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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."
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?
Wouldn't somebody have survived (maybe somebody who was traveling at the time) and passed the story of this down through history?
Travel back then wasn't the luxury it once was, and so isolated tribes/villiages/civilizations would be rather prone to oblivion.
Also, things get passed down, but there are very few stories that do not get warped with each telling. Perhaps, too, that this story is in religious texts, but how are we to know which? The symbolism may be too obscure or too abstract for us to pick up on immediately.
That being said, the article specifically mentions an ancient story:
A date of around 2300 BC for the impact may also cast new light on the legend of Gilgamesh, dating from the same period. The legend talks of "the Seven Judges of Hell", who raised their torches, lighting the land with flame, and a storm that turned day into night, "smashed the land like a cup", and flooded the area.
That may be to what you refer to. Perhaps they didn't mention the civilizations that were destroyed because the land being lit with flame and a storm turning day into night, smashing the land like a cup and flooding the area were kind of heavy on their minds at the time.
--Dan
From Scientific American, page 30, Oct. 2001, in the "Skeptic" column by Michael Shermer:
Amen.Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
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
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.