The Baltic Eden
Index
- Introduction
- Where was Ethiopia really located?
- The four rivers of Eden
- Eden and Colchis
- Other myths
- Conclusions
Introduction
In the second chapter of the book of Genesis we find the story of the creation of man and the description of his primordial "habitat", a "garden" located in the region of Eden, from which, the biblical author informs us, four rivers originate:
A river came out of Eden to water the garden, then divided from there and formed four courses. The first river is called Pison: it flows around all the country of Avila, where there is gold and the gold of that land is fine; here is also the odorous resin and the onyx stone. The second river is called Ghicon: it flows around the whole country of Ethiopia. The third river is called the Tigris: it flows east of Ashur. The fourth river is the Euphrates.Genesis, 2, 10-14
But where was this region located? Apparently, it shouldn't be difficult to trace: we know that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers both arise from the mountains of eastern Turkey; therefore, not far from there will also be found the sources of the other two rivers and, therefore, the biblical Eden.
In reality, the matter is not so simple: not only, in fact, does exist no "Pison" and no "Ghicon" in that region, but this last river, according to the biblical text, would even wet Ethiopia, therefore it would be found on a different continent (Africa) than the Tigris and Euphrates!
Various authors, over the centuries, have tried to identify these two mysterious streams: for example, Josephus Flavius (Jewish Antiquities, I, 38-39) states that the Greeks call the Pison "Ganges" and the Ghicon "Nile ”. However, the sources of these two rivers are very distant from those of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and even thousands of kilometers away from each other. Even the hypotheses proposed later are not able to fully solve the incongruities of the biblical description.
The dilemma would therefore seem to have no solution. There is, however, one last possibility: that the Genesis sentence quoted above actually refers to ... a completely different location! But which one, exactly? We will see that Ethiopia, which appears "out of place" in the description, is the key to solve the issue.
Where was Ethiopia really located?
Ethiopia is mentioned, as well as in the Bible, also in Greek mythology: In the Iliad, for example, we read:
“However, Zeus went towards the Ocean, towards the spotless Ethiopians / yesterday he left for a lunch; and all the gods followed him"(I, 423-424)
and
"I go [who speaks is the goddess Iris] on the ocean currents / of the Ethiopians to the land, where they do hecatombs / to the gods, may I also have part in the offerings”(XXIII, 205-207)
And in the Odyssey:
“But Poseidon went among the distant Ethiopians / the Ethiopians who are divided in two, the extremes of men / those of the falling sun and those of the rising sun”(I, 22-24)
Now, as noted by the engineer Felice Vinci in his book Omero nel Baltico, the world described in the Homeric poems presents numerous inconsistencies with the Mediterranean, where it is commonly assumed that the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Instead, it perfectly match the geography of the Baltic-Scandinavian area.
According to Vinci's reconstruction, it was here that the Achaean civilization flourished, in a period in which the region enjoyed a much milder climate than the current one, precisely the "Atlantic phase" of the so-called "postglacial climatic optimum", which lasted from 5500 to about 2000 BC. Following the stiffening of the climate, around 1500 BC, the Achaeans would have migrated southwards bringing with them their "baggage" of myths, which they would then have transposed into the Mediterranean, assigning the same names to the new localities as their original locations. This migration, in reality, would have involved the majority of peoples defined as "Indo-European": already at the beginning of the 20th century Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an Indian scholar, had shown how the Vedas (Indian sacred texts) describe astral configurations (such as the spring equinox in the Orion's constellation) and astronomical phenomena (for example "dawns" lasting 30 days) which would have been visible only north of the Arctic Circle, in a period between 4500 and 2000 BC. So also the Arii, the Indo-European people who settled in India, were most likely originally from Northern Europe, and like them probably other Indo-European peoples.
So where to place the Ethiopia described by Homer? It too, like the other localities mentioned in the two poems, will be inserted in a Nordic context: the expression "extreme among men" used in relation to the Ethiopians could refer to the fact that they inhabited the regions of the extreme north, while the the fact that there were "those of the falling sun and those of the rising sun" could indicate the existence of two tribes, one western and one eastern. The "Ocean river" where they lived is wittily identified by Vinci with the Gulf Stream, a real river that flows into the sea, and which from the Atlantic Ocean goes as far as the Norwegian coast. Probably, therefore, the ancient Ethiopians resided in the northern tip of present-day Norway,
Nor are the Homeric poems the only ones to suggest such a location for Ethiopia: in fact, in the Greek myth of Perseus, the hero goes to Ethiopia, where he frees Andromeda from a sea monster that was about to devour her, immediately after having killed Medusa in the land of the Hyperboreans (which the Greeks placed in the far north). And Virgil himself, who lived in Italy in the first century BC, perhaps had reminiscences of ancient Homeric geography when he wrote:
"By the ocean shores and the setting sun / there is the last strip of Ethiopia, where the maximum Atlas / holds the precious vault of burning stars on his shoulder”(Aeneid, IV, 480-482)
Finally, toponymic clues are not lacking: in the Nordkinn peninsula, in fact, there is the locality Hopseidet, which recalls the Greek word for Ethiopians, i.e. Aithiops. It is not known with certainty what this word means: since aithos means "fire" and ops "face", it was thought that the term indicated populations "with burnt faces", i.e. of black race. But ops can also mean "eye", "what appears": therefore Homeric Ethiopia could have been the land "where fire was seen", and this probably because during the polar night, which lasted about two months (more than in every other Scandinavian region), the fire had to be kept burning constantly to ensure illumination.
Now, on the basis of Vinci's studies, Luigi Cesetti, editor of the www.edenbaltico.com site, has hypothesized that the author of Genesis too, with the term "Ethiopia", refers to the same region indicated by Homer. This would also lead to locating the other places mentioned (and the rivers that flow there) in the neighboring area: Eden would therefore be located in Northern Europe!
At first glance, this hypothesis might appear outlandish: after all, the Bible and Greek mythology seem to have originated in completely different geographical and cultural contexts. In reality, a more careful comparison between Greek and Jewish civilization would lead to the discovery of unexpected convergences. First of all, in the Bible the Spartans and the Jews are defined as "brothers", as they are both descendants of Abraham's lineage (I Maccabees, 12, 21). Secondly, the echo of many biblical stories can be found in Greek myths: thus Abraham is about to sacrifice his son Isaac when an angel stops him and instead of Isaac a ram is sacrificed (Genesis, 22, 10-13), and in the same way Athamas is preparing to sacrifice his son Phryxus when Heracles stops him and Phryxus flees on the back of a ram; Jacob is capable of giving birth to cattle of a specific color (Genesis, 30, 37-40), just as Autolycus is capable of changing the color of the animals; Dan, progenitor of one of the twelve tribes of Israel, is the son of Jacob and the slave Bila (Genesis, 30, 4-6), while Danao, progenitor of the Greeks (therefore also called Danai), is the son of Belo; Potiphar's wife falls in love with Joseph and, rejected, slanders him (Genesis, 39, 7-18), and the same happens to Bellerophon, with whom Antea, wife of Proto, falls in love; little Moses is placed by his mother in a basket and left on the river (Exodus, 2, 3), and likewise little Perseus and his mother are locked up in a chest and abandoned at sea. In the light of the foregoing, the hypothesis that the biblical stories (and therefore the Jews themselves) would also have originated in Northern Europe may not be totally unfounded.
The four rivers of Eden
So if the Ethiopia mentioned in the Genesis is the same one Homer talks about, where are Eden and its four rivers? At this point, finding both of them is no longer so difficult…
Let's start right from the river that flows through Ethiopia, the Ghicon: it would correspond to the river called Tana in Norwegian, curiously homonymous with the most important lake in African Ethiopia and the longest river in Kenya. The northern Tana flows into the Tanafjord, east of the Nordkinn peninsula, after having traveled a good 256 km along the border between Finland and Norway, "all around" (as the Bible says) the "country of Ethiopia", i.e. the northern part of Norway: probably already in ancient times this river, the third of all Norway in terms of length, marked the (southern) border of northern Ethiopia, and for this reason it flowed "around" it.
The Pison River, which flows in the country of Avila, would instead correspond to the Ivalo, called Avvil in the language of the Sami, the indigenous people of Lapland.The Ivalo flows into the Inarijarvi (jarvi means "lake" in Finnish), from which originates another stream, the Pasvikelv, called Paatsjoki in Finnish (elvand jokiare the Norwegian and Finnish words respectively for "river" ), which flows into the Barents Sea.And at the mouth of this river is the Kirkenes peninsula, originally called in Norwegian Piselvnes, or "promontory of the river Pis".
The region bordered by the Ivalo/Avvil (and, further north, by the Pasvikelv/Paatsjoki) would therefore correspond to the biblical Avila.But the correspondences are not limited to toponymy: in fact, gold is actually found in that area, a particularly pure gold (no less than 23 carats!) just as the Bible tells us.We also find stones such as chalcedony and jasper, similar to the "onyx stone", and of course there is also the "odorous resin", produced by the numerous conifers of which the area is rich.Also in this case, the river flowed "around" the region of Avila probably because it delimited its eastern border, the western one probably being delimited by the Tana.
Finally, the northern equivalents of the Tigris and the Euphrates could be respectively the Kemijoki and the Tornionjoki, with their respective tributaries Ounasjoki and Muonionjoki.These rivers flow into the northern part of the Gulf of Bothnia and delimit a sort of "Finnic Mesopotamia" where perhaps the region of Assur mentioned in Genesis was located.The Muonionjoki/Tornionjoki, which today marks the border between Sweden and Finland, most likely represented their western border, the eastern one being formed by the Ounasjoki/Kemijoki (flowing “east of Assur”).Furthermore, near the mouth of the Kemijoki is the city of Kemi: but Kemi was also the Coptic name of Egypt (Kemet in the ancient Egyptian language), and also recalls the Egyptian city of Akhmim, called Chemmi in Greek.Moreover, Chemmi was also the name of a mythical island located in the delta of the Nile, where Isis allegedly hid her little son Horus to protect him from Seth; and actually near Kemi there are several islands, which are part of the Kemijoki delta.
Were the Egyptians (or at least a part of them) also of Nordic origin?This hypothesis is suggested among other things by the discovery of mummies ofblond or red-haired pharaohs, including for example the famous Ramses II;moreover, astudy published in 2005 highlighted the close genetic affinity (as regards mitochondrial DNA) between the Sami and the Berbers, a North African people with Europoid somatic traits, to which Ramses himself perhaps belonged.As regards instead the city of Chemmi, it was considered by its inhabitants, according to what Herodotus tells us (Histories, II, 91), the city of origin of Perseus. And again Herodotus informs us that according to the Persians, Perseus (their mythical ancestor) was "Assyrian" (ibid., VI, 54). The two statements might seem to contradict each other, but if we look at the position of the Finnish Kemi, we realize that it is located right in the vicinity of the region we have identified as Assur (Assyria)!Although the foundation of this city dates back to the 19th century, it cannot be excluded that the name (which means "plain for grazing") derives from that of a nearby locality inhabited in ancient times, which perhaps represented the "prototype" of the Egyptian Chemmi and in which, according to the myth, were born the ancestors of Perseus, "Assyrian" since he originated from the same "Assur" mentioned inGenesis .
So where was Eden located?It would correspond to the region of Enontekiö ("where great rivers are born"), called Eanodat in the Sami language: here, in fact, are the sources of the rivers we have seen (or of their tributaries), and therefore here we should locate the mythical "garden ” of which the biblical author speaks.In this area, near the border with Sweden and Norway, there is also Mount Saana, sacred to the Sami as Sinai to the Jews.Are the Sami the true Semites, the descendants of the biblical Shem, son of Noah?The Bible recounts the wanderings of Abraham and his descendants, who were nomads and lived in tents (see for exampleGenesis, 12, 8-9;13, 3, 18;20, 1)… just like the Sami!Clearly, the migrations and mixing of various peoples that occurred over the millennia make it difficult to establishwho actually lived in those places in antiquity;however, it is worth highlighting the "coincidences", more numerous than one might expect.
As we have seen, therefore, the passage fromGenesis quoted at the beginning of the article does not speak of fictional places: on the contrary, it describes the Lappish territory in an accurate, albeit concise manner, with the regions into which it was divided (perhaps towards the beginning of the fourth millennium BC) and their boundaries, delimited precisely by those rivers which are still today the most important in the area and perform the same function.
Eden and Colchis
The hypothesis of such a northern location of the biblical Eden could find further confirmation in Greek mythology: in fact, the mysterious region of Avila mentioned inGenesis is sometimes associated with Colchis, where the expedition of the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece. Colchis was an ancient region located east of the Black Sea, in today's Georgia, already known to ancient geographers as a region rich in precious metals, including gold. The main river of Colchis was the Phasis, called Phasis or Phasin in Greek. Does it remind you of anything? Of course: it is the biblical Pison!
All this could contradict what we have said so far regarding the northern location of the rivers of Eden, but in reality the "historical" Phasis and Colchis have almost nothing to do with the "mythical" Phasis and Colchis, their " prototypes” located in all likelihood much further north.Let's see why.
First of all, references to the mythical journey of the Argonauts (completely described for the first time only by Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century BC) are already found in Homer: for example in the Iliad (VII, 467-469) the son that Jason, chief of the expedition, had conceived in Lemnos, where the Argonauts had stopped during the journey, while in the Odyssey (XII, 69-72) reference is made to the passage of the ship Argo (hence the term "Argonauts") between Scilla and Charybdis. This suggests that this story too, like the other Homeric stories, is of Nordic origin.
Secondly, the itinerary followed by the Argonauts, in particular the return one, is totally meaningless if compared to the Mediterranean: in fact, before returning to Greece from Colchis (on the eastern coast of the Black Sea), they would have stopped on the island of Circe (in the Tyrrhenian Sea)! It is clearly an absurd journey, and it is no coincidence that there are many conflicting versions of this part of the story: in fact, once the memory of the original setting of the events narrated has been lost, various itineraries have been hypothesized (which included, for example, the ascent of the Danube and the Po) to make a geographically impossible journey in the Mediterranean plausible.But very possible, on the contrary, in Northern Europe: the ship Argo, having reached northern Scandinavia by river (perhaps passing through lakes Ladoga and Onega?), would later have sailed westward, reaching the island of Circe, which Vinci places along the Norwegian coast north of the Arctic Circle, and then south, back to the Baltic Sea.The location of Colchis in northern Lapland (where the biblical region of Avila would be located!) would be perfectly consistent with this path, as well as with the affirmations of the Greek poet Mimnermus, who relates the land of Aeetes (the king of Colchis) with the Ocean, where Jason would have sailed (Fragment 11W and 11a). Moreover, the Greek name of Colchis (Kolkhis listen) echoes in the Russian name of the Kola Peninsula (Kolsky), included in the Murmansk region of Russia, bordering northern Finland.
And the Fasi River? It is mentioned by Hesiod among the river-gods (Theogony, 338-345), together with other rivers never identified in the Mediterranean area, starting with the Eridanus, whose identification with the Po has always been very doubtful. The Phasis of which Hesiod speaks is therefore a mythical river, but this does not mean that it was non-existent: it simply must be placed, together with the others, in its real geographical context, that context in which "Greek" mythology itself originated: the Northern Europe, indeed. Therefore the "mythical" Phasis will be placed in an equally "mythical" Colchis, whose identification with the Avila mentioned in Genesis seems plausible enough. It could therefore correspond precisely to the Pasvikelv/Paatsjoki, which flows into the Barents Sea (therefore close to the Ocean, i.e. the Gulf Stream) and which we have identified (together with the Ivalo/Avvil) with the biblical Pison.
But the surprises don't end there. In fact, Herodotus informs us that "Colchis, Egyptians and Ethiopians are the only civilizations to practice circumcision from the very beginning" (Histories, II, 104) and that Colchis and Egyptians "are the only two civilizations to work flax in the same way. And overall their way of life, like their languages, resemble each other” (ibid., II, 105). Herodotus records the belief of the Egyptians that the Colchians were descended from a part of the army of King Senusrets (ibid., II, 104); however, this information is much more consistent with the hypothesis of a common origin of these peoples, probably to be found, as we have seen, in the north of the Scandinavian peninsula. Egyptians and Colchis would have originally been a single people, and during their migration towards the south (in all probability prior to the diaspora of Indo-European peoples), one part (the Colchis) would have settled along the shores of the Black Sea, while another (the Egyptians) would later continue on to Egypt. Moreover, an Egyptian presence in the Caucasian area had already been hypothesized in 1926 by the Egyptologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie, on the basis of toponymic traces found in that area.
Therefore, since like the Colchians, the Egyptians and the Ethiopians, also the Jews practiced circumcision (Genesis, 17, 9-14), a common origin (Nordic, in fact) of all these peoples appears even more plausible, and would represent a further confirmation of the hypothesis of the northern location of Eden.
Other myths
In summary, it is possible that the entire Indo-European civilization began in the extreme north of Europe, in the period between 4500 and 2000 BC: later, due to climate change, the Indo-European peoples would have migrated further south, at first perhaps remaining stationed around the Baltic Sea, and later, around 1500 BC, dispersing throughout the rest of Europe, Asia and Africa. If this hypothesis were correct and if the text of the Genesis represented a testimony of this ancient civilization, we should expect to find very similar stories among other peoples of Indo-European descent.
And indeed it is so: two significant examples can be found in Norse and Indian mythology.
According to Norse myths, the first man and woman, called Askr and Embla respectively, lived in the Midgardr ("central garden"). And while in the case of the biblical Eden two trees are mentioned, that of life and that of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis, 2, 9), in the Norse Midgardr the first two human beings are created from two tree trunks, and themselves represent two trees: the name Askr in fact means "ash" and Embla "elm". It should also be noted that Ymir, the giant from whose body the gods drew the world (including Midgardr, which was built from his eyebrows), was fed by a cow from whose udders flowed four rivers of milk.
In the Indian texts, on the other hand, we find the mythical region of Uttarakuru, whose description, although enriched with numerous fantastic details, still retains elements that can allow us to hypothesize its location. The Vayu Purana, for example, in chapters 42-43, describes Mount Meru and the four rivers that arise from it. Each river flows into a different ocean, heading towards one of the four cardinal points. Now, this geography, although "mythical", can find its counterpart in the Lappish area, bordered to the north by the Barents Sea, to the east by the White Sea, to the west by the Norwegian Sea and to the south by the Gulf of Bothnia. The region of Uttarakuru, where the river that flows into the northern ocean flows, could correspond to the Ethiopia mentioned by both Homer and the author of Genesis, just as Mount Meru could correspond to the biblical Eden. Moreover, a "Mount Meru" (a volcano, to be exact) is found in Tanzania, south of African Ethiopia: it was the northern Ethiopians, who migrated to Africa during the Indo-European diaspora, who gave it this name, as well as with the lake and the river Tana? Finally, it is curious to note that the name Uttarakuru means "Kuru of the North" and that in southern Finland there is a city named Kuru.
Therefore, the idea of a "lost homeland" was also rooted in other cultures than the Jewish one. And the homeland in question was a real place, the place where these peoples took their first steps and whose memory remained even after their migration to the south, albeit slowly fading. Obviously, these stories also have exquisitely mythical meanings, which however we are not interested in investigating here.
Conclusions
From the above, it is very probable that the mythical Garden of Eden is to be found among the lakes and rivers of Lapland rather than on the Turkish plateaus or in the Fertile Crescent. This location, suggested by geographical, toponymic and mythological clues, is also consistent with the hypothesis of the Nordic origin of the Indo-European civilization, whose development could have begun in that same region around the fourth millennium BC, curiously the very period in which biblical chronology dates the creation of Adam; an "Adam" who, however, should not be confused with the "man" mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis. Most likely, in fact, the first and second chapters of Genesis they refer to different events: one is the story of the real Creation, the other is a reminiscence of the primitive Indo-European world. The two stories then merged (and confused) with each other, but their different origin is confirmed by the different term to indicate the divinity, "Elohim" in the first and "Yahvè" in the second.
The "smoking gun", the archaeological proof, is still missing to definitively confirm this reconstruction. However, we must bear in mind that any civilizations that developed in Northern Europe around 4000 BC, although far from primitive, would probably have been less advanced than their Mediterranean "counterparts": as Vinci points out, for example, the Homeric Troy (which he places in present-day Finland) most likely had wooden walls; in short, a completely different thing from the mighty fortifications of the Mycenaean age. Therefore, the discovery in the Lappish area of archaeological remains attributable to an original "Indo-European civilization" may not be so easy. However, if archeology also confirmed the hypotheses suggested in this article, we would have definitive proof of the veracity of the biblical narrative, which would thus come to represent a precious historical testimony of a now lost Nordic world.
Note
This article is an english translation of the italian article "L’Eden Baltico" by Merlo Bianco. You can find the original article here: https://merlobianco.altervista.org/leden-baltico/
