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 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.
bookmark
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-3121.1994.tb00656.x?prevSearch=allfield%3A%28tollmann%29
http://www.unibg.it/convegni/NEW_SCENARIOS/Abstracts/Tollmann.htm
http://www.scirus.org/srsapp/search?q=tollmann&t=all&sort=0&g=s
http://www.8ung.at/geologie/egeomorp.htm
Woolley.
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