Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 190, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 August 1919 — THIS THE GARDEN OF EDEN? [ARTICLE]

THIS THE GARDEN OF EDEN?

Many Believe That Territory in Which Famous Spot Was Situated Has Been Located. “And the Lord God planted a garden to the eastward In Eden. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and'it was parted into four heads.”Genesis. Sir William Willcocks, who, in behalf of the British government, has had charge of the wonderful irrigation works In Egypt, was assigned not long ago to the duty of planning a similar' large-scale enterprise for the restoration of ancient Babylonia to its former agricultural productiveness. Thus it happened that he located, to the reasonable satisfaction of archeologists, the veritable site of the Garden of Eden. For reasons wholly practical he thought that the best way to begin. Starting from the spot where Jewish tradition placed the gates of paradise —the yvord “paradise” meaning garden—he followed the traces of the four streams mentioned in Genesis, which, as therein named, were the Pison, the Gihon, the Hiddekel and the Euphrates. The Euphrates (known by that name today) flowed through the great city of Babylon. The Gihon Is now called the Hindia. The Hiddekel is the modem Sakhlawia, which flows into the Tigris at Bagdad. The Pison has gone dry, but is represented by manyarmed channels “encompassing the whole land of Havilath” (see Genesis), which lay between Egypt and Assyria. The Euphrates enters its delta a few miles below Hit. there leaving the desert and debouching into a vast alluvial plain. ,In this departure It has a considerable fall, with a number of cataracts, and along a narrow valley giant water wheels lift water to irrigate of the land on both sides of the stream. The entrance to this valley (according to Jewish tradition) was the gate of the Paradise in which Adam and Eve dwelt, and from w'hicli they were expelled for disobeying a divine command. There the traveler first meets the date palm, which is a “tree of life” (see Genesis) to the whole Arab world. Along the valley garden succeeds garden. It is today a veritable paradise, orchards and date groves checkered with fields of cotton. The climate is everlasting summer, so that three or four crops a year may be grown. Anciently the cataracts were much higher, and water wheels were unnecessary, the water being led off by ditches. The Garden of Eden, Indeed, gains interest from the fact that it seems to have been the first irrigated area in the world. .