Note 306 — Chapter II · THE CONTRIBUTION OF WESTERN CHRISTENDOM BEFORE 1100 A. D.

On the river Pison see the description in Epiphanius, Liber de XII 391gemmis rationalis summi sacerdotis Hebraeorum, in: Corpus script. eccles. lat., vol. xxxv, pt. 2, pp. 747–748.

As this book is in press there has come to the writer’s attention Lutz’s interesting article, Geographical Studies Among Babylonians and Egyptians, 1924, which shows that some of the cosmographical ideas prevalent in the Christian Middle Ages may be traced back to Babylonian origins. The origins of the belief in the four rivers of Paradise, for instance, is unquestionably to be sought for in Babylonian astrology and geography, two sciences closely allied. One group among the Babylonians held that the earth’s surface forms a quadrilateral, itself an exact counterpart of a portion of the firmament, Pegasus α-δ. “Andromeda ... was identified with the Euphrates which flow’s south, while the Tigris was considered to flow parallel to the line between Pegasus α and δ. Two additional watercourses, which later tradition designated as Pison and Gihon, completed the watercourses around the trapezium. This view, however, must have gone back to a time when conditions as they existed in Babylonia were, mutatis mutandis, transferred to the sky; namely, it was ultimately based on the cultivated field surrounded by irrigation ditches” (ibid., pp. 168–169).