We are grateful to our good friend R. Overton for the following extracts from “The Geographical System of Herodotus” written in 1830 by Major James Rennell, Surveyor-General in Bengal.
“The Gog and Magog of Ezekiel must be understood to be meant for the Scythians . . . . The orientals have Jajuje and Majuje, for our Gog and Magog; and there can be no doubt but that the g’s should be sounded soft in those words. The Arabian geographers place these descendants of Japhet in the remotest known part of Asia, northward and beyond the Turks and Kalmucs . . . . There existed in the north-west part of Asia, and no doubt still exists, a rampart or mound with gates and towers, named by the Eastern writers from Jajuje and Majuje, and referred, though erroneously, to Alexander the Great . . . . The country denominated from Jajuje and Majuje by the Arabians, lay to the north, and it appears to have been bounded on the south-west by the great ridge of mountains, the continuation of the Altai, which runs to the north-west and north, through the great Steppe, separating the northern and southern waters of Asia; and of which ridge, the mountains of Ural are a branch, projecting to the west. So that the country of Jajuje and Majuje contained, in the ideas of the people of Arabia and Persia in the early times of Mahommedanism, the northern part of the great Steppe and the course of the River Irtish. There are also notices (collected by envoys sent by the Caliph Watkek in the 9th century to view the rampart), which serve to show that the people in question possessed at an earlier period that part of the Steppe also, towards the Caspian and Aral; and it may therefore be inferred that, in more early times, they were extended over other parts of the Steppe; that the Arabs applied to these nomads generally the names of Jajuje and Majuje (or Gog and Magog); and that Ezekiel was adapting his language to those ideas . . . . The rampart above mentioned seems to have been about midway between Samarkand and Tobolsk.”1 Later in his work2 Major Rennell quotes corroborative evidence from the mediaeval Arabian geographers Edrisi and Abulfeda,3 tending to associate Gog of Magog with territory in modern Asiatic Russia.
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Author: A. E. Jones
Keywords: Gogian, Gogian host, Gogian invader, Gogue Magog, Gog, Gogue, Magog, Magogue, Gog and Magog, Meshech and Tubal, Meshech, Tubal, Russia, Soviet Union, Rosh
Bible reference(s): Genesis 10:2, 1 Chronicles 5:4, Eze 38, Eze 39, Revelation 20:8
Source: “Further Notes on Gog of the Land of Magog,” The Testimony, Vol. 7, No. 83, November 1937, pp. 390-3.
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