Paradise Lost: The Controversial Hunt For The Garden Of Eden | Myth Hunters | Odyssey

[Music] [Music] [Music] the Garden of Eden the biblical birthplace of all Humanity the story is one way of showing how the human world came to be as we know it but is it just a story or did Eden really exist every culture every culture has a story that says this is how we came to be this is what happened one Maverick scientist was desperate to know the truth why did they tell that story where did it come from and what's behind it he risked everything to find the answer I would have expected backlash there are people who don't who don't believe it now this is the story of one man's quest for the Garden of Eden my rule is if people think it's crazy it's probably right in 1987 a respected magazine published an article about the work of a little known archaeologist named Urus Zarin in it Zarin claimed to know the Earthly location of Paradise The Garden of Eden zarin's work caused a storm Many religious people felt it was sacrilege to apply scientific principles to the world word of God it should be accepted on faith or not at all I would have expected backlash there are people who don't believe it now it's like anything else I don't believe that I don't want to know that that's different that's uncomfortable some respected academics were also deeply skeptical they thought zarn was just wasting his time many biblical Scholars thought the story was just an allegory with no basis in fact certainly by the 19th century most educated people no longer think the story of the Garden of Eden is a literal account of the beginning of humanity and the fall of mankind but zarn did not care about other people's opinions most people are not interested in trying to think through let's put it this way if I said to you I'm going to research the Garden of Eden based upon the Genesis story people are going to go well why surprisingly this was not a religious Quest nor was it a hunt for buried treasure or precious relics it was a journey motivated purely by a thirst for knowledge Zarin wanted to know about the origins of human society and despite the fact he is a committed atheist he thought that the answers lay in a all places a Biblical Legend a faith person will say yeah that happened and I believe it that's the end of it okay but a scientific person says well why did they tell that story where did it come from and what's behind it and then you start you know like a detective you start looking at it zarin's archaeological career had a promising start but despite his Keen intellect many people found working with him a challenge he's nuts you have if someone has spoken with Yuri they understand he's brilliant the man is brilliant beyond words um but he is a little bit hard to follow intellectually yes he is truly one of the most intelligent human beings I've ever met socially he's five but perhaps because of his unorthodox Style finding an environment he could work in wasn't easy but he secured a place at a small College in the heart of the American Midwest called Missouri State University I had to find a job and you just don't get a job at just any old place but the archaeology archal jobs are hard to come by in academic circles so you take one where you can get it but rather than hinder his career Zarin found his work at Missouri State helped him become something of a rising star this guy did things that news media covered S I mean he made Smithson and nap Geo worked on projects that were you know had huge budgets so he brought press and money through the school which is always good for the school he was very much encouraged to do his own thing the freedom Zarin had at Missouri State meant he could pick and choose his own passions to follow so he spent most of his time indulging his greatest passion the vast deserts of Arabia the reason I love it is because it's so austere it makes you come to grips of yourself you have to learn about yourself you have to learn about others and Trust others but you have to learn how to survive and how to suffer I like [Music] that Arabia was also Rich terrain For an upcoming archaeologist making a name for himself unlike the well trodden sites of the ancient classical world of the Mediterranean or Egypt Arabia was uncovered country Arabia was a cultural landscape it was like a desert literally because archaeologists hadn't been allowed in the tribes are too dangerous in most places in Arabia it's so remote many places are so remote believe it or not I'm the first person sometimes to touch something that's a half a million years old Zarin also developed a reputation as something of a Maverick he refused to follow the traditional academic career path and started taking in effect freelance commissions he would work with pretty much anyone who had an idea he liked the sound of works the same no matter who's pay for in it who cares these non-conformist methods led him to a project in a man related to of all things things a Bible story The Legend of the three kings bearing gifts of gold frankincense and M our real project was to find out and figure out the frankinson trade Zarin and his team set off into the vast Arabian Desert they wanted to know how long people had been trading frankincense and how it came to be such a valuable commodity across the ancient world frankincense only grows a couple places in the world and it originates in that Oman Yemen region we went on to study basically the trade routes how where it would have come from how they would have transported it what they were doing with it Zarin Owen and their colleagues worked in a man's so-called empty quarter for more than 4 years looking for evidence of trade routes stretching as far as India Egypt and Rome and after an extensive search they made an extraordinary Discovery a lost city called ubar Legends of ubar can be found in the book of 10,1 Arabian Knights where it is described as a place of fantastic wealth and Lush Greenery in the desert according to the Quran it was supposedly destroyed by God as a punishment for its misbehaving King indeed until Zarin found it no one was even sure if uba really existed so uh we found this location as Oasis in the center of uh Southern Oman and we found out that this was a jumping off place where they were congregating and sending Caravans hundreds of of animals were being transported in this direction and they were using frankincense among other things to to trade and those trade Caravans we know moved for centuries Zarin discovered that frankincense had been traded across the region for at least 8,000 years from Uber frankincense Caravans would have set off in all directions including of course to the Holy Land along with Goods to sell these Caravans would have carried something else stories including many that eventually found their way into the [Music] Bible Zarin realized its authors borrowed some of their material from other cultures it's called plagiarism they play eyes that stole it and repackaged it the Hebrew Bible repackaged the story that's much older and came from this proper location where people lived and experienced it Zarin began to wonder about the origins of one story in particular the tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden he wondered whether it was one of the stories that had been borrowed from another culture of all the many fables in the Bible this one seemed to be based on real events when people wrote something down they're not lying to you it's not baloney it's just that they don't think you need scientific evidence zarn was convinced that the ancient Hebrew people who wrote the Bible could not have possibly created this Legend on their own so where did it come from originally Zarin decided to find out his quest for the Garden of Eden had begun his first clue came from the very word Eden how this word came to be in the Bible has always been something of a mystery because it is not native to Hebrew the original language of the Old Testament Eden doesn't translate literally with a a Hebrew translation or any kind of Semitic translation it's not a word that's particular to the language of the story that we're familiar with they knew the story from somewhere else because they Incorporated some of that language where did the ancient Hebrews first hear this [Music] word Zarin knew it came from an area about 800 mil to the east of the Holy Land Mesopotamia the land between the rivers tigis and Euphrates he also knew it dated back to the world's oldest known civiliz ation the first people to create an organized Urban Society the Sumerians the samarians would be the earliest groups of people who settled uh and begin to cultivate the land in the area of the Tigers Euphrates Sumer is the first really organized group of agricultural city states and they began to develop a network of interaction through their their crops and their trade and using the rivers it was these ancient people who first used the word Eden it's a very very ancient word uh which the samarians used in in a very ancient way uh and it means a land of steps or grasslands where people live kind of wild or animals are wild the Sumerians used the term Eden to refer to uncultivated areas beyond their territory in other words the sort of place where nature was not controlled by man by God if this word Eden came from Mesopotamia then it seemed logical that the Garden of Eden was located there this idea was supported by the fact that many early Bible stories have Mesopotamian Roots if you look at the history of the biblical people if you look at an Abraham a Biblical Abraham he came from somewhere in that region for example most people don't know that suers is mentioned in Genesis is called Shar U the Tower of Babel these are all Samarian stories in fact the first 12 chapters of the Book of Genesis up to the point where Abraham departs for Egypt takes place in Mesopotamia Everything is Everything in those stories is from Mesopotamia if you don't believe me read it in the 1980s zarin's curiosity peaked and he formally took up the quest that he had been informally pursuing for years discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and AdFree podcasts presented by world-renowned historians all from history hit watch them on your smart TV or on the-go with your mobile device download the app now to explore everything from the wonders of ancient Pompei and the Mystery of the princes in the tower to the life of Anne Belin and D-Day sign up via the link in the description he started a study group to test out the idea a that the Garden of Eden was a real place and discover where that place was if he couldn't convince his own students his ideas were right he wouldn't be able to convince anyone we met in his office cuz there were like five of us we talked about some of these things it made a lot of sense to him and it didn't take him long to talk us into seeing the logic of it and he at that point he was still our professor he wasn't somebody I'd spent 20 years working with he was my professor so clearly he knew something zarin's starting point was the Bible itself and its first oldest part the Book of Genesis well I should perhaps explain that the Bible has two accounts of Creation The Garden of Eden story is the second one and probably the earlier one The Story begins when God plants a garden Eastward in Eden there he made every tree that is Pleasant to the sight and good for food and of course in the middle of the garden he put the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil the story is one way of showing how the human world came to be as we know it or has the Israelites knew it and there was a kind of a test in the garden there are these two trees the Tree of Life which the first hum are not barred from eating from which gives immortality and the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil which gives some kind of wisdom and as every Sunday school student knows one day a serpent tempts Eve into eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge so she eats of the the tree of knowledge and gives some to her husband uh Adam who um weekly follows as punishment God casts Adam and Eve out of the garden and later destroyed Eden along with the rest of the Earth in the great biblical flood and yet ever since that day people have sought to find Eden or at least evidence that it truly existed the very text of the Bible actually provides some tantalizing clues about Eden's possible location Genesis 2:3 the famous story has some verses in verses 10 to 14 where a river is to come out of the Garden of Eden and it becomes four Headwaters and the rivers in question are tigers and Euphrates and we all know where they are they're the major rivers of Mesopotamia and the modern Iraq the other two rivers are called the Pichon and the gon unlike the Tigris and the Euphrates which still flow today no one knew where these other two rivers once ran or if they ever really existed it appears these two rivers have always been quite obscure even in biblical times in fact the first known mention of them is the Bible itself quite a bit more is said about those two rivers in the text which probably implies that the ancient Hebrews too though those Rivers were a bit more unknown and mysterious so required a bit of elaboration the Pichon is said to Encompass a mineral rich land called Hava and the guon is said to flow through a land called Kush some versions of the Bible translate Kush as [Music] Ethiopia locating these two rivers and where they joined with the Tigris and Euphrates to form the famous four head waters was the key to unlocking the mystery of Eden's position find the rivers and Zarin would find Eden what happens is it just says there were four rivers and it made one River and that's where the garden is I mean if everybody knew where the four rivers was the you know the biblical Scholars would have solved this question years [Music] ago the location of the Pichon and the guihan has baffled Scholars for centuries many medieval thinkers thought the Pichon might be the river Ganges India's holiest River as for the guon even today most biblical scholars believe that it refers to the River Nile now the text says the river gon flows around the whole land of kush and Kush everywhere else in the Old Testament means Nubia or the Sudan and Jewish tradition was very strongly convinced of that over many centuries it didn't deviate and the fact that it goes all the way around the land of kush which is the name for Sudan south of Egypt you know the Nile is the only important river there but that interpretation presented a serious problem the Nile isn't anywhere near The Tigress or the Euphrates so there is no place on Earth where it could join with them and the Pichon to form the all important four headquarters the location of the Garden of Eden the ancient isites knowledge of distant geography wasn't perfect their geography is a bit confused because we know that Nile doesn't really join up anywhere near the Targus Euphrates if the author of the Bible made such fundamental errors like connecting the Nile to the Euphrates how could they be trusted about anything else the Garden of Eden could be literally anywhere for hundreds of years Scholars have faced this exact problem and some of them found a very inventive solution they put the Garden of Eden wherever they wanted well a president of Boston University no less in the 19th centur called William Warren who located the Garden of Eden at the North Pole Mormons locate the Garden of Eden in Jackson County Missouri in in the United States Columbus thought he'd found it by the orino river in Venezuela there were some who wanted located in China when if you think the garden was in in the East well put it into Far East but for Zarin the Bible's incoherent geography left him at a dead end if he tried to follow its directions to Eden he would be lost wandering in the wilderness forever it was the same fate that had befallen every Eden seeker of the past but zarn found a way around the impass his solution was to abandon his Bible studies and turn instead to a more traditional academic discipline history Zarin knew that the word Eden had come from the world's first civilization the Sumerians Suma also happens to be the one place where two of the four biblical Rivers the Tigris and the Euphrates touch this offered Zarin and his group another Avenue to explore the Sumerians were the world's first people to use writing and by recording their thoughts for posterity they quite literally invented history they created writing in order to make sure who got what what came from who who did it who paid taxes and who didn't so somebody didn't say I paid I didn't pay oh I can't remember did I pay did I not pay now they're writing it down they're going no it says you didn't right although writing was invented as a means of bookkeeping the Sumerians quickly found it was a useful tool for recording other ideas later on they got around to writing out things like people were sitting around thinking great thoughts and try and wrote down their stories yeah one of those stories was a particular importance to the Eden Project a tale that quite possibly is the world's oldest written story every culture be it a literate culture or a non-literate culture has a creation story has a story that says this is how we came to be this is what happened and if you look at that root Story the oldest written version of a creation story comes to us from the Sumerians the story the Sumerians wrote is known as the Epic of Gilgamesh and it has some shocking similarities to the story of Eden similarities which would help guide Zarin on his quest Gilgamesh was a king of Oro in Mesopotamia who was 2/3 God and 1/3 man and that was his problem because he was only 2/3 God he was not Immortal but destined to die like those of us who are 3/3 human he became overwhelmed with a sense of his own human mortality so he wanted to find the secret of immortality in his search for the secret of immortality Gilgamesh meets various characters who explain to him how humans came to be the Sumerians talk about man being created from clay which makes sense there are a river culture so what is the substance that's most useful and most abundant it's Clay men were created out of clay okay and as they were created out of clay then they said well now wait a minute we got to get women in here somehow so then we get we get women made out of men and then we put them in a place where people live forever or it was really nice and nobody got sick people lived at the bequest of God you know that's that kind of story when compared to the story of Eden this earlier creation story has a distinctly familiar ring Adam too was created out of clay and Eve was created out of Adam's Body and the Sumerian idea of a land where there is no unhappiness illness or death as an obvious parallel to the Garden of Eden itself the one difference is that the Sumerians did not call their version of paradise Eden they called it dilman dilman refers to a place it it's a specific place it's a settled Paradise it's an abundance blessings all blessings of nature sort of come together it's it's a a way to live without worry the similarities are uncanny even down to the way both dilman and Eden are eventually destroyed in a great flood so may has created from clay to serve the Gods in serving the gods man becomes annoying to the Gods and the God say oh we need to make this go away and they make it rain so there's a flood story someone is saved and they go on to then repopulate the Earth in the Sumerian version of the story the man who was saved and repopulates the Earth is not called Noah his name is utnapishtim and in return for saving Humanity one remorseful God grants him the gift of eternal life Gilgamesh is looking at this and saying well how do I get eternal life so he's going to go searching for it Gilgamesh the Sumerian god king seeks out utnapishtim hoping the old man will reveal the secret of living forever when they meet utnapishtim realizes that Gilgamesh is a hero worthy of immortality and tells him how to achieve it utnapishtim tells gilgames that the secret of immortality is for him to find the plant of life and to eat from this he also tells Gilgamesh that the plant will be underwater in the place where Paradise once stood the land of dilman this is a clue to Scholars to say well where is he searching for this and he answer is the land of dilman which is the land of paradise after an Epic Journey Gilgamesh reaches dilman but just when he has immortality within his grasp disaster strikes he finds this plant of life in the water and he's just going to grasp it and consume it but unfortunately for him a serpent snatches it away first and the serpent rejuvenates itself this tale of humankind being offered the chance of eternal life only to have it snatched away is of course exactly the same fate that befalls Adam and Eve there is a moral in this story that immortality is something just beyond on hum's grasp and there was a similar theme in the garden of Eden's story that the human beings were originally not debarred from eating of the tree of life but because they disobeyed God and at of the tree of knowledge they are cast out of the garden and lose the chance of eating of the tree of life so in a sense are doomed from the chance of having an immortal existence in this life as far as zarn was concerned it was clear that the story of Eden was nothing more than a Hebrew interpretation of the Epic of Gilgamesh I would say it was the same thing because Adam transgresses and Eve and so they're they're punished by having mortality and I have to work for a living when ancient Hebrews heard these Sumerian stories Zarin believes they decided to make them their own and put them in the Bible the biblical story changed the Mesopotamian story if you like it Moniz it so it is not simply taking over a pagan story it's now only one God who brings the flood and delivers a flood hero there's a proper reason for the flood is because of humans sin unfortunately the story itself did not seem to offer any obvious Clues to Eden's loccation it seemed like yet another dead end but there was one thing that offered Zarin a glimmer of hope the name the Sumerians used for their version of paradise dilman if he couldn't find Eden perhaps he could find dilman zarn was not the first person to make the connection between Eden and dilman ever since the Sumerian language was first decrypted Scholars have suggested that the two places might somehow be linked dilman is interesting because it's debated is supposed to be this idealized paradise this this special place that's very Advanced where civilization culture th dve it would be like an Atlantis we have this this mystery place where these incredible advances happen as far as anyone knew dilman was just a myth a parable that had no basis in fact if that were true then Eden too was never likely to have been a real place Zarin however knew that dilman was not simply a figment of the imagination it was a real place in fact he was one of the people who discovered it in the 1970s now in the Quest for Eden Zarin found himself revisiting his earlier work Yuri was in the field going to all these places looking for evidence of early civilization stone tools so he was looking for these things and I don't know if it sparked in his mind then or it sparked later as he came back and processed more and more of what he had seen but it it came together by the time I had had began to study with him as a cohesive idea Zarin and his colleagues found evidence of a civilization a string of trading centers that once thrived along the Eastern shores of Arabia today evidence of this culture can still be seen on the Arabian island of Bahrain when we began to work in Saudi Arabia we helped discover that and it it's a very very rich region this discovery came as something of a surprise considering that today the area is little more than a vast empty desert it was a place where different people congregated it was the ancient Hong Kong people had good stuff coming from everywhere crucially Zarin discovered that Sumerian Traders had visited this land and recorded the name of it as dilman the Sumerian cities became actively interested in trade with any place that they could possibly trade with so they go they're looking for raw materials they bring raw materials back to Sumer make nice things sell them back to them at a profit so they were in the Gulf as soon as the Sumerians start riding They Ride bingo dilman so we know that but why would the Sumerians think of this run-of-the-mill trading center as a paradise the answer May lie with the distance between dilman and Suma It could only be reached by sea and even then only the most Intrepid sailors ever went there just like Sailors throughout history they brought home Tall Tales of this far away land you know how Sailors are they love places that are far away Sailors don't talk about home they talk about distant places they can impress people where they've been they found this place in the Gulf with this beautiful water and they start talking about it the Sumerian Sailors told of a place that was not only rich and magnificent but Lush unlike the dry hard scrubble land of Suma dilman was verdant and green it's exotic to the Samaran but not exotic to local people so you know they just make a transference so what it was how beautiful it was over time Sumerians came to think of dilman as a special place so much so they assumed it was the very place where humankind was first created zarn had started with a cryptic biblical Legend history in the form of the world's oldest story allowed him to link Eden to the Sumerian Paradise of dilman archaeology had helped him discover the dilman was a real place yet still the dilman that zarin's discovered was nothing more than a desert trading Outpost there seemed nothing to support the idea of it being green and beautiful another roadblock on the way to the Garden of Eden to get past it zarn gave up on the idea of scouring the historical record and turned instead to hard science his undergraduate work was in geology so he has a background in hard science as well which is again what makes him interesting because of all of of Yuri's different talents he brings it all together and then is like I said a much better Storyteller because he can actually look at something both scientifically and as an anthropologist or archaeologist would the Quest for Eden turned to the physical landscape of Eastern Arabia and to the thorny question of the two missing Rivers the guon and the Pichon if zarn could not find them then his whole Quest would come to nothing we know the Tigers and Euphrates clearly are in Iraq at this point in time the question was where would you get two other rivers that connect up with that and that's where the science comes in there was no obvious way to break this impass then an answer came from the heavens about the time that zarn was in the thick of his quest a revolutionary new technology came online satellite imagery NASA had recently launched lat a satellite designed to photograph the planet in its entirety for the first time today the kind of imagery is commonplace but in the 1980s it was revolutionary you have to remember that in the late ' 8s remote sensing was just beginning and as a result of that we're getting our first pictures our first lands side images were just beginning to to pop up but simply getting hold of these images would be a challenging quest in itself this was cuttingedge technology a professor at an obscure Midwestern College chasing a legend was very much at the back of the queue s image is really difficult to get a hold of because first they weren't that readily available you have to beg people to produce this map for me luckily zarn had a friend at Nasa who snuck him some early low-resolution pictures at last zarn was closing in on his goal for the first time he and his students could see the land of dilman in a way that had literally never been seen before it certainly changed things if you're looking at an overview if you're looking down on something like you would do with a lat photo it's much more clear than if you're standing on the ground so yes it made a tremendous [Music] difference a careful study of the images revealed a shocking Revelation a river or more specifically a dry Channel Snak through Eastern Saudi Arabia it clearly marked where a river would once have flowed when you put the cellum you you can just generally see it you're going like this is it and then you start drawing where the other rivers are it really makes sense it was the Breakthrough that Zarin had been seeking since his journey began now as well as the Tigris and the Euphrates he had found a third River the pichan the river originates in Northwest Saudi Arabia it's called the ARA and it has many multiple branches and it comes down kind of comes around a little bit then it starts swinging North and now the Arabs call it the W botton belly button River and it comes around and it makes a huge Delta by Kuwait this would be the Pyon from the ground this Dry River channel the Pichon is all but impossible to see it would appear as nothing more than a slight depression in the sand you would have no idea you'd just be like oh more desert you know you couldn't picture it as Lush and fertile but using detailed images obtained from lat's camera this former River stood out clearly and then you look down and you're like wait a minute that's oh and that at one time this was all water when it was in full flow the people of dilman would have had a Perpetual water source and there would have been plenty of food along the banks it would have been a place of Abundant Life when you realize that a dried up River bed it was actually once a water source that changes the whole lay of the land and that's that's a Ure moment however there was a problem the river Zarin discovered clearly provided a source of water to the Sumerian version of Eden dilon but something was missing the place where it connected to the tigress and the Euphrates s showed no evidence of ever being the beautiful Lush Garden described in the Bible story and also where was the fourth River the gon it looked like yet another dead end but having come so far zarn wasn't about to give up reviewing all his evidence zarn had a revelation he was looking for a place that existed thousands of years ago so perhaps he should not simp look for where the biblical Rivers flowed but when he quickly realized that the last time the Pichon had any water in it was 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age it was an Ice Age River all of all of Arabia was drained by three huge rivers in the Ice Age and gradually in what we call the Neolithic period they dried up and they weren't as extensive so when they connected up obviously the landscape was different and so now you have to figure out when that was the answer is about 5 6,000 BC this element of timing is important for two reasons first back when this River was still flowing the region of the Persian Gulf looked quite different to how it does today in fact at that time there was no Persian Gulf it was dry land the gulf is and during the last SI AG was completely dry land because sea level fell about 200 feet and the the deepest part of the gulf is 12 ft you figure it out it's all dry if there was no water in the Persian Gulf then the combined Waters of the Tigris Euphrates and the Pichon must have continued flowing for many more miles Beyond where they meet the sea today they would have combined to form one Great River just as described in the Bible the rivers connect up ahead of what is today would just south or near bosra that's where they would connect up and now you can't see it because the gulf's higher than what it is now but there was another more important factor 8,000 years ago the climate of the region was totally different at that time Monsoon rains which today only reach the southernmost tip of Arabia would have covered the the whole Peninsula with life-giving rain it was this rain that fed the Pichon allowing it to flow all year around more importantly the land around the river would not have been a harsh desert it would have been Lush and green this is why the Sumerians thought of dilman as the birthplace of humanity because it was a paradise land of Eden there would have been a step land with lots of little way sees Marsh lands just like Southern Iraq was to many people for a long time after that it's a beautiful area you got lot got water you got resources You Got Mud you can build houses you got Reeds animals plants you got it all but although it would have undoubtedly been Eden likee was this actually the Eden without the Fourth River the guon it couldn't be the Bible describes the ghon as flowing through the land of kush for centuries most Scholars believed Kush referred to an area in East Africa in fact the King James version of the Bible even uses the word Ethiopia but Zarin knew there was a different interpretation Kush could also be a reference to the area around the zarros mountains located in Modern Day Iran then they said oh the the guihan it comes out of land of K and they go well now that he was explaining to you that kush is another word for Iran see you have to know that as it happens there is a major river that still flows out of the zarros mountains the land of kush today it is called the karon the Kon river which comes out of Iran is still there still carries water comes out of Zagros until it was damned in the 1970s it too connected with the tigress and the Euphrates at the exact place where the newly discovered Pichon also joins these rivers form the so-called four Headwaters that flowed Southward to form one Great River Zarin believed this was the location of the Garden of [Music] [Applause] Eden this last Discovery was the final proof Zarin needed for his theory several times he was close to failure it was only by combining his knowledge across so many disciplines that he was able to finally solve this ancient puzzle that's something that's a little bit unique to Yuri and that his background is diverse enough that he can put it together in a in a bigger picture which is that creative aspect of being multi-disciplinary because of all of of Yuri's different talents you know he brings it all together and he's just a much better Storyteller but like the Maverick he is Uris Zarin refuses to take all the credit he believes his breakthrough only came thanks to the work of others across many different disciplines all he did was put these pieces of the puzzle together you think that's where it is and you you draw satisfaction from saying that you made it you pushed the ball forward a little bit because you add a lot more data and made people think about it not just from reading the text this was not the end of the quest Zarin refused to rest on his Laurels for him the location of the garden was not the most important thing he wanted to know how true the story in the Bible was and what it really meant putting together everything he had learned Lear so far it occurred to Zarin that the story was not really about how the first human beings were created instead it was about how human society was created the epoch defining moment when we humans stopped being hunter gatherers and started becoming Farmers The Garden of inor is an explanation how farming originated zarin's Theory rests on a radical notion the idea that the Garden of Eden was not the only one of its kind he believes that the whole region the land known as dilman was filled with eden-like places well the garden no different than any Oasis you see now in Arabia Arabia it's called an oasis because Subterranean water fractures and everything turns green attracts plants attracts humans attracts animals it's just a place where people congregate so this was a kind of a marshy green area that attracted animals plants and so on and and and original people according to Zarin the Garden of Eden was a home to prehistoric humans hunter gatherers who were able to survive purely from what they found growing [Music] naturally but as the last ice age ended the waters in the world's oceans began to rise eventually this Garden of paradise would have been Dred round in the flood in its place today we find the Persian Gulf it flooded the area and it flooded the Garden of Eden it's flood it's underwater now can't see it the floods forced humans to move northwards into the much harsher landscape of Mesopotamia that we are familiar with today there was no easy living here if people wanted food they had to grow it they had to become farmers and that meant using primitive technology to cultivate the land when people create uh inventions of some kind or another whether it's taming nature or inventing medals or writing you can never go back you just can't reverse technological progress and so it began with this idea of Agriculture being one of the first ideas of of change Zarin believes that the story of Eden was written as a lament for this extraordinary change and a yearning for the days of a simpler life the Advent of Agriculture was not described as a Great Leap Forward but as a sin Eve eating from the Tree of knowledge what happened was they fell they fell from Grace what is that what does that mean that means they transgressed against what God had provided they better and that's what we call the origin of Agriculture you know how to manipulate things now you know how to make plants grow you know what how to create animals and get natural selection in 1987 the results of zarin's work were published in Smithsonian Magazine very satisfying to to to have that feeling that there's an answer there's an explanation that is based in science as well as literature that you can put these two things together and tell a story that is very identifiable oh this is not so far off the mark this this works this makes more sense than just Poof Magic but once he put his ideas in the public sphere sarin discovered that many academics gave them short [Music] shrift urist aran's views I think uh have multiple problems attached to them the first is that the rivers Tigris and Euphrates flow down from the mountains of Armenia into the Persian Gulf area Genesis 2 says the rivers flow out of Eden and become for Headwaters so that implies they are going from a higher area down to the Persian Gulf area and so I think he's located The Garden of En at the wrong end even the ancient Hebrews knew that River don't flow upwards my rule is if people think it's crazy it's probably right you know academics being what they are they are get they wish they wrote it they don't pay any attention but perhaps surprisingly these theories were not so quickly rejected by people with a more religious disposition in fact many welcomed his work I would have expected particularly here in the Bible Belt Springfield is in the Bible Belt I would have expected backlash Yuri spoke to more Church groups was invited to more public venues where you would have thought they would have been hostile to his ideas and yet again he's such a good story teller it's not offensive he's in no way saying what you think is stupid he's saying here's a way to look at it scientifically and let your story be real and he was welcomed in many cases with with open arms it was kind of fun to watch I expected there to be more of a uproar the extraordinary Insight of Urus Zarin showed that the legend of the Garden of Eden might be more than just a parable it might be a true story a story of how Human Society came to be [Music]

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 212,190

Keywords: Eden's location, Eden's mythos, ancient legends, ancient manuscripts, ancient mysteries, ancient ruins, archaeology discoveries, biblical mysteries, civilization exploration, forbidden knowledge, historical accuracy, historical debates, historical documentaries, historical investigations, lost civilizations, mysterious places, mythology, paradise exploration, religious history

Id: WCDDnFywvYA

Length: 51min 12sec (3072 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024