Sunday, August 28, 2011

So where was the Garden of Eden?

In a word: Iraq. Brook Wilensky-Lanford, author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, writes: "The best guess of modern archaeologists is that the Eden story in the Bible developed from an ancient Sumerian myth about the loss of fertile farmlands as sea levels rose, which in turn developed from actual pre-history. The Sumerians then settled in Iraq’s southern marshlands. Since then, those lands and the people who’ve lived on them have gone through countless Eden cycles: fertility, civilization, peace, followed by drought, invasion, and war." So can we then assume that Adam and Eve more likely resembled Iraqi Marsh Arabs than the bucolic European pair depicted above? Shocking.

No comments:

Post a Comment