Clay tablet holds clue to asteroid mystery

The Telegraph ^ | 3/31/2008 | Nic Fleming

[SunkenCiv]

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A Sumerian Observation of the Kofels' Impact Event by Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell	Comet/Asteroid Impacts and Human Society ed by Peter T. Bobrowsky and Hans Rickman intro (PDF) due to links here

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[SunkenCiv]

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

[SunkenCiv]

Causes And Effects Of The
2350 BC Middle East Anomaly
Evidenced By Micro-debris Fallout,
Surface Combustion And Soil Explosion
by Marie-Agnes Courty

Occurrence 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.

[blam]

"Meteor clue to end of Middle East civilisations
by Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent"

An FR thread with the same title:

Meteor Clue To End Of Middle East Civilisations

[rdl6989]

Thanks, that answered my question before I asked it.

[gleeaikin]

“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?

[SunkenCiv]

I don’t think this latest interpretation is correct anyway :’) — not *least* because of the Sodom and Gomorrah dating error.

[Red Badger]

A “mile-wide asteroid” would have done a lot more damage than this article accounts for.

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............

[SunkenCiv]

According to a fringey book I'm reading right now, the Tollmans attribute the Kofels crater to this theorized sevenfold (plus Kofels) impact event.

Great Comets, Great Floods
by Carla Helfferich
Alaska Science Forum
July 13, 1994

Authors 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.

[Little Bill]

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.

[southland]

bookmark

[SunkenCiv]

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

[SunkenCiv]

Woolley.