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22 since perhaps 200,000 years ago and until about 4,000 years ago, when the climate changed. The discovery in the Sahara desert made us wonder: Could the same have happened in the Arabian desert? Could it be that when the version in chapter 2 of Genesis was written— obviously at a time when Assyria was already known—the Pishon River had entirely vanished under the sands as the climate changed in past millennia? Confirmation of the validity of this line of reasoning took place quite dramatically in March 1993. It was an announce- ment by Farouk El-Baz, director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University, concerning the discovery of a lost river under the sands of the Arabian peninsula—a river that flowed for more than 530 miles from the mountains of western Arabia all the way eastward to the Persian Gulf. There it formed a delta that covered much of today's Kuwait and reached as far as the present-day city of Basra, merg- ing—"confluing"—there with the Tigris and Euphrates riv- ers. It was a river that was about fifty feet deep throughout its entire length and more than three miles wide at some points. After the last Ice Age, between 11,000 and 6,000 years ago, the Boston University study concluded, the Arabian cli- mate was wet and rainy enough to support such a river. But some 5,000 years ago the river dried up because of climatic changes that resulted in the aridity and desertlike conditions in the peninsula. In time, wind-driven sand dunes covered the river's channel, obliterating all evidence of the once- mighty river. High-resolution imaging by Landsat satellites, however, revealed that the dune patterns changed as the sand crossed a line that extended for hundreds of miles, a line that ended in mystifying deposits of gravel in Kuwait and near Basra—gravel of rocks that came from the Hijaz Mountains in western Arabia. Ground-level inspections then confirmed the existence of the ancient river (Fig. 7). Dr. El-Baz has given the lost river the name Kuwait River. We suggest that it was called Pishon in antiquity, cutting across the Arabian peninsula that indeed was an ancient source of gold and precious stones. And what about the river Gihon, "the one that meanders in all of the land of Kush"? Kush is listed twice in the Table DIVINE ENCOUNTERS