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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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Gomorrah. That's why sodomy still exists - I don't even want to think what Gomorramy was.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
The comet impact does not appear to be nonsense from those working in the field. There is evidence of a massive cloud of dust covering the earth and settling down around the end of the Cretaceous period. Dinosaurs are not found above the line of silt from that impacted and a huge number of variations of mammals are found above that. Added to that there is other evidence from the same time of a massive impact off the coast in Yuctan, Mexico. The
Chicxulub crater appears to have caused massive direct damage to North America and would have the strength to kick up the cloud found in other places throughout the world. The geological evidence points to a cataclysimic change in the Earth over a period of about 50 years
It appears that dinosaurs may be warm blooded. And more like modern birds and mammals than the lizards and amphibians. And in size they ranged from as big as a blue whale to as small as a chicken. They survived a huge number of gradual changes to the environment in their time on the earth. They seem to have a lot in common with modern mammals and birds, especially in terms of diversity and habitats.
On your over all hypothosis that mammals are superior to dinosaurs is really just statistical conjecture. If being fit means alive now then, yes mammals are more fit. But if fit takes on other qualities, then it is really a question of which was more fit (even the best solutions don't always get chosen in today's world). In the end I believe that, mammals really got lucky. They were the right size at the time of the impact, if they'd been larger they would of suffered the same fate as the bigger and more diverse dinosaurs. Dinosaurs just got caught buying into a system that all of a sudden just dissappeared on them. If the same thing happened today, probably most mammals (including humans) would suffer the same fate.
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.
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'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.