Adelung notices a feature in which the locality fixed upon as the birthplace of man by the Indian traditions corresponds with the Paradise of Scripture. From Mount Meru spring four Rivers, the Ganges, the Buramputur, the Indus, and another stream that flows into Tibet. “Now Michaelis,” he observes, “translates Genesis, ii. 10, ‘Four rivers flowed out of Eden, and they _separated continually more and more widely from each other_!’ ”
Cashmire is considered by the Hindoos in the light of a Holy Land, the cradle of their race, their civilization, and their religion!
The Scriptural narrative, in describing the Creation of our species, does not define the first abode of man any further than by fixing it in “the East,” (Genesis, ii. 8,) an expression corroborative, as Adelung observes, of the Indian traditions, for in the time of Moses this expression was applicable to the regions of the Indus. On the other hand, the common interpretation of Genesis, viii. 4, which assumes that Ararat in Armenia was the centre of diffusion of population after the Flood, is irreconcilable with those accounts, this locality being not to the East but to the North of all the Syro-Phœnician or Scriptural regions. But according to Bohlen,(10) the impression that Ararat in this verse means the mountain of that name in Armenia, which is inaccessible, crowned with perpetual snow,(11) and _anciently had a different name_, is erroneous. Ararat, he observes, does not mean a mountain but a country in this verse and elsewhere in Scripture. Thus the sons of Sennacherib escaped into the land of Ararat, (II. Kings, xix. 37,) and the Prophet Jeremiah calls upon the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz to rise up together with the Medes against Babylon, (Jerem. li, 27-8) Ararat in these passages, it may be suggested, may naturally be interpreted to apply generally to the kingdoms and regions of the unexplored(12) table-land of Central Asia, which commences on the Persian borders, immediately to the East of Assyria. Moreover the supposition that the Ararat of Scripture was in Armenia may be regarded as irreconcilable with another important passage, Gen., xi. 2, which distinctly implies that the emigrants who reached the plain of Shinar, and who, it may be inferred, were the first colonists of South Western Asia, had journeyed thither from some region far to the “East” of all the Semetic countries, of which Shinar or Mesopotamia forms the Eastern border!