Posted on 03/30/2008 8:33:39 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
British scientists have deciphered a mysterious ancient clay tablet and believe they have solved a riddle over a giant asteroid impact more than 5,000 years ago.
Geologists have long puzzled over the shape of the land close to the town of Köfels in the Austrian Alps, but were unable to prove it had been caused by an asteroid.
Now researchers say their translation of symbols on a star map from an ancient civilisation includes notes on a mile-wide asteroid that later hit Earth - which could have caused tens of thousands of deaths.
The circular clay tablet was discovered 150 years ago by Sir Austen Henry Layard, a leading Victorian archaeologist, in the remains of the royal palace at Nineveh, capital of ancient Assyria, in what is now Iraq.
The tablet, on display at the British Museum, shows drawings of constellations and pictogram-based text known as cuneiform - used by the Sumerians, the earliest known civilisation in the world.
A historian from Azerbaijan, who believes humans originally came to Earth from another planet, has interpreted it as a description of the arrival of a spaceship. More mainstream academics have failed to decipher its meaning.
Now Alan Bond, the managing director of a space propulsion company, Reaction Engines, and Mark Hempsell, a senior lecturer in astronautics at Bristol University, have cracked the cuneiform code and used a computer programme that can reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago to provide a new explanation.
They believe their calculations prove the tablet - a copy made by an Assyrian scribe around 700 BC - is a Sumerian astronomer's notebook recording events in the sky on June 29, 3123 BC.
The pair say its symbols include a note of the trajectory of a large object travelling across the constellation of Pisces which, to within one degree, is consistent with an impact at Köfels.
Köfels, in the Austrian Alps, where an asteroid
is thought to have hit 5,000 years ago
Mr Hempsell said: "All previous work has drawn a blank on what the tablet is about.
"It is such a big jigsaw and the pieces we have found fit together so well that I think we have a definitive proof."
The Köfels site was originally interpreted as an asteroid impact, however the lack of an obvious impact crater led modern geologists to believe it to be simply a giant landslide.
However, the Bond-Hempsell theory, outlined in their book published today, A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels Impact Event, suggests that the asteroid left no crater because it clipped a mountain and turned into a fireball.
Mr Hempsell said: "The ground heating, though very short, would be enough to ignite any flammable material, including human hair and clothes.
"It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast."
He added that extreme changes caused to rock and other substances at the site had previously led to the Köfels impact being erroneously dated to around 8,000 years ago.
A “mile-wide asteroid” would have done a lot more damage than this article accounts for.
Ping
This is the first I’ve heard of an impact in Europe at this time.
Hard to believe a major impact in such a gorgeous area; this is no Tunguska. ;->
The ancient Sumerians were able to determine the size of an asteroid??? I don't think so.
bump for later
Maybe it was a mile wide and a foot long and a foot tall.
"A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels Impact Event, suggests that the asteroid left no crater because it clipped a mountain and turned into a fireball."
yitbos
3123 BC is too long before any known form of writing. Cuneiform included.
Wow, FR proves the scientist wrong again. It's so easy.
yitbos
Coast to Coast will surely be covering this soon.
Actually..........there is a portion of Germany that was an impact zone for a meteor...............Evidence?.....In the very stones used to erect a cathedral.
Fascinating...
“In the very stones used to erect a cathedral.”
Shocked quartz.
Depends upon the composition of the object.
. . .yes, who knew?
I wonder how much of their ‘reconstruction’ was to the missing contents of the stone itself.
It appears that several large sections are missing and were filled in with playdough.
It's so easy to prove that many don't read the friggin' article before they post.
"They believe their calculations prove the tablet - a copy made by an Assyrian scribe around 700 BC - is a Sumerian astronomer's notebook recording events in the sky on June 29, 3123 BC. "
"Another tourist feature of this mediæval town is its 90m-steeple called "Daniel" being part of the Saint Georg's Church and made of an impact breccia called suevite containing shocked quartz."
I might make one of those clay tablets and sell it on ebay.
Keep the writing to 10 short declarative sentences.
yitbos
How much would have burned up before reaching ground level?
The scientists were a historian who thinks spaceships crash on earth, a managing director of a space propulsion company and a lecturer in astronautics? I am big large great brilliant enormous squatting scientist too!
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That would be Zecharia Sitchin. I've read his books, they are interesting but I don't believe the same conclusions he comes to.
Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic and/or early mnemonic symbols. The best known examples are:
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400–3200 BC with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC.
The Chinese script likely developed independently of the Middle Eastern scripts, around 1600 BC.
The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are also generally believed to have had independent origins.
It is thought that the first true alphabetic writing appeared around 2000 BC, as a representation of language developed by Semitic workers in Egypt (see History of the alphabet). Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one innovation, many via the Phoenician alphabet, or were directly inspired by its design.
I've read them too; it's been a while though. Still, you gotta wonder how he (or I guess the Sumerian's) knew what Neptune & Uranus looked like before science did with the fly-by of Voyager 2.
Have the scientist found shocked quartz at this impact site?
I remember seeing that. History Channel wasn’t it?
It is always fascinating to observe in these types of threads how so many posters can't resist projecting their own preconceptions and biases into the sloppy texts of journalists' articles purporting to "explain" various scientific issues. They seem to automatically assume that the same media hacks who can't even report accurately on an event we all watched ourselves on live TV are somehow giving a precise and accurate description of what the scientists actually said or wrote... /grin
I would suggest to all my fellow self-assured Freepers who pontificate so emphatically about stuff they claim "just ain't so" that they try to remember that all of the surviving artifacts, writings, etc. upon which we base our claims to know what happened in remote antiquity are but a small fraction of what once existed but has now been lost in the mists of time. After all, a hundred and fifty years ago Troy and Ur were only myths, and if the libraries of Alexandria and Baghdad had not been destroyed, our perceptions of "history" might be quite different.
Indeed it would. So much history has been lost, and I'm particularly upset with the early Church's hand in destroying a great deal of it simply because it didn't conform to the church's belief system of the time. Or at least squirreling it away in hidden/off limits libraries/archives and whatever, for much the same reasons.
And then there's all the wars, and disasters... what the Taliban did to the ancient sites in Afghanistan...
The one I'm most fascinated by is 'The New World Bible' which apparently was similar enough, yet different enough, from the Church's Bible that the Padrés feared it was a satanic mockery of the One True Word. To the best of my knowledge every copy was systematically tracked down and destroyed.
what the Taliban did to the ancient sites in Afghanistan...
Don't forget that we know so little of Ancient Egypt because when islam took over ALL hieroglyphic writings they could find were destroyed. The characters looked too much like representations of humans, something strictly forbidden by islam.
It was either History Channel, the Science Channel, or the Discovery channel, all of which we tend to watch a lot. ;o)
Asteroids:
Deadly Impact
National Geographic
:’) Eugene Shoemaker.
Nice post! Thanks.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1091680/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1357365/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1406892/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1875432/posts
Meteor clue to end of Middle East civilisations"Studies of satellite images of southern Iraq have revealed a two-mile-wide circular depression which scientists say bears all the hallmarks of an impact crater. If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs.
by Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent
"The catastrophic effect of these could explain the mystery of why so many early cultures went into sudden decline around 2300 BC. They include the demise of the Akkad culture of central Iraq, with its mysterious semi-mythological emperor Sargon; the end of the fifth dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom, following the building of the Great Pyramids and the sudden disappearance of hundreds of early settlements in the Holy Land."
A Sumerian Observation
of the Kofels' Impact Event
by Alan Bond
and Mark HempsellComet/Asteroid Impacts
and Human Society
ed by Peter T. Bobrowsky
and Hans Rickman
intro (PDF)
due to links here
http://personal.eunet.fi/pp/tilmari/tilmari.htm
http://www.sis-group.org.uk/cambconf.htm
dead links (didn’t check ‘em on Wayback)
http://www.sis-group.org.uk/abstract/bailey.htm
http://www.meteor.co.nz/nov97_1.html
Causes And Effects Of TheOccurrence in a previously recorded thick tephra deposit of particles identical to some of the mysterious layer and resemblance of its original pseudo-sand fabric with the exploded one of the mysterious layer confirms that the later is contemporaneous with the tephra deposit It has been however impossible to find typical tephra shards in sites located at a few km around the one with the tephra deposit The restricted occurrence of the later suggests that the massive tephra accumulation can no longer be considered as a typical fallout derived from the dispersion of material from a terrestrial volcanic explosion.
2350 BC Middle East Anomaly
Evidenced By Micro-debris Fallout,
Surface Combustion And Soil Explosion
by Marie-Agnes Courty
An FR thread with the same title:
Thanks, that answered my question before I asked it.
“A ‘mile-wide asteroid’ would have don a lot more damage.”
If the boloid were of the fluffy snowball type described in “The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes,” by Firestone et al. it could still have killed a lot of people, but left a less severe trace. Incidentally, there was a possible boloid strike in Greenland around 1999 (?), does anyone know if they ever found any traces of this impactor?
I don’t think this latest interpretation is correct anyway :’) — not *least* because of the Sodom and Gomorrah dating error.
The asteroid came in at a very low angle, approximately 6°. It hit a mountain top and exploded into a bazillion pieces. It was an asteroid with a orbit that was nearly the same as the Earth's............
Great Comets, Great FloodsAuthors Edith Kristan-Tollmann and Alexander Tollmann, both of the University of Vienna's Geological Institute in Austria, suggest that a cometary crash is the cause of the flood we usually associate with Noah... By combining historical record with geological clues, the Tollmanns picture several cometary fragments -- probably seven of them -- smacking into the earth about ten thousand years ago. The great splashdown took place near the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, spring in the Southern, with the major fragments hitting the oceans over a span of days at most. (Oddly, the Tollmanns are less certain of the year than of the time of year; because of the many internal clues in the tales and commentaries worldwide, Mesopotamian and Scandinavian sources agree on the season.) ...The geologic evidence is--or should be--less arguable. The Tollmanns think they've found described in the scientific literature a worldwide array of tektites of the right age, for example. Tektites are rocks melted by an impact and splashed away as molten drops that then solidify again as they cool. Because they are inorganic, they are usually dated by stratigraphy -- the age of the layers within which they lie -- and that is an admittedly imperfect science.
by Carla Helfferich
Alaska Science Forum
July 13, 1994
There was a hiatus in Sumerian Culture around this time, I will be damed if I can remember the reference. It was noticed by people doing the early digs, correct me if I am wrong.
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