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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."
Nah, not a meteorite, more probably those we caused by the first tests of "bunker buster" bombs thrown at Saddam by the U.S...
cheers
The only reason they're "discovering" this now is because it provides a conveniant excuse should Bush decide to carpet bomb Afghanistan or Iraq into the Indian Ocean...
Reporter: Mr. President, why haven't we heard from Bin Laden or Sadam Hussein in three weeks?
Dubya: They were hit by a... meteor.
This is the first find, AFAIK, of a meteor impact affecting human civilization directly.
Well that depends, human civilization or humans for that matter might have never evolved had that meteor 65 million years ago not wiped out the dinosaurs. We might still be rodent like creatures trying to not become lunch if the dinosaurs were still running around.
We have histories in the form of writing or stories when other civilizations were wiped out through catastrophe. At the very least we have ledgeds or religious tales of being smitten by the hand of God. But in this case, these civilizations vanished, to quote the article "without a trace" Wouldn't somebody have survived (maybe somebody who was traveling at the time) and passed the story of this down through history?
Are there any slashdot archeologists who can clarify this?
>>This is the first find, AFAIK, of a meteor impact affecting human civilization directly.
I seem to recall a meteor impact in Siberia in the early 1900's flattening a relatively large area... recently they discovered that it vaporized to an unusal degree on impact leaving a very small geological footprint, the area looked similar to Mnt. St. Helens after it erupted. In any case, I would be inclined to say that this affected human civilization directly, granted on a much smaller scale given the remote nature of the region hit.
is did it hit Sodom or Gomorrah?
Isn't it also odd that there is only one legend which tells of this event (Gilgamesh)? I would have thought there would be scriptures and whatnot all over the place.
Any information on what effect this impact had on other wordly civilisations, or indeed the environment? I for one would find it interesting.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
Ancient Red Cross centers were also accidently destroyed by the meteor.
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?
Wonder what kind of dust such an impact would have kicked up? Red sky at night? Global winter? Is there corroboration of this event in any historical documents?
This reminds me of article from a few months ago on bad weather wiping out the Old Kingdom of Egypt.
If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs.
Historians say this would be the first proof of such an event to have happened prior to September, 2001, and may hinder the US's attempt to enter the Guiness Book of World Records for 'largest bombardment of the Middle East'
--Dan
We have histories in the form of writing or stories when other civilizations were wiped out through catastrophe. But in this case, these civilizations vanished, to quote the article "without a trace" Wouldn't somebody have survived (maybe somebody who was traveling at the time) and passed the story of this down through history?
Some did disappear 'without a trace', meaning 'without a historical record', not 'without leaving archeological remains'. In other cases, (Egypt is one cited in the article), we do have records and tales as well as archeological evidence.
I'm not disputing what the article says, but if this was such a large impact that it caused all of these civilisations to go into decline, how did we manage to uncover enough stuff to realise that they were prosperous civilisations in the first place?
Archeological digs, records of the civilizations that followed them, regional myths and legends.. Many sources, not always as clear and as direct as we might like, but more akin to detective work.
One interesting thing about the article, it points out one of the many advantages of being well read and educated, and reading constantly. (The two are not congruent.) The formation was discovered by accident in a photograph illustrating a magazine article.
Fortune favors the prepared mind.
From Scientific American, page 30, Oct. 2001, in the "Skeptic" column by Michael Shermer:
Amen.Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Ummm... yeah. The hebrew is "Yam Suf", the Sea of Reeds. Not too hard to see how a simple typo made that the "Sea of Red", from which "Red Sea" is obvious. And yes, what we call the Red Sea is clearly identifiable as the biblical Sea of Reeds. If you actually _read_ your bible, you'll see that the Israelites didn't go directly from Egypt to Israel, they went via what's now known as Jordan, first crossing the Red Sea, then the Jordan (which retains its name to this day).
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
The island you are referring to is Thera, also called Santorini. The idea that the eruption of Thera destroyed Minoan civilization has been around for about 30 years, so it's not exactly a recent idea. What we know is that there was a catastrophic eruption of Thera, an explosion that was approximately 1000x larger than Mt. St. Helens. There are geologic strata throughout the Eastern Mediterranean containing ash from that eruption. The ashfall even made it to Egypt, and there are believed to have been decent size tsunami that made it as far as Egypt (although not catastrophic waves, it seems).
A witty saying is worth nothing - Voltaire
As for crossing the Red Sea, according to Jewish history the exodus from Egypt happened in the year 2448, or 1312 BC, so the meteor would not have had much to do with the plagues or the splitting of the sea.
Hope that helps answer your question!
The article says that the impact "must have happened within the past 6,000 years", and then immediately concludes that it is responsible for some specific events 4,300 years ago. Yes, 4300 is "within" the past 6000, but the proposal of cause-and-effect is a rather long stretch until we get the actual date of the crater.
Nor is there anything "mysterious" about the "sudden decline" of the specified nations/dynasties. After all, we know of lots of nations/dynasties that have suddenly declined during the past 6000 years. Do we require meteors to explain them, too?
The basic report of a powerful meteor strike is really interesting -- or at least will be if it is confirmed -- but let's not descend into pseudoscience by "explaining" history with it before there is any evidence to suggest cause-and-effect for specific events.
The claims about Sargonid Akkad seem to be entirely off base anyway. The glory days of Akkad coincided exactly with Sargon's personal reign -- no rare occurence in ancient history. Moreover Akkad saw a revival just a few decades later, during the reign of his grandson Narim-Sin. Not long after that Akkad did collapse altogether, but that can be explained by the ravages of Guti highlanders, without having to invoke meteors, divine wrath, aliens, or Microsoft's predatory marketing.
People are too quick to invoke grand catastrophes to "explain" things that don't need explaining in the first place. Let's stay skeptical until there is some actual evidence for something.
Also, notice that the article was dated back in April. Any more recent publications on it, anyone?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
So anything coming from space that leaves a crater, is a meteorite.
sic transit gloria mundi
The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph in the UK aren't the most reliable rags. I'd really take this with a mountain of salt. Honestly.
Smegma.
There is this link. many good links on the page.
Of course, this has been discussed in the fringe areas for a while.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I think I have a candidate for you to consider. The so-called pre-Roman Celts of what is now France and northwestern Spain feared that the sky might fall on their heads. Although the so-called Celtic (as opposed to Basque) ethnic groups in present-day France and the mountains in the north of Spain (Liguri, Asturi, Kantauri, Gallici) most probably came from other mountain homelands in Europe, like (in the case of the probably Celtic Liguri) the Alps, poet and historian Robert Graves has pointed to similarities between Celtic myths of the western Celts (Spanish, Irish, Welsh, and Brittonic) and myths which were "displaced" in early recorded history (euphemism for ethnically cleansed) in lands that were later to become Greece and Persia. Now, it seems reasonable to object that people that far west could not have seen this event, but it is known that Celts, who preferred to live in easily -defended high grounds, periodically migrated in large groups; Julius Caesar reported that, during his "last" campaign against the Gauls, thousands of Celts passed near his encampment, apparently on their way to the Iberian peninsula. What I am trying to say is that the Celts may well have lived that far east a long time ago; indeed, not so long ago, the Isauri [sp?] were a well-documented (and almost certainly Celtic) pain in the ass in the middle east -- during early recorded history, IIRC. Or maybe there were many meteor impacts, some of which remain to be discovered near the traditional Celtic homelands. In any case, I don't know whether the collective Celtic memory of the sky "falling" is linked to the cataclysm alluded to in the article, but it's an interesting conjecture -- one that I make on no authority (I am not a historian) strictly for the sake of discussion.
I'm not sure I'd read a lot into the fact that there may be only one legend (Gilgamesh) referring to this incident. Remember that the vast majority of history and culture of the time was conveyed orally; there simply wasn't a lot of writing, and much of what was written was undoubtedly focused on mundane things like keeping tracking of financial transactions or religious observances. I happen to be in the midst of reading Gilgamesh right now, so I'll quote from the introduction (this is from the Pengiun Classics edition translated by Andrew George): "Literature was already being written down in Mesopotamia by 2600 BC, though because the script did not yet express language fully, these early tablets remain extremely difficult to read....Texts in Akkadian appear in quantity from about 2300 BC....The early texts in Akkadian dating from this period include a very small body of literature." Incidentally, 2300 BC is just about the time this impact is supposed to have occurred.
I agree with you that the evidence for this seems pretty thin so far, based on what the article describes. But I don't think it's implausible on its face, either...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Actually, it's not a typo at all.
The literal Hebrew is "Sea of Reeds", which has caused certain Bible scholars to to argue that the Israelites had merely crossed a swampy region and not the actual Red Sea.
However the amount of water must have been sufficient to cover the Egyptian military... impossible in a mere swamp.
Also Acts 7:36 and Hebrews 11:29 when refering to the same incident use the Greek expression erythra' tha'lassa, meaning "Red Sea".
In fact Herodotus used the same Greek expression to refer to the Indian Ocean which contains the Red Sea.
For more info on usage of "Red Sea" in the OT, check out Jeremiah 49:21 and 1 Kings 9:26... and check out where Edomite territory was known to be at that time. It's quite clear that "Sea of Reeds" was the Hebrew term in use for that region at the time.
-CODiNE
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
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.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
There have been a lot of cuneiform texts found by archaeologists that spoke about some wind of death bringing an abrupt end to the Sumerian civilization at around the late 2000's BC, and this is something that the archaeologists have been hard pressed to explain, giving far-fetched explanations about barbarian tribes raiding and pillaging Sumer. A cometary impact is a far more plausible explanation, it would seem, given the way the texts are written. Perhaps the comet fragmented on entry to the atmosphere and another fragment landed on the plain of the Dead Sea, destroying the settlements of Sodom and Gomorrah there and turning the area around the Dead Sea into the wasteland it now is. I wonder if there has been any geological study of the Dead Sea plain that could perhaps confirm or deny this conjecture.
So now, somebody kick Saddam out of Iraq so the archaeologists and geologists can study it more closely! :)
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
The article did not jump to conclusion that this impact occured around 2300 BCE, it merely mentioned it as an intriguing possibility. Nothing but intriguing speculation until scientists can study samples from the impact site.
The only people claiming that the impact *was* in 2300 BCE are Slashdot readers.
As for the other argument that this is a cop-out, Occam's Razor cuts both ways. Localized disruptions only require localized events, but widespread social collapse is easier to explain by one major catastrophe (literall, "ill star!") than dozens or hundreds of smaller independent events.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I believe the civilization was the "Hittites." A really cute girl in high school gave her year report on the issue. IIRC, until about the turn of the century, critics claimed that the entire bible is a bunch of hogwash because they couldn't find any record of the hittites outside of the bible. Then they did. I believe her point was that in science, a more moderate view is often the most useful, don't let your personal biases get in the way of your work. Don't assume the bible is entirely correct on a few small details, but don't assume it's all wrong for the same reason.
funny munging
... I've been playing Civilization3 for the past week and haven't seen anything like this yet and no mention of "random meteor strikes" in the Civilopedia.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
The meteor hypothesis can be considered scientific because it makes testable predictions which have not yet (to my knowledge) been refuted by observational data. People can go and take core samples, look for glassy beads concentrated near the crater, magnetic alignmnets consistant with the location of the crater, isotope anomallies concentrated on the crater, etc. If several of these support the meteor prediction, then most scientists will probably put a fair bit of credance in the meteor hypothesis. If they don't, then most scientists will probably dismiss it.
If some of the data is consistant and some is not what was expected, then people will think more about the avaliable data and how they can perform additional tests. Maybe there's a coincidence or maybe scientists can learn a little more about meteor impacts. In any case, there will probably remain a few scientits who cling to their original hypothesis as long as the data remotely allow. That's actually good, because they'll be motivated to keep performing additional tests when most scientists will think the case is solved. Most of the time they'll just dig their own graves, but ocassionally a scientist previously thought a crackpot manages to produce data that changes people's mind.
My point is that, yes, at this point, it's certainly not cemented. However, it's not just idle speculation. People can (and most likely will) collect data, do experiements, make models, and see whether a meteor is the most likely hypothesis to explain the avaliable data. Neither of us know what the outcome will be, but I have confidence that with time (maybe several decades), scientists will be able to make a convincing case either for or against the meteor hypothesis.
Human events, maybe. Astrophysics, no. See the post you are replying to.
The reason why Velikovsky is not accepted is the same that Copernicus's theory was not.
Carlk Sagan once said something like: "They laughed at Galilieo. They laughed at Copernicus. But then they also laughed at Bozo the clown".
Not that it was against logic
But it is against logic: Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. And suggesting that "Venus was bored orbiting over there, and decided to wander over this way a bit" or "Jupiter burped" Aint it.
You seem to have touble letting go of outmoded things (OS2, Velikovsky). KDE is quite nice you know.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
FYI, Carl Sagan also presents a refutation of Velikovsky's theories in Broca's Brain.
It's been a while since I last read it, but here are a few of Sagan's argument that I remember off-hand:
There's other objections too-- I think Sagan has about ten-- but those are the ones I remember.
I can see how the type of content to which you are responding might cause you to disbelieve, but what is portrayed by the poster is not consistent with what the Bible says.
I believe that the existence of God gives a foundation of reason on which we can stand when investigating the universe through the scientific method.
If you have any level of interest in pursuing this discussion, please contact me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com.
God loves you and longs for relationship with you.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?