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Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)
- willismonroe 9mo agoThis article makes wildly erroneous claims about a genuinely very interesting ancient object. I've worked a bit on this (PhD in Babylonian Astronomy/Astrology) and published articles talking about it. It's a fascinating object but more so as a product of scholarly thinking about the heavens rather than actual observations. Even if it did record observations they would date to the Neo-Assyrian period (when/where the object was found) not to an even more ancient past. Notably the article linked here doesn't even show the object! It only reproduces images of badly made replicas.
- griffzhowl 9mo agoYeah, soon after I posted this it became clear it's nonsense, a few people in the thread have referred to studies that trees underneath the landslide have been carbon dated to 9400BP, while the book this article's based on claims 5500BP for an "impact" I mainly posted this because I was beguiled by the images of the disk. I hadn't seen it before, so even these shoddy images were impressive, with the circular form, radially arranged characters and lines looking both ancient and technical. Would you recommend a source for some proper information on it? I'm curious about what it says. Googling I keep coming up with rehashings of this meteor story from websites with "Atlantis" in their names and suchlike.
- niobe 9mo agoGood news everyone!
- INTPenis 9mo agoThat is one crazy story. I need to see this done in Hollywood graphics. They're claiming the asteroid came in so low that it did a flyby of the Levant, igniting any flammable object or person on its way, and slammed into the side of a mountain in the Alps It's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about asteroids.
- adzm 9mo agoA six degree angle?! That's insane. I never considered that as a possibility.
- jacquesm 9mo agoIt is not as likely as some of the others but still more likely than five or four... it all depends on what you started out with.
- griffzhowl 9mo agoVery perspicacious remark that it's more likely than five or four... are you an astronautical engineer by any chance? But I'm wondering about such shallow angles - wouldn't it bounce off the atmosphere or somesuch? Perhaps it's just about possible somehow: just imagine firing a kilometre of rock from a mountain at a six degree angle with enough velocity to get it into orbit, but in reverse.
- jacquesm 9mo agoAt some point it might but that would depend highly on the speed of the object relative to us.... Tunguska must have been just too steep because it left a very long track and likely did not even impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event At Mach 80 a lot of things that seem compressible are not... so yes, once you get to angles like that at some point it would possibly deflect but the energy dissipated will still be massive and the shockwave will be ringing the whole planet.
- LargoLasskhyfv 9mo agoYou have it backwards. It came in fast and in a flat angle from somewhere up in the Arctic, over what is now the North Sea, over what is now Germany, and smashed into/grazed the northern side of what is now the 'Gamskogel' near 'Köfels' in the Alps in Austria. The resulting cloud of glowing white hot stuff got almost ejected back into space, and mostly stayed on course North->South by inertia, sending it over the Adriatic Sea, radiating heat downwards in the process. Some of it impacted in the Levante in multiple places, some far apart, over several hours. Skyfall!1!!
- urxvtcd 9mo agoWe found an ancient tablet, dated it, reconstruded a long-dead language well enough to read it, reconstructed the night sky on that day, five and a half thousand years ago, found the orbit of this thing, and connected it to a geological formation thousands of kilometers away. Humans can do some amazing stuff.
- scrollop 9mo agoAnd then they make tiktok
- qubex 9mo agoI find it an absolutely amazing (note I did not use ‘incredible’ on purpose: I consider this explanation very credible indeed). We have a creditable record of a meteor impact dated exactly 29 June 3123 BC. That’s 1,880,145 days ago as of today. It simply boggles my mind.
- beloch 9mo ago"The astronomers made an accurate note of its trajectory relative to the stars, which to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels." --------- This is what I find most amazing: Sub-degree accuracy in a measurement from before chariots. The people of this time had donkey-pulled battle carts that were so slow they had to be abandoned if there was a retreat, but they were able to record and measure astronomical events this accurately. It's also mind-boggling to consider why they were making such observations. It was all about omens that could determine the success of harvests or battles. There is certainly some of what we might now consider scientific thought going on here. They produced omen tables that exhaustively covered every combination of events they could think of, not yet realizing that some combinations were impossible (e.g. A Lunar eclipse at high noon). Omens sound silly today, but the fundamental motivation of early astronomers was to make sense of what was going on in the heavens in order to help make better decisions on the ground. If everyone believed in these omens, they had real power and the predictions these astronomers made may have had large impacts.
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- arto 9mo agohttps://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide-of-kofels-geology-between.html http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide...
- griffzhowl 9mo agoYeah, the meteor story is rubbish. Strange Bristol Uni published this. They're an actual, legitimate, good university.
- metalman 9mo agoslop vibe theorising
- mjd 9mo agoEven if you were right, your comment would have been a useless waste of time. But the article appears to be a copy of a press release from the University of Bristol from 2008. https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html
- metalman 9mo agodrivle, then 1km impactor my ass a german landslide and a mesopotamian clay disk, 5000 years ago, uhuhuh, ya NO! that needs a very very very high level of documentation to even dare hold up your hand do you know about the acedemic/beurocratic practice of "shelving" ?, I am quite certain that it applies to whover "publishied" the original.
- griffzhowl 9mo agoYeah, my bad for sharing. I mainly did it for the pictures because it looks spectacular, and just read through the story quickly, looked like book published by Bristol University? But as per references from other comments here, the landslide was ~9400 BP, so a bit earlier than the 5500 BP date proposed in TFA
- metalman 9mo agoThe picture of the disk is exceptionaly evoctave of the whole mesoptaimian culture/civilisation we can sense but cant quite reasemble as a whole,due in part to the other warning sign from the article, in the period reference to archaeology, which often involved dynamite.
- mjd 9mo agoThere is something here that I do not understand. The article claims that “[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC” But radiocarbon dating of trees buried in the landslide seems to have reliably dated the landslide to 7500 BC. For example https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169555X15002548 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695... Update: The Wikipedia article about the coauthor Mark Hempsell says: “Hempsell got public audience as author of the book "A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event", with Alan Bond proposes a theory not accepted by the scientific community…” The link posted in this thread by user arto calls the theory “pseudoscience”: “Despite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed observations of a meteorite by the Sumerians…” Now it seems very suspicious that the article claims that the tablet is from 3123 BC, when it was excavated from the palace of Ashurbanipal (650 BC).
- YeGoblynQueenne 9mo ago>> “[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC” I'm pretty sure clay tables, that had to be fired to preserve them, did not function as "notebooks". Scribes probably used either unbaked clay or wax tablets to take notes, and they would erase and overwrite them constantly like etch-a-sketch.
- griffzhowl 9mo agoAh, oh well. Was an interesting story. But I mainly shared this to remind myself of this incredible star map, or whatever it really is... Seems not easy to find bona fide information on it, maybe because it's untranslated/decoded except for this Kofels' story, which indeed appears to be out of the bounds of likelihood by 4000 years.
- willismonroe 9mo agoThe tablet has been translated for the better part of a century. The problem is that many of the popular depictions of it don't give it's museum number or any other (correct) identifying information, often erroneously referring to it as a "Sumerian" object. If you search for the museum number K. 8538 you'll find quite a bit (some still bad). That said, this article is wildly off-base.
- imadierich 9mo ago[dead]
- meindnoch 9mo agoI'm extremely skeptical.
- flint 9mo agoI bought the book "A SUMERIAN OBSERVATION OF THE KÖFELS’ IMPACT EVENT" by Mark Hempsell, and Alan Bond. Tried to do a film adaptation, about 10 years ago. One part in Sumer and another in the Alps.
- LePetitPrince 9mo ago[dead]
- CommieBobDole 9mo ago"This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels. The incoming angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometers from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point. As it traveled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometers in diameter" This doesn't even make any sense. A 1km asteroid going many kilometers a second entered at a six degree angle, tore through hundreds of miles of atmosphere without burning up or breaking up, hit a mountain causing a landslide and only then turned into a 5km fireball and traveled down the valley (at a height of ~1500 meters above the valley floor) and just sort of evaporated? I don't think physics works the way the author of this piece thinks physics works.
- herodotus 9mo agoSumerian and Akkadian are two different languages. This tablet is written in Akkadian and is dated in the Akkadian era. The authors claim is that the tablet is a [translated] copy of a much (much) older Sumerian tablet. Apparently the author's theory is not taken seriously by assyriologists or ancient science historians.
- 6000199627 9mo agoHack.
- sxp 9mo agoReading some of the other articles on that site, it's unclear how scientifically sound the original article is. A quick Google search gives different radiocarbon dating for the landslide https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169555X15002548 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695... I don't know enough about the event to figure out the likelihood of either hypothesis, but this other data point is something to keep in mind.
- LargoLasskhyfv 9mo agoHow does one reliably carbon-date a site which got much extraterrestrial matter mixed into it? Whith probably different carbonisotope decay rate onsets/offsets? Because from 'not around here'?