Researchers have finally discovered the ‘genesis’ of the Euphrates, a river that fed the ‘cradle of civilisation’. A breakthrough study published in Nature Geoscience uncovered the origins of the waterway famously mentioned in the Bible’s account of the Garden of Eden.In biblical literature, the Euphrates River appears as one of the four waterways mentioned in the opening chapters of Genesis as flowing through the legendary Garden of Eden. From its introduction in Genesis to its apocalyptic mention in Revelation, the river appears over fifty times throughout scripture. The Euphrates is believed to play a key role in end-times prophecy, drying up to prepare the way for the Battle of Armageddon.Interestingly, the real-life water body, stretching 1,740 miles through Turkey, Syria and Iraq, played an equally important role in shaping the earliest human civilisations. Along with the Tigris, its sister river, it provided a water supply that helped Mesopotamia—also known as the cradle of civilisation and the Fertile Crescent—flourish some 6,000 years ago, according to a report by National Geographic. Contrary to the depiction in the Bible, the origin of the Euphrates remained a mystery, until now.The new study, conducted by an international team of researchers, found that the waterway was born from the convergence of two rivers flowing from Turkey to the then-arid Mediterranean Basin between 3.6 million and 1.6 million years ago.“The modern landscape onshore, along with buried sediments offshore, still preserves clear signs of the ancient Euphrates River. If the Palaeo-Murat and Palaeo-Karasu rivers had not switched course and merged when they did, it is unclear whether the Fertile Crescent would have formed in the way it did,” study first author Andrew Madof, a senior seismic stratigrapher at the oil and gas corporation Chevron, told Live Science.The breakthrough came unexpectedly in 2014, when Madof was conducting seismic imaging surveys off the coast of Lebanon while searching for natural gas. During the process, he found some unusual patterns and evidence of river sediment atop large underwater salt deposits in the region. These had formed more than five million years ago during an epoch known as the Messinian Salinity Crisis, when the Mediterranean Sea had either partially or completely dried out. Intrigued, the researchers set out to trace the origins of the sediments using satellite data, geological mapping and advanced imaging techniques.What they found has finally solved the mystery behind the waterway. They discovered that the area once had two giant rivers, the Palaeo-Karasu and the Palaeo-Murat, which date back to 16.5 million years ago and between 8.6 million and 5.9 million years ago, respectively.These water bodies were gigantic by any standard. One was even larger than the Nile today, while the other was larger than the Tigris and Euphrates combined. These two ancient rivers flowed into the dried Mediterranean for about 120,000 years. Over millions of years, tectonic phenomena changed their course until they merged into one, the Euphrates.“I think this may be the end of a discussion that has lasted decades,” geophysicist Angelo Camerlenghi said.
