Meteor May Have Wiped Out Middle East Civilization

GFD writes "The Telegraph has a story about how a recently discovered impact crater in Iraq could have wiped out several civilizations that 'collapsed mysteriously' about 4000 years ago. This is the first find, AFAIK, of a meteor impact affecting human civilization directly. Very thought provoking."

Comments

Any stories in the Bible/Koran/etc that coincide?

[hattig]

I am not overly religious, so I do not know my town names, etc. Do people know where Sodom/Gommorah were? These places were smitten by god in the Old Testament, although the only film that I have seen that related to this used a nuclear blast in the background to denote "destruction by god" and obviously did not have any "alien intelligence" overtones to it at all, no sirrah!

Could a meteorite hit has sucked water from the Red Sea thus emptying it for Moses to cross?

As you can see, I am just making wild assumptions here trying to relate myths (Old Testament) with reality (Meteorite that hit 4000-6000 years ago). Didn't some religious people a long time ago date the beginning of the earth to be like 4090BC or near that anyway?

Wild, brainstorming thoughts that archeologists need to have to piece things together. It was only recently that they connected the volcanic destruction of an island in the mediterranean with the ending of a civilisation on Crete 100 miles away at the same time (i.e., huge tidal waves, killing of trade & crap weather killed the Cretian civilisation off - I forget the name of the civilisation though - Minoan?). Good TV program though.

Anyone else got a fave religious story that could be attributed to this event?

Mundane Apocaypses

[fm6]

This is all very interesting, but you don't need humoungous events like these to wipe out a bronze-age civilization.

A lot is made of the fact that almost every culture has some version of the Noah myth. (There's an interesting exception, that I'll talk about in a moment.) But why is this suprising? Cultures from this period tended to grow up around small (a few thousand people) cities built in flood basins. The river was source of life -- it provided topsoil, transportation and food. It was often considered divine (the Latin word for "priest" originally meant "bridge-keeper").

But life on the river has its downside, as everybody who lives near one knows. One major flood, and there goes your urban center. Not cataclymisic if you're one river town in a bigger culture. But suppose that town contains your entire government, economic establishment, and cultural elite? Obviously, the River God has decided to mod your civilization down in a big way.

The exception is very interesting -- sub-Saharan Africans don't have a Noah myth. Which is hardly suprising. Altough the pre-colonial Africans did build a few cities none of them were on flood plains.

Other things can wipe out a small civilization too. It can outstrip its resources, be decimated by plague, or simply get sloppy about maintaining its source of wealth. We need to consider the mundane before we start worrying about the exotic.

Re:Velikovsky said this all those years ago.

[os2fan]

Regards your view of pseudo-science rubbish: You must understand that the movements of the planets as posited by Velikovsky is an explanation of the events that he teased out of legends. He successfully predicted that Venus was hot, that Jupiter has a large magnetic field, and quite a number of other things. Whether it is right or wrong, it is still a valid, testable hypothesis, capable of making predictions, and therefore Science.

The collapse of the Roman Empire and other events around the year 300 were discussed in the recent book Catastrophe, the proposition of which is that the Dark Ages were caused by an upset of the world weather around 535, by a large volcano that Krakatoa is in the crater of. The events of 535, as well as those of 1485BC and 687BC, suggest that it was not the work of a local civilisation, but widespread disasters.

You must understand this about Velikovski's theory. He did not posit that the celestial events occured, and then looked for confirmation, but rather, from the study of ancient legends, using his skill as a psychocharist, suggested that the described events happened, and were suppressed (as victims of trauma usually do). That is, Velikovski's wandering planets are an explination, not a cause. Your "Sun Standing Still" is described as a tippletoe movement of the earth.

The great chorus of people who stood up and said it was rubbish sounds similar to those who stood up and said the earth moves in the sky. There were serious objections to a moving earth, that took centries to overcome [like, how can it move and keep its atmosphere].

To date, I have not seen any reasonable attempt to refute Mr Velikovsky, which, if he were such a widely read author, and Science were so sure of their footing, this aught be addressed. Put simply, there is nothing in Velikovsky that is against the reason of physics, and certianly, one must agree that our understanding has changed in the intervening time.

On the other hand, there are perfectly reasonable explinations to most of the events that Velikovski describes. Check out the Abacus book Velikovski Reconsidered.

Also, Velikovski DID submit his books to peer review. But there was an organised campaign by some scientists to prevent the publication of his book by his first publisher, MacMillan.