98 HORMUZD RASSAM, ESQ., 
to be the Pison of the Bible, as I shall try to prove presently, 
joins the Tigris a few miles below Nimroud, the supposed 
Calah mentioned in the tenth chapter of Genesis as having 
Bae founded by Nimroud, “the mighty hunter before the 
ord.” 
The greatest objection, I think, to the theory that the 
situation of the Garden of Eden was at the junction of the 
Euphrates with the Tigris, is the difficulty of harmonizing 
the description of the countries encompassed by the rivers of 
Pison and Gihon with the land of Shinar.* We are told that 
the River Pison encompasseth the land of Havilah, when we 
know that the kingdom of Nimroud contained these pro- 
vinces, namely, Babylon, or Babel, Erech, and Accad ; and if 
Havilah existed there also, the same sacred writer would 
have included it in it, Then the Gihon is said to have 
compassed the whole land of Cush, and not of Nimroud, 
when Shinar was well known in those days, and which was 
really encompassed by the Euphrates and the Tigris, and 
not by the Pison and Gihon.f 
Having disposed of the Babylonian theory regarding 
the Garden of Eden, I must now submit to my learned 
fellow-members my own opinion of what I consider to be, 
according to Biblical account, the legitimate site of the long- 
lost earthly Paradise. In doing so, I crave your indulgence 
in what might seem tedious quotations from different autho- 
rities for the purpose of substantiating certain problems 
which I have to lay before you with regard to the sources of 
the four rivers of Eden, and I trust that I may be pardoned 
if I should commit any error in my geological calculations, 
as my scientific knowledge on that head is somewhat meagre. 
I merely refer to what other more competent authorities 
have said about the effects of earthquakes upon terrestrial 
waters in different parts of the world, even to this century, 
* Genesis x., 10. 
+ It is mentioned in Faussett’s Englishman’s Bible Cyclopedia that 
‘the Primitive Eden was somewhere in the locality containing the con- 
joined Euphrates and the Tigris (= “‘ Hiddekel”), which branch off north- 
ward into those two rivers, and southward branch into two channels again 
below Bossara before falling into the sea, Gihon the east channel and 
Pison the west. Havilah, near the west channel, would thus be north- 
east Arabia ; and Cush (= “ Ethiopia”) near the east channel would be 
Kissia, Chuzestan, or Susiana. The united rivers are called the Shat-al- 
Arab.” Knowing the country as I do, I must confess the foregoing is 
quite unintelligible to me, and it is doubtful if any one else can quite 
comprehend this imaginative description of the site of the Garden of 
Eden. 
