In a nutshell, a 2700 year old cuneiform tablet is thought to be a transcription of one written down by a Sumerian astronomer, describing in great detail the appearance of this asteroid as it moved across the sky. Researchers said the original must have been a “wonderful” piece of observational science.
The asteroid is supposed to have been a half-mile or so in diameter, and may be the cause behind numerous disaster myths including the Biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah.
This is someone disturbing, too, since it seems to indicate that asteroid strikes big enough to cause regional devastation are fairly common, occurring perhaps once every 7000 years or so. A recent theory suggests that a North American impact event caused the extinction of the megafauna there. We seem to be due for another one, somewhere. I think this also may explain how the superstition of comets being evil omens. There might be legendary memories of catastrophic impacts.
I’m trying to figure out why the article is headlined “Clay tablet identified as asteroid that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah”. Wouldn’t “Clay tablet may have identified asteroid that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah” be just a bit more accurate?
I see it now, Sword and sandal movie meets Killer Asteroid Movie! Bruce Willis in a toga! The entire film is spoken in ancient Babylonian! Even the posters will be in Cuniform! Co-directred by Mel Gibson and Michael Bay!
Armageddon The Prequel This shit got real 10,000 years ago!
I wonder how you say “I’m too old for this shit” in ancient Babylonian?
Do you have a cite for that? I have no trouble with accepting that an impact event could have been a factor in the extinction of the North American megafauna, but when one considers that megafauna world wide were going extinct at the same time, it doesn’t hold water for me as the sole cause of the extinctions.
I don’t think it needs any more explanation than the simple recognition that until very recently there were two classes of celestial objects: Stars and planets. Anything that challenged that categorization was both a challenge to the priest/astronomers of the times, and seen as a sign of divine displeasure by causing unexplained change in something that was supposed to be unchanging. Comets were “bad stars” because they followed none of the rules for planets nor for stars, and Novae were distressing because while they followed most of the rules for stars (i.e. remaining in the same part of the sky) the sudden appearance, and changing brightness were not shared by any other “known” celestial object.
Here is a BBC news report on it. (And here is a page with links to some abstracts on published papers.)
The Wikipedia page has links to video of the press conference announcing it.
I think it is plausible, although impossible to know for sure, that both prehistoric and ancient astronomers could watch an object get bigger and bigger, witness an impact event occurring, then see that the object is gone and make the connection.
I’m still left with many of my original questions/qualms, based on what’s reported there. Either it’s a global climate affecting event, which seems to be the argument presented, in which case I’d want to hear why the Australian megafauna died off, but the African ones didn’t. Or it’s simply a locally affecting event, which means that it needs to explain what pressures were affecting European and Asian megafauna to cause effectively simultaneous extinctions.
I don’t say that it’s implausible. I just don’t see the need for such a dramatic explaination, when the more mundane one I’d mentioned seems to leave no unexplained bits.
Some asteroids are remarkably subtle. If a half-mile-wide asteroid smashed into the center of Europe, even 5000 years ago, I’d have expected more impressive signs of the event than a 5 km wide landslide in the Austrian Alps.
But evidently not. Apparently asteroids have the ability to single out communities in the Middle East thousands of miles away from the actual impact site. I heard a noise out in the front yard last night and just assumed it was raccoons. But maybe it was an asteroid.
Er… yes, that sounds about right. A one-kiloton explosion ought to destroy about a million square kilometers, give or take. That’s what, Texas and New Mexico combined? Thank the gods there have been no explosions of that magnitude in recent history.
The more I look at the Times article, the harder it is to believe that it wasn’t accidentally posted a day early.
An asteroid over a half-mile wide-- slightly less than one kilometer-- impacts the Austrian Alps, causing a landslide roughly five times its own width? This clay tablet is supposedly a 700 BC copy of a Sumerian record from 3123 BC, and half of it is missing, and apparently part of the surviving data concerns the positions of clouds. Yet these researchers have been able to narrow the time and place to slightly before dawn on June 29, in Austria. And this somehow explains the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as recorded in the Bible.
Even the illustration is unreliable. “The clay tablet, which is 6cm in diameter.” So who’s holding it, a leprechaun?
I first heard about it on NPR, but I can’t remember if it was Tuesday or not. They have done April Fool stories in the past, but those don’t usually get picked up by other media.
Seriously though, many tablets were small, only a few inches across. They weren’t massive book-sized pieces of clay. The person holding it could have small hands.
According to the Telegraph article on the subject, you are exactly right:
So, there you are then. Asteroid nicks mountain in Austria and turns into a fireball, thereby destroying several towns in the Middle East. The theory is beautiful in its simplicity. The authors also note that this model neatly explains why other studies have dated the landslide to 6000 BC, which would be troublingly early for the Sodom/Gomorrah connection:
This sounds vaguely similar to the miraculous radiance that supposedly affected the Shroud of Turin. Maybe Jesus was killed by an asteroid.
I’m telling you, that clay tablet is being held by a hobbit. If there were any archaeologists that tiny, they’d have a “Tiny Archaeologist” show on the Discovery channel.
