisdom. For instance this find indicates a culture which was rooted to a specific geographical location for generations. How did they do that? Did they already have agriculture back then? Was the cresent so fertile that generations of people could live in one spot, gathering and hunting with no effort to replenish and not pick it clean?

I begin to wonder about some of those people who claim ancient egypt is way older than anyone imagines and get laughed at by scholars because it's simply a ludicrous proposition. In other words, conventional wisdom precludes it, so any evidence presented must have some other explanation even if one cannot be identified. Perhaps there is some credibility to those arguments after all.

[satchmodog9]

Sometimes people hold down opinions and facts because they don't want their ideas to be proved wrong. Take the water-Sphynx theory. It may be totally off base, but you have to wonder if some scientists and Egyptologists crap on the idea because they have a vested interest in the new theory being wrong.

[GOP Poet]

bookmark

[Rurudyne]

No ... but it does say any of the following things:

... that Cain built the first city, Enoch, east of Eden in the land of Nod. It was Cain who seems to have come up with the idea of religion, too (Abel described as "also" bringing his offerings).

... or, after the birth of Enosh, that men had begun calling on the Lord.

In either case, it wouldn't have been unreasonable for them to have built a structure and if you live a long time it might be easier to develop advanced skills.

As for the structure being buried ... filling a stone structure with packed earth is a good way to protect it from damage if you believe there's trouble coming.