The Situation of the Land & Garden of Eden together with the Rivers of Paradise as they are imagined to have been situate by some Writers who thought that the Garden of Eden was planted in that which was afterwards called The Holy Land.
The Situation of the Land & Garden of Eden together with the Rivers of Paradise as they are imagined to have been situate by some Writers who thought that the Garden of Eden was planted in that which was afterwards called The Holy Land.
From the Middle Ages to our own time, the land of Eden - the site of biblical Paradise - has been a continuing subject of study, theological and geographical. See generally Scafi 2006. The pendulum has repeatedly swung from a symbolic reading of the biblical Paradise to a literal one and back again. Ibid. 352. "Mapping paradise [is] one of the most powerful expressions of the fundamental tension between the locative and utopian tendencies in Christianity." Ibid. 153.
The Age of Discovery led in the 17th century to persistent pressure for Christian theology to identify the precise location of Paradise in order to validate the text of Genesis. As Thomas Gale wrote in 1694: "Atheists and scoffers, whom the psalmist call Pests, usually demand, What's become of paradise? Shew us the place in the Maps? And if this be not done for them (they are generally lazy) with all exactness, . . . they will slide into a disbelief first of Genesis, then of the whole bible, and lastly of all revealed religion." (Quoted ibid. 284.) There are more than a dozen such maps in the collection, locating Eden from the Middle East (Iraq, Armenia, Palestine) to Western China, Bristol Florida, Jackson County Missouri, and the North Pole; Search > "Eden."
Shuckford's work includes two maps of Eden, showing it in two different locations. ID #2163.01 situates Eden in Armenia, following the conclusion of the French Cleric Augustin Calmet in 1724. Scafi 2006, 320-21. ID #2163.02 situates Eden in Palestine.
Shuckford, Samuel & James Creighton. 1808. The Sacred and Profane History of the World Connected, from the Creation of the World to the Dissolution of the Assyrian Empire at the Death of Sardanapalus. London: W. Baynes. v.1.
Cite As:
P.J. Mode collection of persuasive cartography, #8548. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
