Ancient Buried City Uncovered ｜ The UnXplained

Southern Iraq, February, 1854. A British team, led by archaeologist John George Taylor, excavates what appears to be a series of barren desert mounds. But incredibly, they soon uncover an extensive network of brick walls and a massive ziggurat. They later determine these structures are the remains of a remarkable ancient city buried by the sands of time. John George Taylor, who also crucially found bricks that actually were stamped with the name of the city, and that was Eridu. Eridu is considered the oldest city of the world. It dates back to about 5,400 BC and was actually constructed by the ancient Sumerian culture. The Sumerians themselves said that Eridu was the most ancient city. The Sumerians are an important civilization for many different reasons. First and foremost, that they invent writing in a system known as cuneiform, which is just the wedge-shaped impressions that a reed stylist would make into clay tablets. Another important contribution that the Sumerians give to us is the development of urban lifestyles, so the first cities. In these cities, we begin to find the emergence of political elites, religious elites. Eridu is the first political center of this region. And couple that with writing, and we start to get a real picture of a society at really the beginnings of our knowledge of history. Soon after the discovery of Eridu, the ancient city drew the attention of British Assyriologist Theopolis Pinchas, and his 1908 book was responsible for inspiring a provocative yet longstanding theory that Eridu may have actually been the most famous paradise in human history as described in the Bible, the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis first appears in chapter 2, and it's placed right there at the beginning of creation. It's set up as a place where God creates the human and puts him in this garden, and his job is to till it, to take care of it. And soon Adam and Eve are in this garden, living together in this idyllic life. The big question is, is the Garden of Eden a real place, or is it a mythological place, or is it a metaphor for humanity? Was the Garden of Eden a real location, a lush paradise where the first human beings are said to have lived? And if so, could Eden have been located in Eridu, the oldest human settlement ever discovered? In 2025, researchers did this amazing study where they discovered that 200 irrigation canals and 4,000 branch canals were situated in and around the city of Eridu to bring water to where they wanted. And so what this tells us about the environment is that it was much wetter, much more productive than it is now. The result of the irrigation engineering was the abundance of fabulous, very, very well-managed gardens, very well-ordered, beautiful, lush, manicured little paradises that proliferated in Eridu. It's incredible to think that this desert wasteland was once home to bountiful and vibrant life of all kinds. But why would Eridu even be considered a possible location for the Garden of Eden? Well, some point to clues mentioned in the Bible's book of Genesis. In Genesis, we're told that the Garden of Eden has four rivers. They are the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Gihon, and the Pishon. We know what the Tigris and Euphrates are. These are two very famous rivers that essentially run all the way down through Iraq and into the Persian Gulf. While many scholars think that the Garden of Eden is a metaphor for a utopian paradise, many people actually think it's in ancient Mesopotamia. I do think the Bible gives us a real place when it's describing Eden. The clues are the rivers. We know where the Tigris and Euphrates are. The more challenging ones are the ones that have since disappeared, the Pishon and the Gihon. And so we start with, what do we know? Well, we know where the Euphrates River is, and we know where the Tigris River is. And so if we're taking the text of the Bible to face value, then that's where the Garden of Eden is. And this is very interesting, because Eridu is right on one of these major rivers that we're talking about. In this case, it's the Euphrates River. That's then very consistent with the Eden story. While Eridu appears to be in the same region that scripture describes as the Garden of Eden, some believe another clue can be found in ancient Mesopotamian tales surrounding the Sumerian creator god known as Enki. One of the prominent figures associated with this idea that Eridu was a biblical Eden is Enki, patron deity of the city, the god of wisdom, and the god of underwater aquifers and fresh water. Enki is a major figure in most of the Sumerian creation myths. He has a very important role to play in the emergence of not just humanity, but really life itself. He opts to create humanity. And so what we find is early associations of Eridu with a site of creation, a paradise, a Mesopotamian Eden. The Garden of Eden story, it has to be sort of thought of as this origin story, as where we come from. So maybe Eridu was one of the sources, or maybe the main source for the Garden of Eden. We know Eridu was remembered fondly as the birthplace of civilization. But the Sumerian and Mesopotamian civilizations, could this have been sort of what we remember through the Garden of Eden story? It's possible.