Baku, March 16, AZERTAC

According to the Bible, within six days the God created the sky and the earth, then celestial bodies, sea and land dwellers and, finally, the man. In the East of Eden the God created a paradise garden and settled Adam there, who had to look after it. The garden was irrigated with a big river, which ran through entire Eden. Flowing outside the borders of Paradise, the river, as the Bible says, split into four main rivers of the world: Fisson, Gikhon, Haddekel and Perat (Euphrates). From Adam’s rib the God created a girlfriend for him, whom Adam called ‘Eve’. When Eve tasted the forbidden fruit, they were expelled from the Paradise and settled on the earth.

However, the location of Eden and the routes, which Adam’s descendants used for settling in various parts of the world, remained obscure, though this question has interested many people almost since the first days of Christianity.

A British writer and archaeologist David Rohl managed to put an end to these centuries-old researches and took the search for four rivers of the Bible as basis. Rohl summarized the results of his researches in 1998 in a fundamental work called “Legend: the Genesis of Civilization”, which became a world’s historical sensation and a best-seller translated into many languages of the world. At the same time, Discovery Channel shot a fascinating film using various space episodes. For us this discovery is not only sensational, but also especially signifıcant, as Eden and the place of origin of the world’s civilization was placed by the author onto the present-day territory of Southern Azerbaijan, in the frames of an ancient State of Manna (Urmia, according to Rohl, bore the name of Ur-Mannai - the city of Manna dwellers). Though even Abbas Gulu Bakikhanov on the basis of local legends and names (pasture of Gulistan-Iram, villages of Gulistan-Iram Araid and Gulistan located in Garabagh) called Northem Azerbaijan ‘Eden’s garden’ (Gulistan-Iram). The fact of possible origin of the world’s civilization in territory of historical Azerbaijan and Eastern Anatolia (including the developed culture of Kura-Araz) for us is not sensational, as it had already been discussed by archaeologists and historians repeatedly. They consider this area as the cradle of neolith’s culture. Here people started to cultivate wheat for the first time, here for the first time people learned to process metals. As Rohl writes: “All these amazing technical innovations in combination with gradual transition from hunting and gathering to settled community-type way of life (creation of ancient settlements, agriculture, domestication of animals) were symbols of revolution of the neolith epoch. These were the very knowledge, which became the basis of civilization”.

The territory of Karabakh, as it is testified by archaeological researches, is one of the basic centers of civilization. Climate at that time was warm and mild and contributed to rapid development of local flora and fauna. Conditions for human development were perfect. The discovery of Azerbaijani scientists of the unique Azikh cave - archaeological site of ancient man, which is almost 1 million years old — helped greatly in tracking the ways of human development in this region.