I’m kidding here, but the similarities are odd. The weather is always between 70F and 85F all year round. The biggest threat to you on the island are apples. You shouldn’t eat the apples that grow on the island; the small green ones are poisonous. Oh, and it isn’t easy to immigrate there. It’s a place where only few people are allowed to reside. Oh, and did I mention the abundant variety of plants and animals on the island?
IIRC there are theories that Eden refers to a location near where the Tigris and Euphrates meet.
Something about a line mentioning three rivers and there being a river that joins the combined river shortly after it merges.
I just think it’d be funny to imagine that the legendary first home of humanity was somewhere in southern Iraq or Kuwait.
There’s a field that was called Gu-edin (meaning “open fields”) in the mid third millennium BCE that was the subject of a border war that lasted a couple centuries, between the cities of Lagash and Umma (which is right where you said), because the founder of Lagash bought an unassuming piece of land from Umma and a bunch of surrounding terrains, and then did mad irrigation work and it became crazy fertile. According to Lagash’s records, Umma got mad that it was swindled out of such great land and kept attacking Lagash over it, and kept getting its ass kicked and its kings killed. People from Umma were “allowed” to till the field for Lagash for a time, but most of the grain would still go to Lagash, causing more revolts from Umma (and more punishment).
It’s fairly agreed that this place probably gave some degree of inspiration for “Eden”, along with some rare green gardens in the region created with irrigation work. The apple bit, the woman rib bit, and the knowledge bit came from other Sumerian myths.
I’m not sure if it’s the Galapagos, maybe in the Canaries instead?, but some island famous for its apples, weather, and safety did play a part in inspiring the myth of Avalon, the island of apples.
There’s no mention of apples in the biblical record, just “fruit”
Right, the Inanna myth where she learns about sex also talks about eating the herbs and trees on a mountain / highland, I’m not sure when Eden was associated with an apple.
No one tell this guy about 6th grade geography.
Mesopotamia is merely the first place civilization developed, not the place humanity originated from