Originally Posted by Serenitude

There are some interesting linguistics to the story, though. "eden", or "edin", in Sumerian, was a word that meant "the land beyond the cultivated land", or the "wilderness". It's said that "eden" was a paradise. "Paradiso" is a very specific Persian word for a 4 walled garden. The Taj Mahal is laid out in a paradiso concept. There are said to be 7 gates one must attain to get to the paradise of Eden. In the original Sumerian, "gates" as translated are mountain passes. So, in the earliest known version of the story, the Garden of Eden would have been a 4 walled garden 7 mountain passes from the town it was written in

Originally Posted by Disinfo Agent

Second question: even if Rousseau never assigned the quote to Marie Antoinette, she could have said it anyway, right?

Originally Posted by Gillianren

Given that I think she was about seven and still living in Austria at the time, it's at best unlikely.

Originally Posted by RalofTyr

Also, since when is a story about two people that were created from a god a historical fact?

Originally Posted by Moose

My read on it is that it's more likely to be impressive ignorance regarding how the world works....

This is the sort of person who never went hungry a day in her life, nor so much as prepared a single meal. She may well have been genuinely concerned about the plight of the peasantry and believed with perfect sincerity that she'd come up with a valuable idea that surely was too obvious to have to mention. She probably also assumed someone would take care of it, like they took care of every other problem that might ever have intruded on her tiny little world.