It’s a not-so-secret garden.

A map in a 16th-century Bible has revealed the potential real-life location of the Garden of Eden, potentially solving a historical mystery that has eluded scholars for centuries.

“It’s very detailed considering when it was printed,” exclaimed a holy antiquities collector known only as Ashleys_AntiqueBibles on her popular YouTube channel.

This 1599 Geneva Bible—a term for the holy books produced by English Protestant refugees in Switzerland—contained a map called the “Situation of the Garden of Eden,” based on one created by Protestant reformer John Calvin in 1554.

The cartographical artifact placed the lush oasis—where the so-called first humans, Adam and Eve, allegedly resided—at the Euphrates River’s headwaters near the base of Mount Ararat in present-day Turkey. In prior videos, the YouTuber had proposed that Eden was beneath the Caspian Sea.

Per the clip, this map matched the descriptions in the Book of Genesis, which states that one river flowed out of Eden before branching off into the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates.

The real-life counterparts of this watery quartet remain somewhat murky.

Although scholars generally agree on the Tigris and Euphrates, identifying the Pishon and Gihon as the Ganges and the Nile creates a geographical conundrum, as these waterways do not intersect, the Daily Mail reported.

However, Calvin posited that “headwaters” in biblical vernacular could signify either the start or the mouth of a river.

This meant that “Pishon and Gihon” could have simply referred to lower sections of the Tigris and Euphrates, according to a preprint study by former Wisconsin historian Justine Angelique Walden.

This would place Eden’s location in Mesopotamia.

Unfortunately, Walden noted that Calvin’s cartography only depicted the “general location” of Eden rather than its actual perimeter, infuriatingly leaving us with just “traces” of a site that had once been “precisely locatable.”c

As a result, scholars have postulated that the Garden of Eden could be located anywhere from South Africa to the Persian Gulf, or even in northwestern Ethiopia at the tributary of the Blue Nile.

In reality, the geological origin of the Euphrates does not match the biblical account of the Garden of Eden.

Instead, the river was formed by the confluence of two rivers flowing from Türkiye to the then-arid Mediterranean Basin between 3.6 million and 1.6 million years ago.