God: A Human History

by Reza Aslan

Embedded in the myth of the Garden of Eden is a collective memory of an era long ago when human beings were free from toil and struggle, when there was no need to slog day and night over the land. An era, in other words, before the rise of agriculture, when our ancient ancestors Adam and Eve were, to put it less biblically, hunter-gatherers. And that is how the ancient city of Urfa has come to be regarded in the collective memory of its inhabitants as the location of the Garden of Eden. Believers will point to the fact that, like the biblical Eden, Urfa is nestled between four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates, and that it, too, is located in what the Bible terms “the east”—that is, west of ancient Assyria. However, the main reason so many people around the world believe that this city rests upon the ruins of Eden has less to do with Urfa’s location than it does with what lies just ten miles to the northeast, atop a high mountain ridge called Göbekli Tepe, or Potbellied Hill. For buried there, just beneath a man-made mound on the very tip of the highest peak overlooking a desolate plateau, are the remains of what is widely recognized to be the earliest religious temple ever constructed—“the Temple of Eden,” as Klaus Schmidt, the chief archaeologist of the site, playfully calls it.