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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)
mjd wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
There is something here that I do not understand. The article claims
that
â[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian
astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29
June 3123 BCâ
But radiocarbon dating of trees buried in the landslide seems to have
reliably dated the landslide to 7500 BC.
For example [1] Update:
The Wikipedia article about the coauthor Mark Hempsell says:
âHempsell got public audience as author of the book "A Sumerian
Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event", with Alan Bond proposes a
theory not accepted by the scientific communityâ¦â
The link posted in this thread by user arto calls the theory
âpseudoscienceâ:
âDespite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis
was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed
observations of a meteorite by the Sumeriansâ¦â
Now it seems very suspicious that the article claims that the tablet is
from 3123 BC, when it was excavated from the palace of Ashurbanipal
(650 BC).
URI [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169555...
griffzhowl wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
Ah, oh well. Was an interesting story. But I mainly shared this to
remind myself of this incredible star map, or whatever it really
is... Seems not easy to find bona fide information on it, maybe
because it's untranslated/decoded except for this Kofels' story,
which indeed appears to be out of the bounds of likelihood by 4000
years.
mjd wrote 1 hour 17 min ago:
It was a great theory, and I was glad to have read it. Thanks for
posting!
griffzhowl wrote 1 hour 0 min ago:
Thanks for the landslide info! Good to have the proper knowledge.
Shame there's no reliable stuff about the tablet. Maybe it hasn't
been translated by a sane, competent professional
metalman wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
slop
vibe theorising
mjd wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
Even if you were right, your comment would have been a useless waste
of time.
But the article appears to be a copy of a press release from the
University of Bristol from 2008.
URI [1]: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html
metalman wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
drivle, then
1km impactor my ass
a german landslide and a mesopotamian clay disk, 5000 years ago,
uhuhuh, ya NO!
that needs a very very very high level of documentation to even
dare hold up your hand
do you know about the acedemic/beurocratic practice of "shelving"
?, I am quite certain that it applies to whover "publishied" the
original.
griffzhowl wrote 55 min ago:
Yeah, my bad for sharing. I mainly did it for the pictures
because it looks spectacular, and just read through the story
quickly, looked like book published by Bristol University? But as
per references from other comments here, the landslide was ~9400
BP, so a bit earlier than the 5500 BP date proposed in TFA
arto wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
[1]
URI [1]: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html
URI [2]: http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide-o...
griffzhowl wrote 30 min ago:
Yeah, the meteor story is rubbish. Strange Bristol Uni published
this. They're an actual, legitimate, good university.
urxvtcd wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
We found an ancient tablet, dated it, reconstruded a long-dead language
well enough to read it, reconstructed the night sky on that day, five
and a half thousand years ago, found the orbit of this thing, and
connected it to a geological formation thousands of kilometers away.
Humans can do some amazing stuff.
thaumasiotes wrote 31 min ago:
> reconstruded a long-dead language well enough to read it
We "reconstructed" Sumerian through the fairly intuitive process of
finding reference works describing the language, and reading them.
griffzhowl wrote 20 min ago:
That's cool isn't it? Even to the Akkadians, Sumerian was an
ancient language (prehistoric!), that became sacred.
Aren't there also bilingual texts that are used for learning it? Or
maybe I'm thinking of different versions of stories, in Sumerian
and later Akkadian or Babylonian.
I'm curious how the modern pronunciation is arrived at. Is that a
lot of convention and guess work or is it reasonably secure through
knowing (approximately) Akkadian pronunciation via other Semitic
languages?
abainbridge wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
Seems like it is no longer considered to be anything to do with a
meteorite impact. It's hard to find a good source. This is the best I
found: [1] I think this paper's abstract claims that wooden debris
from the landslide has been dated to 5000 years older than the
Sumerian tablet:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_impact_struct...
URI [2]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329153343_The_produ...
griffzhowl wrote 1 hour 14 min ago:
If you're looking for a source on the landslide, another commenter
here posted this, that seems more reliable than wikipedia.
Searching for Kofel's impact, rather than landslide, brings up
nonsense because there's only pseudo-evidence for that. [1] It
dates the landslide to about 9400 years ago (BP), so this article
about the star map putting it at 5500 years ago seems to be a
colourful fabrication (my bad). The author of the meteor theory
apparently even tries to connect it to Sodom and Gomorrah being hit
by the passing heat! Lol
Finding reliable info on this "planisphere" tablet isn't easy. As
far as I can tell it was untranslated and kept a low profile until
this impact story
URI [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016...
urxvtcd wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
Eh, so too good to be true.
griffzhowl wrote 7 min ago:
Yeah, it was quite a compelling story, and it's at least a
genuinely beautiful and intriguing tablet. The author Hempsell
does have some talent though, in seemingly getting a reputable
university to publish his book... I'm thinking he was quite canny
in finding this attractive untranslated tablet with little else
written about it, and then employing enough knowledge about a
combination of different subjects (ancient Sumerian, asteroid
orbits, Alpine geology) that no single reviewer was able or
motivated to properly evaluate all the arguments. Or he just had
a friend at the press.
INTPenis wrote 3 hours 19 min ago:
That is one crazy story. I need to see this done in Hollywood graphics.
They're claiming the asteroid came in so low that it did a flyby of the
Levant, igniting any flammable object or person on its way, and slammed
into the side of a mountain in the Alps
It's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about
asteroids.
District5524 wrote 1 hour 17 min ago:
In a movie, I'd definitely involve Ãtzi as well ( [1] ). Ãtzi was
found like 30 km from the impact site. And could have been a
contemporary.
E.g., he cursed the guy who shot him and whose village is struck by a
meteor in the end.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi
adzm wrote 3 hours 16 min ago:
A six degree angle?! That's insane. I never considered that as a
possibility.
jacquesm wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
It is not as likely as some of the others but still more likely
than five or four... it all depends on what you started out with.
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