The missing sun temples! (Where are they?)

I found this an interesting article.

The largest group of administrative documents known from the Old Kingdom was found in 1980 in Pharaoh Neferirkare's mortuary temple photo: Salah Ibrahim

Reconstruction of Niuserre's sun temple at Abu Ghurab (after Borchardt)

The axes of the necropolises of Giza and Abu Sir were probably directed

it is interesting...Thanks!

The missing sun temples! (Where are they?)

Don't look at me. I put 'em back when I was done with them. ;>)

Interesting article. Thanks for posting it.

/john

Ping

The missing sun temples! (Where are they?)

Well if I had to just guess I'd say they were under some sand somewhere in Egypt.

bump for the sun gods

There was a shuttle mission that used an earth penetrating radar to scan the globe. I remember radar pictures of Egypt which disclosed geological features which were hidden by the sand. The change in the course of the Nile, eons ago, was readily visible. Might a search of these images be fruitful?

The Question is not the where but the why.

I disagree...it is the where!

Why was the religion structured the way it was? The why.

enlighten us further...it is nice to discuss this with people that are truly interested. I am not really familiar with this dynasty but I would love to know more.

I am not, Egyptology kinda left me cold, but riddle me this. Why in this time band did sun and moon rituals take over the minds of the peoples from England to Sumeraria?

Tell me, I have been looking at this stuff for fourty years and the evdence is contridictory.

I don't honestly know...Akahenton was 18 dynasty... he worshiped only the Sun God and he moved his city to get rid of those pesky priests and he was much hated for changing from the old ways....his son...King Tut changed things back to the old way due to extreme pressure....but you are right...many of the great cultures did worship the sun God...even the Inca,Maya and Aztec....maybe because they all experts on the astronomy.

I am not, Egyptology kinda left me cold, but riddle me this. Why in this time band did sun and moon rituals take over the minds of the peoples from England to Sumeraria?
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the Pennsylvania railroad runs near an old canal bed by my grandfathers house. The canal was built in the 1820's about the same time as the Erie canal. That canal represented something like 3-4 thousand year old technology. When the railroad came in during the 1840's the canal was quickly displaced. The great leap in technology was about as big as the trip to the moon in 1969.

How did it happen that men went from canal building to moon walking in the space of 130 years?

In the future it will look like some alien civlization just put its foot down.

Five thousand years ago people started looking up. Why? My guess would be that there were a few comet strikes that got people's attention. The archaelogical literature these days suggests that there was some kind of event like a comet/meteor strike in about 2200 BC that brought down the Old Kingdom in Egypt and the ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia.

You might be right, but about that time of the first Dynasty, old Gilgamesh was chopping trees in the Tarsas, 4th dynasty of UR, I kinda like to move things back a bit because the Egypt people have a cronology problem, they don't know who was where.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/comet_bronzeage_011113-1.html

Comets, Meteors & Myth

By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 07:00 am ET
13 November 2001

"...and the seven judges of hell ... raised their torches, lighting the land with their livid flame. A stupor of despair went up to heaven when the god of the storm turned daylight into darkness, when he smashed the land like a cup."

-- An account of the Deluge from the Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2200 B.C.

If you are fortunate enough to see the storm of shooting stars predicted for the Nov. 18 peak of the Leonid meteor shower, you'll be watching a similar but considerably less powerful version of events which some scientists say brought down the world's first civilizations.

The root of both: debris from a disintegrating comet.

Biblical stories, apocalyptic visions, ancient art and scientific data all seem to intersect at around 2350 B.C., when one or more catastrophic events wiped out several advanced societies in Europe, Asia and Africa.

Increasingly, some scientists suspect comets and their associated meteor storms were the cause. History and culture provide clues: Icons and myths surrounding the alleged cataclysms persist in cults and religions today and even fuel terrorism.

And a newly found 2-mile-wide crater in Iraq, spotted serendipitously in a perusal of satellite images, could provide a smoking gun. The crater's discovery, which was announced in a recent issue of the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, is a preliminary finding. Scientists stress that a ground expedition is needed to determine if the landform was actually carved out by an impact.

Yet the crater has already added another chapter to an intriguing overall story that is, at best, loosely bound. Many of the pages are washed away or buried. But several plot lines converge in conspicuous ways.

Too many coincidences

Archeological findings show that in the space of a few centuries, many of the first sophisticated civilizations disappeared. The Old Kingdom in Egypt fell into ruin. The Akkadian culture of Iraq, thought to be the world's first empire, collapsed. The settlements of ancient Israel, gone. Mesopotamia, Earth's original breadbasket, dust.

Around the same time -- a period called the Early Bronze Age -- apocalyptic writings appeared, fueling religious beliefs that persist today.

The Epic of Gilgamesh describes the fire, brimstone and flood of possibly mythical events. Omens predicting the Akkadian collapse preserve a record that "many stars were falling from the sky." The "Curse of Akkad," dated to about 2200 B.C., speaks of "flaming potsherds raining from the sky."

Roughly 2000 years later, the Jewish astronomer Rabbi bar Nachmani created what could be considered the first impact theory: That Noah's Flood was triggered by two "stars" that fell from the sky. "When God decided to bring about the Flood, He took two stars from Khima, threw them on Earth, and brought about the Flood."

Another thread was woven into the tale when, in 1650, the Irish Archbishop James Ussher mapped out the chronology of the Bible -- a feat that included stringing together all the "begats" to count generations -- and put Noah's great flood at 2349 B.C.

All coincidence?

A number of scientists don't think so.

Mounting hard evidence collected from tree rings, soil layers and even dust that long ago settled to the ocean floor indicates there were widespread environmental nightmares in the Near East during the Early Bronze Age: Abrupt cooling of the climate, sudden floods and surges from the seas, huge earthquakes.

Comet as a culprit

In recent years, the fall of ancient civilizations has come to be viewed not as a failure of social engineering or political might but rather the product of climate change and, possibly, heavenly happenstance. As this new thinking dawned, volcanoes and earthquakes were blamed at first. More recently, a 300-year drought has been the likely suspect.

But now more than ever, it appears a comet could be the culprit. One or more devastating impacts could have rocked the planet, chilled the air, and created unthinkable tsunamis -- ocean waves hundreds of feet high. Showers of debris wafting through space -- concentrated versions of the dust trails that create the Leonids -- would have blocked the Sun and delivered horrific rains of fire to Earth for years.

So far, the comet theory lacks firm evidence. Like a crater.

Now, though, there is this depression in Iraq. It was found accidentally by Sharad Master, a geologist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, while studying satellite images. Master says the crater bears the signature shape and look of an impact caused by a space rock.

The finding has not been developed into a full-fledged scientific paper, however, nor has it undergone peer review. Scientist in several fields were excited by the possibility, but they expressed caution about interpreting the preliminary analysis and said a full scientific expedition to the site needs to be mounted to determine if the landforms do in fact represent an impact crater.

Researchers would look for shards of melted sand and telltale quartz that had been shocked into existence. If it were a comet, the impact would have occurred on what was once a shallow sea, triggering massive flooding following the fire generated by the object's partial vaporization as it screamed through the atmosphere. The comet would have plunged through the water and dug into the earth below.

If it proves to be an impact crater, there is a good chance it was dug from the planet less than 6,000 years ago, Master said, because shifting sediment in the region would have buried anything older.

Arriving at an exact date will be difficult, researchers said.

"It's an exciting crater if it really is of impact origin," said Bill Napier, an astronomer at the Armagh Observatory.

Cultural impact

Napier said an impact that could carve a hole this large would have packed the energy of several dozen nuclear bombs. The local effect: utter devastation.

"But the cultural effect would be far greater," Napier said in an e-mail interview. "The event would surely be incorporated into the world view of people in the Near East at that time and be handed down through the generations in the form of celestial myths."

Napier and others have also suggested that the swastika, a symbol with roots in Asia stretching back to at least 1400 B.C., could be an artist's rendering of a comet, with jets spewing material outward as the head of the comet points earthward.

But could a single impact of this size take down civilizations on three continents? No way, most experts say.

Napier thinks multiple impacts, and possibly a rain of other smaller meteors and dust, would have been required. He and his colleagues have been arguing since 1982 that such events are possible. And, he says, it might have happened right around the time the first urban civilizations were crumbling.

Napier thinks a comet called Encke, discovered in 1786, is the remnant of a larger comet that broke apart 5,000 years ago. Large chunks and vast clouds of smaller debris were cast into space. Napier said it's possible that Earth ran through that material during the Early Bronze Age.

The night sky would have been lit up for years by a fireworks-like display of comet fragments and dust vaporizing upon impact with Earth's atmosphere. The Sun would have struggled to shine through the debris. Napier has tied the possible event to a cooling of the climate, measured in tree rings, that ran from 2354-2345 B.C.

Supporting evidence

Though no other craters have been found in the region and precisely dated to this time, there is other evidence to suggest the scenario is plausible. Two large impact craters in Argentina are believed to have been created sometime in the past 5,000 years.

Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in England, said roughly a dozen craters are known to have been carved out during the past 10,000 years. Dating them precisely is nearly impossible with current technology. And, Peiser said, whether any of the impact craters thought to have been made in the past 10,000 years can be tied back to a single comet is still unknown.

But he did not discount Napier's scenario.

"There is no scientific reason to doubt that the break-up of a giant comet might result in a shower of cosmic debris," Peiser said. He also points out that because Earth is covered mostly by deep seas, each visible crater represents more ominous statistical possibilities.

"For every crater discovered on land, we should expect two oceanic impacts with even worse consequences," he said.

Tsunamis generated in deep water can rise even taller when they reach a shore.

British Archaeology, no 30, December 1997: Features
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba30/ba30feat.html

Comets and disaster in the Bronze Age
Cosmic impact is gaining ground as an explanation of the collapse of civilisations, writes Benny Peiser

At some time around 2300BC, give or take a century or two, a large number of the major civilisations of the world collapsed. The Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Early Bronze Age societies in Israel, Anatolia and Greece, as well as the Indus Valley civilisation in India, the Hilmand civilisation in Afghanistan and the Hongshan Culture in China - the first urban civilisations in the world - all fell into ruin at more or less the same time. Why?

A thousand years later, at around 1200BC, many of the civilisations of the same regions again collapsed at about the same time. This time, disaster overtook the Myceneans of Greece, the Hittites of Anatolia, the Egyptian New Kingdom, Late Bronze Age Israel, and the Shang Dynasty of China.

The reasons for these widespread and apparently simultaneous disasters - which coincided also with changes to cultures and societies elsewhere, such as in Britain - have long been a fascinating mystery. Traditional explanations included warfare, famine, and more recently ‘systems collapse’, but the apparent absence of direct archaeological or written evidence for causes, as opposed to effects, has led many archaeologists and historians into a resigned assumption that no definite explanation can be found.

Some decades ago, the hunt for clues passed largely into the hands of natural scientists. Concentrating on the earlier set of Bronze Age collapses, researchers began to find evidence that natural causes, rather than human actions, may have been initially responsible. There began to be talk of climate change, volcanic activity, and earthquakes - and some of this material has now found its way into standard historical accounts of the period.

Agreement, however, there has never been. Some researchers favoured one type of natural cause, others another, and the problem remained that no single explanation appeared to account for all the evidence.

Over the past 15 years or so, however, a new type of ‘natural disaster’ has been much discussed and is beginning to be regarded, by many scholars, as the most probable single explanation for widespread and simultaneous cultural collapse, not only in the Bronze Age but at other times as well. The new theory has been advanced largely by astronomers, and remains almost completely unknown by archaeologists (notable exceptions include Prof Mike Baillie of Queen’s University, Belfast, and Dr Euan Mackie at Glasgow University). The new idea is that these massive cultural disasters were caused by the impact of comets or other types of cosmic debris on the Earth.

The hunt for natural causes for these human disasters began when the French archaeologist Claude Schaeffer published his book Stratigraphie Comparée et Chronologie L’Asie Occidentale in 1948. Schaeffer analysed and compared the destruction layers of more than 40 archaeological sites in the Near and Middle East, from Troy to Tepe Hissar on the Caspian Sea and from the Levant to Mesopotamia. He was the first scholar to detect that all had been totally destroyed several times in the Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age, apparently simultaneously. Since the damage did not show signs of military or other human involvement, and in any case was too excessive, he argued that repeated earthquakes might have been responsible.

At the time he published, Schaeffer was not taken seriously. Since then, however, natural scientists have found widespread and unambiguous evidence for abrupt climate change, sudden sea level changes, catastrophic inundations, widespread seismic activity and evidence for massive volcanic activity at several periods since the last Ice Age, but particularly at around 2300BC, give or take 200 years. Areas such as the Sahara, and around the Dead Sea, were once farmed but became deserts. Tree rings show disastrous growth conditions at c 2350BC, while sediment cores from lakes and rivers in Europe and Africa show a catastrophic drop in water levels. In Mesopotamia, vast areas of land appear to have been devastated, inundated, or totally burned.

Scholars who, following Schaeffer, favour earthquakes as the principal cause of civilisation collapse argue that the world can expect vast earthquakes every 1,000-2,000 years, leading to widespread abandonment of sites; while scholars who prefer climate change as the principal cause argue that severe droughts caused agriculture to fail and that societies inexorably fell apart as a result.

Yet what was the cause of these earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, fire-blasts and climate changes? By the late 1970s, British astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier of Oxford University had begun to investigate cometary impact as the ultimate cause. Then in 1980, the Nobel prize-winning chemist Luis Alvarez and his colleagues published their famous paper in Science that argued that a cosmic impact had led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. He showed that large amounts of the element iridium present in geological layers dating from about 65 million BC had a cosmic origin.

Alvarez’s paper had an immense influence and stimulated further research by such British astronomers as Clube and Napier, Prof Mark Bailey of the Armagh Observatory, Duncan Steel of Spaceguard Australia, and Britain’s best-known astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. All now support the theory of cometary impact and loosely form what is now known as the British School of Coherent Catastrophism.

These scholars envisage trains of cometary debris which repeatedly encounter the Earth. We know that tiny particles of cosmic material penetrate the atmosphere every day, but their impact is insignificant. Occasionally, however, cosmic debris measuring between one and several hundred metres in diameter strike the Earth and these can have catastrophic effects on our ecological system, through multi-megaton explosions of fireballs which destroy natural and cultural features on the surface of the Earth by means of tidal-wave floods (if the debris lands in the sea), fire-blasts and seismic damage.

Depending on their physical properties, asteroids or comets that punctuate the atmosphere can either strike the Earth’s surface, or explode in the air. Those that strike leave an impact crater, such as the well-known Baringer Crater in Arizona caused by an asteroid made of iron some 50,000 years ago. At least ten impact craters are known around the world dating from after the last Ice Age, and no fewer than seven of these date from around the 3rd millennium BC - although none occurred in the Near East.

Air-explosions, however, can be more disastrous. A recent example - known as the Tunguska Event - occurred in 1908 over Siberia, when a bolide made of stone exploded about 5km above ground and completely devastated an area of some 2,000 km2 through fireball blasts. The bolide, although thought to have measured only 60m across, had an impact energy of about 40 megatons, three times as great as the Arizona example and equivalent to the explosion of about 2,000 Hiroshima-size nuclear bombs - even though there was no actual physical impact on the Earth. (The object that destroyed the dinosaurs, by contrast, is thought to have had a diameter of about 10km.) A smaller cometary blast occurred over the Brazilian rainforest in 1930.

In addition to the physical impact of comets, the British astronomers point to the occasional massive influx of cosmic dust high above the stratosphere which can cause a dramatic drop of global temperatures, leading to the suspension of agriculture; and also to the massive influx of cosmic chemicals (associated with dust) with, as yet, incalculable biochemical potentials. Until recently, the astronomical mainstream was highly critical of Clube and Napier’s ‘giant comet’ hypothesis. However, the crash of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in 1994 has led to a change of attitudes. The comet, watched by the world’s observatories, was seen to split into 22 pieces and slam into different parts of the planet over a period of several days. A similar impact on Earth, it hardly needs saying, would have been devastating.

According to current knowledge, Tunguska-like impacts occur every 100 years or so. It is, therefore, not far-fetched to hypothesise that a super-Tunguska may occur every 2,000, 3,000 or 5,000 years and would be capable of triggering ecological crises on a continental or even global scale. In the past, sceptics have demanded the evidence of a crater before they would accept an argument of cosmic impact, but it is now becoming understood that no crater is necessary for disastrous consequences to ensue. The difficulty this leaves scholarship, however, is that in a Tunguska Event no direct evidence is left behind. It may be impossible to prove that one ever took place in the distant past.

The extent to which past cometary impacts were responsible for civilisation collapse, cultural change, even the development of religion, must remain a hypothesis. But in view of the astronomical, geological and archaeological evidence, this ‘giant comet’ hypothesis should no longer be dismissed by archaeologists out of hand.

Dr Benny J Peiser is a historian and anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University. With Mark Bailey and Trevor Palmer, he is editing Natural Catastrophes during Bronze Age Civilisations (BAR, 1998, in preparation).

I bumped into one in Vegas a few years back. It may still be there...

I bumped into one in Vegas a few years back. It may still be there...

You should put things back....

/john