Location of Garden of Eden
The Biblical description of the garden says:
Currently a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the very first is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.[...] The name of the second river is Gihon; it flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris; it flows east of Assyria And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
There have been a number of claims as to the actual geographic location of the Garden of Eden, though many of these have little or no connection to the text of Genesis. Most put the Garden somewhere between Najaf and Kufa in Iraq in the Middle East.
Sumer and Dilmun
Some of the historians working from inside the cultural horizons of southernmost Sumer, where the earliest surviving non-Biblical source of the Biblical account lies, point to the quite genuine Bronze Age entrepo^t of the island Dilmun (theorized by quite a few to be Bahrain) in the Middle / Near East, described as 'the area where the sun rises' and 'the Land of the Living'.
The setting of the Babylonian creation narrative, Enu^ma Elish, has clear parallels with the Genesis narratives.
Shortly after its actual decline, beginning about 1500 BC, Dilmun developed such a reputation as a long-lost garden of exotic perfections that it may have influenced the story of the Garden of Eden.
Some translators have attempted to establish an Edenic garden at the trading-center of Dilmun.
Under the Persian Gulf
The Genesis creation narrative relates the geographical location of both Eden and the garden to four rivers (Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, Euphrates), and three regions (Havilah, Assyria, and Kush). While the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are renown the Pishon and Gihon are not known at all. Gihon is sometimes identified with the Karun River of Iran that flows into the Shatt al-Arab below Basra. Kush is sometimes associated with Egyptian Kush, but it is also associated with the Kossaei, the homeland of the Kassites (Kashshu), in the Zagros Mountains.
Regarding the Pishon on the location of Eden in Genesis 2:10 says: "And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into ftheir heads. The name of the very first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah".
Havillah is thought to have been the Arabian shore of the Persian Gulf.
Satellite photos of the place shows that before 4,000 BCE there was a river that drained into the Persian gulf at that area, now called Wadi Ramah and Wadi Batin. Dr. Juris Zarins, the Latvian-American Professor of Southwestern University believes that the Garden of Eden lies in the vicinity, presently under the headwaters of the Persian Gulf, and he further believes that the story of Adam and Eve in-and especially out-of the Garden is a highly condensed and evocative account of the shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture.
The story of Eden, Zarins believes, came about 6500 B.C. during the Neolithic Wet Phase when rains returned to the Gulf region.
The reaches of eastern and northeastern Saudi Arabia and southwestern Iran became green and fertile again. Foraging populations came back to where the four rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, Karun (Gihon) and Wadi Ramah (Pishon) now ran full, and there was rainfall on the intervening plains.
Animal bones indicate that in this period Arabia had abundant game. Thousands of stone tools suggest intensive, if seasonal, human occupation around now dry lakes and rivers.
These tools are located even in the Rub al-Khali or Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. This region was believed to be the homeland of the Proto-Sumerians. Both "Eden" and the word "Adam" also abounded in cuneiform, the latter meaning something like "settlement on the plain".
Even though both words were set down first in Sumerian, along with place names like Ur and Uruk, they are not Sumerian in origin.
They are believed to be older.
The Assyriologist Benno Landsberger proposed that these names were all linguistic remnants of a pre-Sumerian people who had already named rivers, cities-and even some specific trades like potter and coppersmith-prior to the Sumerians appeared.
Landsberger called the pre-Sumerian language simply Proto-Euphratian, and it is believed to be associated with the beginning of farming.
Other scholars suggest that its speakers were the members of the Ubaid culture that spread southwards around the Persian Gulf.
The existing place names and words for farming and other crafts were incorporated into Sumerian and written down for the very first time.
And in managing the mythology the lush and lovely spot called Eden was codified by being written. Zarins writes "Adam and Eve were heirs to natural bounty.
They had everything they needed. But they sinned and were expelled.
How did they sin? By challenging God's very omnipotence.
In so doing they represented the agriculturists, the upstarts who insisted on taking matters into their own hands, relying upon their knowledge and their own skill sets rather than on His bounty." The 5.9 kiloyear event saw this area revert to the desert it is today.
His theory is supported by C. A. Schlabach.
Tabriz (Iran-South Azerbaijan)
David Rohl suggests that the land of Eden was a vast area alluded to in ancient Sumerian texts as the Edin (lit. "plain" or "steppe"), north of Mesopotamia beyond the Zagros Mountains.
The Garden of Eden was then found in a long valley "in the east of Eden," to the north of Sahand volcano, close to Tabriz.
He cites multiple geographical similarities and toponyms which he believes match the biblical description.
These similarities include: the close toby headwaters of the four rivers of Edin, the Tigris (Heb. Hiddekel, Akk. Idiqlat), Euphrates (Heb. Perath, Akk. Purattu), Gaihun-Aras (Heb., Gihon), and Uizun (Heb. Pishon); the mountain range of Kusheh Dagh (the land of Cush); and Upper and Lower Noqdi (the Land of Nod).
In his book From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible, Eric H. Cline says "his suggestions have not caught on with the scholarly establishment.
His argument is not helped by the fact that it depends upon speculations regarding the transmission of place-names for both the several rivers and close toby related areas from antiquity to the present.
In the end, while Rohl’s suggestion is not out of the question, it seems no more probable than any other hypothesis, and less likely than those suggested by Speiser, Zarins, and Sauer."
Jerusalem
Many religious traditions identify the location of the garden of Eden with the city of Jerusalem, in particular Gihon Spring.