A centuries-old Bible contains a remarkable map showing where Protestant scholars once believed the Garden of Eden may have existed, placing the biblical paradise near the mountainous region surrounding modern-day eastern Turkey and Armenia.
The map, titled “The Situation of the Garden of Eden,” appears inside a 1599 Geneva Bible and identifies the ancient region of Great Armenia near mountains associated with Mount Ararat as the possible setting of Eden, according to the Daily Mail.
The map places particular emphasis on the Euphrates River, which appears to begin among the mountains before flowing westward. Other locations identified include Mesopotamia, Babylon, Havilah, the Arabian Desert, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea.
The geography appears to place Eden near the headwaters of the Euphrates, in an area corresponding roughly with eastern Turkey near Armenia and Iran.
The theory attempts to make geographical sense of the account found in Genesis, which describes a river flowing from Eden and then dividing into four rivers: the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates.
For Christians, the Garden of Eden is inseparably connected with the biblical account of creation, humanity’s original relationship with God, and the Fall of Adam and Eve. But attempts to identify Eden with a precise location on a modern map remain theories rather than established discoveries.
The historical map itself reflects one such attempt.
According to the Daily Mail, the Geneva Bible was produced by English Protestant scholars who fled England and took refuge in Switzerland. Historians estimate that as many as 360,000 copies were printed between 1560 and 1644.
The Eden map was reportedly copied from an earlier map created by Protestant reformer John Calvin and first published in his 1554 commentary on Genesis. Calvin attempted to reconcile the four rivers described in Genesis with the geography known in his time.
Two of the biblical rivers were commonly associated with the Tigris and Euphrates, while the Pishon and Gihon were sometimes identified with the Ganges and Nile. That presented an obvious geographical difficulty because those four rivers do not converge.
According to a pre-print study by historian Justine Angelique Walden cited by the Daily Mail, Calvin proposed a different interpretation. He argued that the Pishon and Gihon could refer to lower portions or outlets of the Tigris and Euphrates rather than entirely separate rivers.
That interpretation allowed Calvin to place Eden within Mesopotamia and regard it as a real earthly paradise whose exact boundaries had disappeared from human knowledge.
“Oddly, the Eden map showed the general location of Eden but did not specify the walled garden’s perimeter, and so ambiguously asserted both the presence of paradise as well as its absence,” Walden wrote, according to the Daily Mail.
“Eden had once been precisely locatable; now only traces of its existence, such as the four rivers, remained.”
The centuries-old map is far from the only proposed location for Eden.
In 2025, Texas-based chemical engineer Mahmood Jawaid proposed a dramatically different possibility: the Bahir Dar region of northwestern Ethiopia, near Lake Tana and the source of the Blue Nile. His study had not been peer-reviewed, according to the Daily Mail.
Jawaid argued that the Blue Nile could correspond to the biblical Gihon and pointed to Genesis’ association of the Gihon with the land of Cush. His reconstruction placed Eden around Lake Tana and the garden itself near Bahir Dar.
“All clues point to Bahir Dar, near Lake Tana, a region of striking beauty, abundant vegetation, and the source of the Blue Nile, which fits the ancient description of Eden’s rivers,” Jawaid wrote.
He also proposed that volcanic features surrounding the Ethiopian highlands might be connected with the “flaming sword” described in Genesis after Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden.
“Considering that the valley is surrounded by historically active volcanoes, it is very much possible that the active volcanoes formed the flaming sword mentioned in the Bible,” Jawaid wrote.
That interpretation, like the centuries-old map preserved in the Geneva Bible, remains speculative.
What the 1599 map does provide is a fascinating glimpse into how earlier Christians and biblical scholars tried to connect the geography described in Genesis with the physical world around them.
More than four centuries later, the exact earthly location of Eden remains unresolved — but the ancient map demonstrates just how long readers of Scripture have been captivated by the question of where humanity’s first home may have been.
