Excerpt from a post by David Rohl (British Egyptologist)

The Garden of Eden, Where is It?

Back in 1987 I had been sent a short, privately published paper by

amateur historian, Reginald Walker (1917-1989), which proposed a
location for the Garden of Eden in north-western Iran. The main thrust
of Walker’s argument was that the four rivers of Eden, described in
Chapter Two of Genesis, were to be found in that region. All four had
their sources (the Bible refers to them as ‘heads’) around the two great
salt lakes of Van and Urmia.

Ever since the time of the Jewish historian Josephus, a near

contemporary of Christ, scholars have tried to use Genesis 2 to locate
Eden. But the problem has always been the identification of the rivers
themselves. The Bible calls them Perath, Hiddekel, Gihon and Pishon. The
first two are no problem: the Perath is simply the Hebrew version of
Arabic Firat and Greek Euphrates; similarly the Hiddekel is Hebrew for
Sumerian Idiglat from which the Greek Tigris derives. The remaining two
rivers, however, have always been a mystery. Clearly, in order to locate
Eden precisely, we need to find the sources of all four - and that’s
where Walker’s research comes in.

He showed that the River Aras, flowing into the Caspian Sea from the
mountains north of Lake Urmia, was once called the Gaihun. By checking
the writings of the Islamic geographers who accompanied the Arabic
invasion of Persia in the 8th century, I was able to confirm that this
was indeed the case. Moreover, even as late as the last century,
Victorian atlases and encyclopaedias were still naming the river as the
Gaihun-Aras. The Gaihun is therefore the missing biblical Gihon.

The fourth river - the Pishon - was more difficult to find. Walker
suggested that this Hebrew (West Semitic) name derived from the old
Iranian Uizhun, where the Iranian vowel ‘U’ had been converted into the
Semitic labial consonant ‘P’. Thus we have Uizhun to Pizhun to Pishon.
Strange as it may seem, such switches do occur between the two
language
groups. For instance, one archaeological site in Iran is known by its
Arabic (West Semitic) name of Pisdeli whereas its ancient (Iranian) name
was Uishteri. The river Uizhun (the modern Qezel Uzun) - thus identified
as the biblical Pishon - flows down from the mountains of Kurdistan and
empties into the southern basin of the Caspian Sea.

The four rivers of Eden.

Bringing all this together we find that the sources of all four rivers
originate in the highland area which Alexander the Great knew as Armenia
and we know today as eastern Turkey and western Iran.
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2 Kings 19:12 (New International Version)
12
Did the gods of the nations that were destroyed by my forefathers
deliver them: the gods of Gozan, Haran, Rezeph and the people of Eden
who were in Tel Assar?

Isaiah 37:12 (New International Version)

12
Did the gods of the nations that were destroyed by my forefathers
deliver them—the gods of Gozan, Haran, Rezeph and the people of Eden
who were in Tel Assar?