TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 173 



regarding the site of the traditional Garden of Eden of the Hebrews. He re- 

 marked, in the first place, that on examining the early traditions of nations, "we 

 invariably found the Heaven-land, tlie abode of the gods, the connecting-link 

 between divinity and humanity, to lie in that region of the earth from which the 

 recording race took its intellectual origin. In illustration of this he need only 

 refer to the Olympus of the Greeks and the Merit of the Aryans, which latter had 

 three sites, accoi-ding to the habitat of tlie three branches of the Aryan race ; the 

 Persians, or Western Aryans, placing their Iran-vij in the Paropamisus, while the 

 Meru of the Central Aryans was in Pamir, and of the Eastern about the Sacred Lakes 

 in Thibet, and in each of these there were supposed to be fom- rivers flowing from 

 a common centre. There was ground, then, for supposing the Paradise of the 

 Hebrews to lie in that region which was the cradle of the nation, namely, near 

 Ur of the Chaldees, which the author had been able to demonstrate, from cunei- 

 form inscriptions, to have been situated on the lower Euphrates, at the place now 

 called Muzheir. The name of " Hebrew " was also derived from the same locality, 

 the zone, or belt, of alluvial land between the river and the tertiary formation 

 having the specific title among the Arabian geogi'aphers of Ihr, or " the bank ; " so 

 that Ibri was a perfectly correct ethnic title for the Abrahamic emigrants. Fur- 

 ther, the author suggested that Gan-eden, which we translate " Garden of Eden," 

 was nothing more than the Hebrew rendering of one of the old vernacular names 

 of Babylonia, which was Gana-duni (or, with the case-ending, Gana-dmni/as), 

 Gana signifying apparently " an enclosure," while Vuni or Aduni was one of the 

 earliest gods worshipped in the country. Without, however, insisting on this 

 identification of the name of the covmtry, he would rely mainly on the names and 

 attributes of the four rivers which watered the garden, and which were evidently 

 intended, as Kalish has remarked, to furnish an exact geographical description of 

 Eden. These rivers, as it is well known, were Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and 

 Euphrates. Now the land of Babylonia was constantly illustrated in the cunei- 

 form inscriptions by the names of four rivers, two of wliich answer to the Tigris 

 and the Euphrates, and the other two were named tlie Surrapi and the Ukni. The 

 latter two were Assyrian terms, and their Babylonian equivalents had not yet been 

 identified. The Surrapi seemed, however, to answer partly to the Biblical Gihon, 

 and Ukni to the Pison, and they represented respectively the left hand, or eastern 

 arm of the Tigiis, and the right hand, or western arm of the Euphrates. 



Regarding the Pison, it is said in Genesis, "The name of the first is Pison, 

 that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold ; and 

 the gold of that land is good : there is bdellium and the onj-x stone." The name 

 Pisun, coming from the Hebrew verb "to disperse," signifies " the overflow;" and 

 as in all ages there has been an outlet to the Euphrates above Babylon, where the 

 flood drains oft' to the south-east, varying constantly in its com-se and name, and as 

 Ukiii'h&d. been shown on independent grounds to mean " the onyx," or "the onyx- 

 river" (though probably the term really refers to alabaster, quarries of which existed 

 just outside the Euphrates alluvium), the author considered there was good reason 

 for identifying the stream with the Pison of Genesis. Bdellium he considered to 

 mean "pearls " (Bedolat), which were obtained at the mouth of the river, from the 

 banks in the Persian Gulf; and the land of Havilah he believed to be tlie strip of 

 sandy desert which skirts the Ai-abian upland ; Haul siguifnng simply " sand." 



With regard to the Gihun, or the river "which compasseth the whole land 

 of Cush," his theory was, that in very early times the left branch of the Euphrates, 

 which left the main river just above Babjion and ran due east to the Tigris, was 

 considered to be the same as the left arm of the Tigris itself, that arm being 

 prolonged in the same line to the eastward, while the right arm of the Tigris was 

 considered to be the true continuation of the upper course of the river following 

 the same general direction of south-east. In a rough way, it might be said that the 

 left arm of the Euphrates thus crossed the Tigris and formed the Gihun. He justified 

 this theory on philological grounds, showing that the left arm of the Tigris had 

 retained the name of GiiM, absolutely identical with the Hebrew reading of Gihon, 

 almost to the present day, and discussed the whole subject in some detail. As 

 to the description of the Gihun as "encompassing the whole land of Gush" 

 (which, by a very bold guess, our translators had rendered " Ethiopia"), " Cush," or 



