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23 SAUDI ARALIA an MArWD pesenT at Figure 7 of Nations, first with the Hamitic-African lands of Egypt, Put (Nubia/Sudan) and Canaan; and a second time as one of the Mesopotamian lands where Nimrod was lord, he "whose first kingdoms were Babylon and Erech and Akkad, all in the land of Shine'ar" (Sumer). The Mesopotamian Kush was in all probability east of Sumer, the area of the Zagros Mountains. It was the homeland of the Kushshu people, the Akkadian name for the Kassites, who in the second millennium B.C. swept down from the Zagros Mountains and occupied Baby- lon. The ancient name was retained as Kushan for the district of Susa (the "Shushan" of the biblical Book of Esther) well into Persian and even Roman times. There are several noteworthy rivers in that part of the Zagros Mountains, but they have not caught the attention of scholars because none of them share headwaters with the Tigris and Euphrates (which begin hundreds of miles to the northeast). Here, however, another thought came into play: Could the ancients have spoken of rivers that join together not at their headwaters, but at their confluence into the Per- sian Gulf? If so, the Gihon—the fourth river of Eden—would have been a river that joins the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the newly discovered "Kuwait River" at the head of the Persian Gulf! If the problem is looked at thus, the obvious candidate for The First Encounters