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.
"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 3400ÃÂ3200 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."
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