What Did the Babylonia Astronomers Know, and When Did They Know it?
The sudden destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, as described in the Bible, has, for centuries. intrigued scholars, and provided preachers with much material for sermons on the cosmic consequences of rampant immorality. The underlying facts have been disputed for just as long, but now, a new study by archaeologists from the University of South Carolina, argues that, indeed, 3600 hundred years ago a meteor with Tunguska-like power struck an ancient Jordanian site known as Tell el-Hamman, near the Dead Sea, and could be the source of the original account.
In the Old Testament, the ‘wicked’ behavior of the Sodomites offended no less than the patriarch Abraham, who personally chose to live elsewhere. For the sake of his nephew Lot, who still lived there, Abraham pleaded with two angels sent to warn of the coming catastrophe, to spare the cities from their well-deserved doom. The evil cities did not escape, but Lot and family, the Bible tells us, were spared, though Lot’s wife, who disobeyed warnings, and looked back at the final conflagration, was turned, unfortunately, to a “pillar of salt.” The turning-to-salt part, some have speculated, could represent the fate of someone too close to a nuclear blast. And, according to Christopher R. Moore, lead author of the new study, the evidence now unearthed indicates that in 1650 BCE, just such an explosion created an airburst greater than the notorious 1908 event near Tunguska, Siberia, where a 50-mile-wide bolide detonated with a 1000 times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Tell el Hamman, however, was not the first site involving an invading space rock, proposed to account for the Sodom and Gomorrah story.
In 2008, according to press reports, including one from Atlantis Rising contributor Frank Joseph (“Secrets of the Stars: The Amazing Lost Astronomy of the Ancient Sumerians,” A.R. #117), Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell, a pair of British rocket scientists, claimed that an ancient stone tablet—known as the Planisphere, and discovered by the Victorian archaeologist Henry Layard in the ruins of the royal palace at Nineveh—was actually an ancient Sumerian astrologer’s description of the night sky shortly before dawn on June 29, 3123 BC. The tablet, said Bond and Hempsell was a 700 BC, copy of a far older one. Half of it showed the position of planets and clouds, while the other half described the movement of an object looking like a ‘stone bowl’ traveling rapidly across the sky. That object, said Bond and Hempsell, matched a kind of asteroid known as the Aten type which orbits the sun close to earth. Its trajectory would have put it on a collision course with the Otz Valley in Austria. “It came in at a very low angle,” said Hempsell, “—around six degrees—and then clipped a mountain called Gaskogel around 11 kilometers from Köfels’.” Hempsell went on to explain how the object exploded as it traveled down the valley and produced an event of literally biblical proportions. The explosion, said Bond and Hempsell would have generated a gigantic mushroom cloud and filled the air for hundreds of miles with thick dust.
The hypothetical ‘Köfels event,’ where a kilometer-long asteroid, may have crashed into the Alps, was once thought to have occurred several millennia earlier than the date referenced, but Bond and Hempsell contended that contaminated samples used in prior analysis had caused an error, and that subsequent research showed that the strike, in fact, belonged in the same time frame as the fabled Old Testament episode.
