The Garden of Eden:
Our next problem is to discover where the Adamic or Aryan race originated. According to the scriptures it began in Eden. But where was Eden? Concerning the location of Eden we read in Genesis 2:10-14:
�And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into fur heads. The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasses the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates. Because the Euphrates is mentioned here people have assumed that Eden must have been located on the banks of the historic Euphrates river in Mesopotamia; but as the Euphrates and the Tigris merge into one river, the situation in no wise corresponds to the description given in Genesis, which states that one river went out of Eden and divided into four heads. If we wish to accept the Bible statement as descriptive and authoritative, we are compelled to look elsewhere for a group of four rivers originating from one source.
Such a location of four rivers starting from one source we find on the Pamir plateau in Central Asia, between the Tian Shan mountains on the north and the Hindu Cush on the south. Cush is the original word for Ethiopia and is a word older than the division of languages. From the lakes of that plateau issue four great rivers: the Indus, the Jaxartes, the Oxus, and Tarim. The Oxus is still called by the natives the Dgihun or Ghon; the Chitral branch of the Indus answers the description of the Pison; the Jaxartes is the original Euphrates; and the Tarim going toward the east is in all probability the Hiddekel.
Concerning this identification, Professor S.H. Buchanan on pages 125 and 126 of his work, The World and the Book, quotes the great french Orientalist, M. Renan:
�If we search to determine the country which best satisfies the geography of the first chapters of Genesis, it is necessary to avow that all conducts us to the region of the Imaus, where the most solid inductions place the cradle of the Aryan Race. There is found, as in the Paradise of Genesis, gold, precious stones, bdellium. This point is that of the world of which one is able to say with the most truth that four of rivers issue from the same source. Four immense currents of water: the Indus, the Helmend, the Oxus, and the Gaxarles, take there their rise, flowing in directions the most opposite. The second chapter of Genesis presents to us a traditional geography which has no connection with the ordinary geography of the Hebrews; but which, on the contrary, offers the most astounding resemblance with the Turanian system. The Pison, which issues from the Garden of Eden, situated in the East, is very probably the high Indus, and the country of Havilah, seems well to be the country of Darada towards Chachmises, celebrated for its riches. The Gihon is the Oxus, and it is without doubt by substitution of more modern names that we find the Tigri and Euphrates at the side of the other rivers indicated. Thus, all invites us to place the Eden of the Semites ate the point of the separation of the waters of Asia at the umbilici of the world, toward which, as with index finger, all the races seem to point as that recognized in their most primitive traditions.�
Sir Gaston Maspero, late director-general of Egyptian antiquities in his Ancient History of the Orient, also identifies the Pamir plateau as the location of the Garden of Eden. His quotation is also taken from Professor Buchanan�s book, pp. 124-125:
�All have preserved, mixed with the vague legends of their infancy, the memory of a primitive country where their ancestors had lived before their dispersion. This was a high mountain, or better, an immense plateau of a square figure, and so elevated that it seemed as if suspended between the heavens and the earth. From the interior flowed a great river, which soon divided itself into four arms or canals, spreading out over the four surrounding countries. There was the umbilici of the world and the cradle of humanity. The people settled between the Mediterranean and the Tigris located this legendary country in the East. The people of ancient Persia and India conceived it situation in the North. The moderns have succeeded in determining its site more exactly than the ancients had done. They have placed it in the mountains of Belurtag, near the point where the chain unites with the Hamalaya. There in effect, and there only, is found a country that satisfies all the geographic descriptions preserved in the sacred books of Asia. From the Plateau of Pamir, or better, from the mountain mass of which this plateau is the center, four great rivers issue, the Indus, the Helmend, the Oxus, and the Gaxares, which flow in direction the most diverse corresponding sufficiently to the four rivers of tradition.�
This plateau of Pamir all the people of Asia consider to be the original Eden and the central part of the world as Professor Renan tells us, quoted by Buchanan, pp. 123-124:
�Thus everything invites us to place the Eden of the Semites (Aryans) in the mountains of Belurtag, at the point where this chain unites with the Himalaya, toward the Plateau of Pamir... We are conducted to the same point, according to Brunoff, by the most ancient and authentic texts of the Zend-Avesta. The Hindu traditions also contained in the Mahabbarata and the Puranas, converge to the same region. There is the true Meru (Ararat) (of the Hindus), the true Albordj (of the Persians), the true river Arvanda, from which all rivers take their source, according to Persian tradition. There, according to the opinions of almost all the populations of Asia, is the central point of the world, the umbilici, the gate of the universe. There is the Uttarakura; �the country of happiness,� of which Magesthanes writes. There is, finally the point of common attachment of the primitive geography, both of the Semitic and the Indo-European races.�
The Pamir plateau of today is of course a different place from what it was five or six thousand years ago. At that time the whole of Asia was lower than it is today; at that time a large inland sea covered the steppes of southern Siberia, of which the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea are remnants; and over the now frozen steppes of northern Siberia roamed the mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger.
All the indications are that northern Siberia then had a semi-tropical climate, and ideal conditions prevailed on the Pamir Plataea. A study of our map shows that his plateau occupies a unique position; it is called �the roof of the world� and forms the watershed of Asia. The plateau itself has today an altitude of 15,000 feet, and upon it stand peaks 10,000 feet higher. Four great rivers derive their waters form the valleys or Pamirs, the lakes and glaciers of that region.
The main branch of the Amu Daria or Oxus forms an outlet to Lake Victoria, several others of its tributaries flowing also from the plateau, as seen on our map. The Oxus is still called by the natives the Gihun. Both the Chitral and the Gilgit branches of the Indus. have their origin close to Lake Victoria on the southern side of the Pamirs, and so also has the Yarkand River, which together with the Kashgar forms the Tarim River.
The Tarim river, as will be seen, has no outlet towards the sea, but disappears in the Tarim Basin at a place that is five hundred feet below sea level. This Tarim Basin is the greatest sinkhole in the world, although it is surrounded by the highest mountain peaks in the world; yet its floor lies in many paces below the level of the Indian Ocean, indicating that a great cataclysm tore the earth here in a bygone age.
The northern branch of the Tariom, the Kashgar River, flows out of the Alai valley on the northern end of the Pamir Plateau and not far form where a branch of the Oxus originates. From the same valley also flows in a northerly direction a branch of the Syr Daria or Jaxartes River, whose name indicates that it is probably the original Euphrates of the ancients. The Helmend, which Renan and Maspero identify with the Hindkel does not have its origin on the Pamir plateau, but starts several hundred miles south of it in a valley of the Hindu Kush; but it is probable that the Kashgar river is the original Hiddekel, flowing towards the East.
Only the Pamir Plateau answers to the geographical conditions described in Genesis 4:10: �A lake also sprang up in Eden to supply the Garden with waters, and from there it divided and became four rivers.� Fenton translation of the Bible. Such a condition exists nowhere else in Asia, four streams coming from one group of Alpine lakes, which may once have been one lake; and all the people of Asia look with awe to the �forbidden Pamirs� as a place of the original Paradise. There on the �roof of the world{ is located the mythical Taurus or Alai mountains, the legendary Chinese Ques Kio or Lake of Stars and the Rang Kul or Dragon�s Lake, from which the Serpent is said to have come.
Today the Pamir Plateau is uninhabited. Its high altitude of 15,000 feet or more makes it too inhospitable a place to live in; and, covering a territory of about 180 by 180 miles, it forms a blank and mysterious spot on the map of Asia.
The fact that the Tarim Basin,, lying just east of the Great Pamirs, as the homeland of the Adamites; both locations and their peculiarities make it evident that the cradle of the Adamic or Aryan race was located in these mysterious mountain fastnesses of Central Asia.
However, there are still more evidences from other sources, and indeed very substantial ones, that direct us to Central Asia as the homeland of the Aryan race; and those evidences are furnished by the roots of various languages, all of them tracing their parent stock to the Aryan.
Chambers Encyclopedia, under �Aryan Race and languages,� says:
�The evidence on which a family relation has been established among these nations is that of language. Between Sanskrit (the mother of the modern Hindu dialects of Hindustan), Zend (the language of the ancient Persians), Greek (which is yet the language of Greece), Latin (the language of the Romans, and the mother of the modern Romaic languages; i.e., Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese,, Rumanian). Celtic (once the language of great part of Europe) now confined to Wales and parts of France, Ireland, and Scotland), Gothic (which may be taken as the ancient type of the Teutonic or German languages; including English, and of the Scandinavian), and Slavonic (spoken in a variety of dialects all over European Russia and a great part of Austria), the researches of philology have within the 19th century established such affinities as can be accounted for only by supposing that the nations who originally spoke them had a common origin.
No one of these nations, existing or historical, can claim to be the parent nation of which the others were colonies except the Hebrew. The relation among the languages mentioned is that of sisters; daughters of one mother, which perished, as it were, in giving them birth. No monuments of this mother-language have been preserved, nor have we any history or even tradition of the nation that spoke it. That such a people existed and spoke such a tongue is an inference of comparative philology, the process of reasoning being analogous to that followed in the kindred science of geology...By skillful interpretation of their indications, aided by the light of all other available monuments, he is able to spell but, with more or is probability, the ethnical records of the past, and thus obtain a glimpse here and there into the gray cloud that rests over the dawn of the ages.
�When these linguistic monuments are consulted as to the primitive seat of the Aryan nations, they point to Central Asia, somewhere probably east of the Caspian, and north of the Hindu Kush and Paropamisan Mountains. There, at a period long anterior to all European history; while Europe was perhaps only a jungle, or, if inhabited at all, inhabited by tribes akin to the Finns, or perhaps to the American Indians; dwelt that mother-nation of which we have spoken.
�From this center, in obedience to a law of movement which has continued to act through all history, successive migrations took lace towards the northwest. The first swarm formed the Celts, who seem at one time to have occupied a great part of Europe; at a considerably later epoch came the ancestors of the Italian, the Greeks, and the Teutonic peoples. All these would seem to have made their way to their new settlements though Persia and Asia Minor, crossing into Europe by the Helleport, and partly, perhaps. Between the Caspian and the Black Sea (as recorded in Esdras). The stream that formed the Slavonic nations is thought to have taken the route by the north of the Caspian...
�In the most ancient Sanskrit writings (the Veda), the Hindus style themselves Aryas; and the name may be preserved in the classic Arii, a tribe of ancient Persia, and in the idstrit Ariana. Ariana is evidently an old Persian word, preserved in the modern native name of Persia, Airan or Iran. Arya, in Sanskrit, signifies �excellent,� �honorable,� originally �lord of the soil,� form a root ar (Lat. Arare, �to plow�), distinguishing tillers (earers) of the earth from the nomadic Tuarians.�
All this evidence, should suffice to identify the Aruan with the Adamic race and thus explain satisfactorily the distinctive superiority of the White Race above the primitive races.
(Taken, in part, from Tracing Our Ancestors, by Frederick Haberman, pp. 9-15)