The survey
is based in and around the Rachaiya Basin South, 8 miles (12
kms) north of Mt Hermon in Lebanon (Latitude (DMS) 33° 30'
4” N Long (DMS) 35° 50' 22”E). This inter-montane
valley lies above the Bekaa Plateau on the anti-Lebanon Mountain
range close to the Jabal Ash-Shakh (Mount Hermon) range. It
has abundant supplies of fresh water and fertile soils derived
from volcanically extruded and weathered rock, together with
sediments within a former lake bed.
Rachaiya
town is 25 miles (37.5 kms) from Damascus and 35 miles (52.5
kms) from Beirut, our main port of call for communications and
liaison with the authorities and archaeological departments,
with our second communication centre being Damascus, where we
hope to gain support and cooperation from both Lebanese and
Syrian authorities.
Kharsag
translates from the archaic Sumerian as head enclosure, and
is named from the Kharsag Epics, a series of clay cylinders
and tablets, inscribed in cuneiform from the Nippur library,
and translated by Christian O'Brien, who read natural sciences
at Christ's College, Cambridge. From 1935 he spent many years
as an exploration geologist in Iran, where he was involved in
the discovery of the Tchoga Zambil ziggurat (French Delagation
Archeologique En Iran of its findings from Mission de Susiane
1966).
In 1970
he retired as the head of the international oil operating companies
in Iran, and was awarded a CBE in 1971 for his work. He then
devoted his retirement to researching the many enigmas of prehistory,
surveying and discovering the Integrated Astronomical Observatory
Line A - Hatfield Forest to Wandlebury, near Cambridge, and
the Bodmin Moor Astronomical Complex in Cornwall, England, both
dated to c. 2,500 BC. He established the overwhelming mathematical
probability and proof that they were designed for complex observational
astronomy.
In the search
with his wife Barbara Joy for the master builders who constructed
them, he followed the evidence back to the land of Canaan and
Sumeria, and established the need to master archaic Sumerian
cuneiform, Aramaic and Hebrew texts and languages.
O'Brien
became the scholar who continued the work of Samuel Noah Kramer,
who was born in the Ukraine in 1897, and died in the United
States in 1990. Kramer was one of the world's leading Assyriologists,
and a world renowned expert in Sumerian history and language.
The cylinders
and tablets, recording the Kharsag Epics, form part of the Nippur
collection held at the University Museum, Philadelphia in the
USA. They describe in detail the agricultural, and advanced
technical activities of the primary Sumerian Gods, An, Enlil
and Ninhursag. The detail within the Kharsag Epics are supported
independently by the Chronicles of Enoch, and the early chapters
of Genesis.
Christian
O'Brien in his book The Genius of the
Few, first published in 1985 and co-authored by his
widow Barbara Joy, sets out the evidence that Kharsag and the
Garden of Eden were one and the same, and that this record was
a pre-historic reality rather than a biblical myth.
He concluded
that the south Rachaiya Basin met the requirements as being
the most probable location of the Kharsag/Eden site. And further
that; a group of culturally and technically advanced people
who settled in this inter-montane valley in the Near East had
established an agricultural and teaching centre at about 8,200
BC. (Now re-calibrated to about 9,300 BC).
He derived
his choice for the location of Kharsag from a wide range of
disciplines, including the descriptions of the area given by
Enoch when he was taken to meet the Great Lord and record all
that was going on. O'Brien finally used the French surveyed
1:20,000 map of the area, to eliminate three other possible
inter-montaine basins before deciding that the Rachaiya south
basin site, best matched the evidence.
People
Involved
The Patrick
Foundation Golden Age Project, set up in 1998 by Edmund Marriage,
is run in partnership with Barbara Joy O'Brien, co-author
of the books, with the specific purpose of continuing and promoting
the O'Brien scholarship, together with protecting the author's
copyrights on the wide range of subjects and discoveries made
in the course of their work.
In November
2006 Edmund Marriage was able to study the area, identified
by Christian O'Brien as the Kharsag/Eden site, using the Google
Earth website satellite imaging facilities. His study of the
images confirmed the strong physical feature of the watercourse,
together with terrain and contour features, which support the
accuracy of Christian O'Brien's ground plan. The Kharsag Research
Project is run by Edmund Marriage in his role of an independent
researcher and administrator of the O'Brien interests.
Aims
