Layard Tablet

[ewx]

Since it seems to be quiet today... Clay tablet identified as asteroid that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

Well, sort of. Other articles suggest that geologists date the Köfels landslide to 8-9K years ago (i.e. well before the Sumerians) and the connection to the story in Genesis 19 appears to be completely speculative.

Comments

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

...and the fact that Sodom and Gomorrah were not in the Austrian Alps.

Hats off to the Sumerian astronomer who recorded it, though.

(The Telegraph also makes the erroneous claim that the Sumerians were the first known civilisation. This is incorrect; rather, they, along with the Egyptians, were the first to record themselves in writing so we know more about them than merely examining the ruins they left tells us.)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The theory is that the cities destroyed were under the path of the asteroid, not that it actually hit them.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

What's your definition of civilization? Cities an agriculture seems to be a popular one, but not necessarily the only possibility. Were you thinking of Catal Huyuk or something else?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

So how come the cities destroyed were those at the lowest point on Earth, with the most protective atmosphere over them, and not, say, Jerusalem, a few tens of miles to the northwest, but up in the hills?

It doesn't hang together.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

It seems a bit odd that an event that squashed an equivalent area to France + Germany would be recorded in terms of a couple of cities.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I wasn't aware that S+G had been located that accurately. (I'm a bit uncomfortable about defending what I still think is complete speculation so I'd like to emphasize that I'm playing devil's advocate here.)

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I think this (http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html) is the press release it's all cribbed off. No proper publications that I can find.

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

Think of it as the Old Testament equivalent of The Telegraph.

"Europe Devastated, no Israelites hurt."

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

What's your definition of civilization? Cities an agriculture seems to be a popular one, but not necessarily the only possibility.

I hadn't actually pinned that down. I suppose things did take off in a big way from the thirty-second century BCE, when within a short period of time writing, the wheel and bronzeworking were all invented, but I was thinking more of the fact that when the Sumerian culture emerged from the mists of protohistory, there were a lot of cities in the Middle East with a history going back thousands of years, comprising cycle upon cycle of growth, trade, conquest and rebuilding.

It's not clear exactly when the Sumerian culture started; it's possible the people in Sumeria a thousand or more years before the Jemdat Nasr period (when writing was invented) were already Sumerians, but there's other cities outside the area with long histories, too: Jericho, for example, was founded 11,000 years ago. (And there's Çatal Hüyük, as you point out.)

[sparrowsion]

I've read one report (which I now can't find, meh) which implies that it was the ejecta falling back to earth which was responsible.

Fits the biblical description better than the last attempted explanation I saw, which was that an earthquake triggered liquifaction and a mudslide carried all archeological evidence into the Dead Sea.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Have you come across The Tabloid Bible (http://lethargic-man.livejournal.com/82959.html)?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Also, perhaps it did get trashed, but the people who recorded the story had more reason to record S+G's destruction that Jerusalem's at the time.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The S+G story isn't really a report, though, is it - there could easily be many hundreds of years between the original historical events (if there were any!) and the written form that's come down to us, and it'd only take one step of that chain being more interested in S+G than any bigger picture that there might have been to narrow the scope, just as details like angels can be added.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

OK, good point.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

When I ask the impact-effects calculator http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/ for a 1km asteroid impacting at a six-degree angle at cosmic speeds, it gives a 3-gigaton explosion, and the largest crater in the three-by-thirty-mile crater field is a mile across. The blast wave would demolish steel-framed buildings at 20km; but, thanks to the inverse-square law, 2000km away in Israel a loud noise would be heard. The asteroid started breaking up about 700km out from impact at an altitude of 70km, and deposited 24Gtons of energy over that period.

Kofels doesn't look like a field of one-mile craters and isn't full of shocked quartz; there is some melted rock, but I'm prepared to accept that when a mountain is sliding at 30kmph the friction is quite enough to melt rock.

I could just about believe a Sumerian description of an impact; but I don't believe the connection with Kofels in the slightest.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

There's no proper publication that I can see; there's a self-published book

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sumerian-Observation-Kofels-Impact-Event/dp/1904623646

I deduce that Alan Bond has caught Engineer's Symptom.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

They're generally accepted as having been located (if they existed) at the southern end of the Dead Sea. (I have also heard a theory that the name Qumran (located at the northern end of the Dead Sea) originated from "Gomorrah", though given Qumran was settled nearly two thousand years later, that's plenty of time for mix-ups to have happened.)

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Engineer's Symptom.

Which is?

[sunflowerinrain.livejournal.com]

After staring at the headline in bemusement I conclude that it was written, or edited, by someone who hadn't read the article.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

It's rather bizarre, isn't it.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

It's a term coined by James Nicoll; essentially, modelling complicated systems with first-order engineering approximations without considering that the approximations might be outside their range of validity, and without consulting with people skilled in the field.

It’s generally agreed that the mind of an engineer is a delicate thing, particularly the minds of Electrical Engineers.

Engineers Syndrome may be caused by the habit of some schools to use Lies for Engineers, models that are wrong but good enough for their purposes. There is also a tradition amongst some engineers to see their profession as the best one in the world, certainly much harder than mere open heart surgery, managing a nation-state’s monetary system or being a Hindu god.

When they notice the fact that Lies for Engineers are flawed the reaction is often _not_ “Oh, they simplified that [foo model] for engineering undergrads” but rather “Those guys over in [foo] don’t know their stuff. I’d better invent my own version of [foo] and since I know regular old [foo] is wrong, because my Lies for Engineers course shows me this, I won’t bother to check Foo For Fooists to see if the flaws I have noticed LFE are addressed in FFF.”

When Foo-ologists notice Shiny New Foo by an Engineer [SNFbaE] they may well point out that their standard model produces better results or that SNFbaE requires that the Earth be composed entirely of pudding. many engineers do not take this as proof that SNFbaE is wrong but that Foo-ologists are even more incorrect than the engineer thought. A few cycles of this (particularly the bit where the Foo-ologists fail to fall to their knees in worship but instead act as though their discipline was a real job like engineering) and you may get to see Secondary Engineer’s Syndrome where not only do they see Foo-ologists as wrong but as an active conspiracy to suppress SNFbaE.

Tertiary Engineer’s Syndrome is to that stage as Tertiary syphilus is earlier forms. Every other profession is seen as un-engineerish and therefore flawed and wrong. It’s just a matter of
looking for the mistakes you know are there.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I think we'd have noticed the destruction of Jerusalem in the archaeological record. (Rather conveniently, the location of Jerusalem shifted slightly over the centuries, so the oldest part is mostly not covered today by the Old City, or the Temple Mount.)