There has been news around the blogosphere this week about an ancient artifact that might indicate that Sumerians saw an asteroid impact… and that it might explain Sodom and Gemorrah. Pretty much everything about that press release set off my BA detector, and I was going to write about it. But then I saw that my friend and asteroid-namer-after Jeff Medkeff already tackled it with much gusto.
I’ll be very curious to see if more about this idea turns up any time soon.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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April 13th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
The story is really BA (or BG? Hard to say when talking about meteor craters
).
For the ancient people whose world view was based on myths the historical correctness of a story was more or less irrelevant. In the case of this story the whole point was its moral teaching.
Either some clever fellow made up the story, or something historical event evolved as a spoken story into something entirely different. Trying
to pinpoint the exact event scientifically is fruitless because the stories are so vague. Marginally interesting, but the attempt is doomed.
April 13th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
BA, BG … it’s all BS.
April 13th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Exactly. Like trying to find scientific explanations for the ten plagues of Egypt — what’s the point? Either they’re miracles, or they’re just stories. There’s no reason to accept them as historically true (as there are no extra-biblical records of them), yet simultaneously reject their miraculous nature. To me, it seems an incoherent position, and I don’t quite understand the motivation.
April 13th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Hm.
Hempsell was behind the proposal to build a British module for the ISS.
Crank or just a shameless self-publicist?
April 13th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Bad science fiction masqerading as worse science: The Shaggy God Story extended one more level.
April 13th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
What I find interesting is that as soon as some pseudo-archaeologist makes an announcement there are literally hundreds of… um… loonies jumping to the defence of the crank theory within minutes of a press release and they become very vehement in the defence of that theory.
The Bosnian pyramid was perfect example of this. As soon as the story hit the blogosphere millions (hyperbole) of people came out to support the “discovery” knowing exactly zilch about he subject.
April 13th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
When I read the story some days ago, my first thought was the validity of the translation. My second was where is the impact crater? I’m glad I read the link all the way through, because the lack of shocked quartz seems to be the clincher.
That said, we should not make the mistake of assuming ancient peoples wouldn’t give much attention to historical accuracy. The Chinese have recorded astronomical data to around 2,300 BC. We have records of things like solar and lunar eclipses. The only real question is whether the claim that this is a Sumerian record of an asteroid impact is valid - and that claim doesn’t seem to hold up very well at all.
April 13th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Last time I checked, they hadn’t found Sodom and Gomorrah. Even if they did exist they were likely only small towns with a few hundred people each at least. If there is a grain of truth to the legend then fire is still by far the most likely reason why one or both towns were destroyed, regardless of what the Bible says.
April 13th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
If there is a grain of truth to the legend then fire is still by far the most likely reason why one or both towns were destroyed, regardless of what the Bible says.
I thought a cow knocked over a lantern?
Wait… that’s a different city, right?
April 13th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Coincidentally, the Tunguska event was on June 30th.
This one was on June 29th!
.
April 13th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
A Sumerian astrologer observes and records an asteroid.
The same asteroid lands on the corner of Sodom and Gemorrah.
The astrologer’s clay notebook is untranslatable until the mid 20th century.
Sumerians invented beer.
Strange sights in the sky–wild tales–incoherent notes.
Sounds like my grad school days, when I was a great fan of Sumerian inventions.
April 13th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Que??!
April 13th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Quiet Desperation : “I thought a cow knocked over a lantern?
Wait… that’s a different city, right?”
Me : Que!?
My understanding - & could be wrong- is that Sodom & Gomorah were located at (or under) the southern edge of the Dead Sea in ancient Canaan (modern Palestine) and were possibly destroyed by flooding perhasps with accompanying earthquakes.
April 13th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
As a pilot I have photographed sites that looked potenitally like impact sites and referred them to the folks at the Earth Impact Data Base for review….so far no craters to call my own. I can understand the desire to locate a new impact site but facts are facts….no shock quartz…no cosmic impact. Let it go and have a cold beer thanks to the Sumerians.
April 13th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
I have some background in Sumerian, actually, and this sounds very phony to me.
Though Akkadian scribes did copy Sumerian texts for practice (Sumerian was to them like Latin was to Europe during the Dark Ages), these texts were usually more robust and literary, things like essays and myths. Sumerian mathematical/scientific writing is very terse and would be pretty useless for study. A Sumerian text from 3123 BC would be especially useless for that, for around that time Sumerian scribes wrote carelessly and didn’t really have an even standard of quality (it’s the ancient equivalent of text message abbreviations, really). Scribes didn’t really start writing Sumerian accurately until the language was dying out in the second millennium BC. It seems highly unlikely to me that an Akkadian scholar would copy that particular work.
Judging by the picture, the tablet itself is full of gaps. I believe that the problem researches had wasn’t translating it; I’m sure they could translate what little material they had. The problem was interpreting it. That’s what this guy claims to do, and I think he’s guilty of a little wishful thinking.
Oh, and for the rest of you guys, the Sumerian word for beer is “kash” (pronounced to rhyme with “posh”).
April 14th, 2008 at 1:09 am
Que??!
I’m sorry. It was a rather lame reference to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871…
… which, of course, everyone knows was caused by a comet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biela%27s_Comet
April 14th, 2008 at 2:01 am
But Sodom and Gomorrah just looks like a retelling of an actually more disturbing story from Numbers where it’s not a group of angels, it’s a guy who throws his runaway concubine to these folks instead. And the cities aren’t destroyed. Instead, the guy takes his now dead concubine home and cuts her up into twelve parts and sends them to all the tribes of Israel with no explanation given.
There’s a number of stories in that there book that have a plausible version and a highly implausible version.
April 14th, 2008 at 2:13 am
Sorry, it was Judges 19… compare this to Genesis 19… oddly similar tales.
April 14th, 2008 at 4:59 am
Pat:
Not similar at all. The latter tells of a civil war where one of the Twelve Tribes was almost wiped out. The former tells of a destruction not only of two towns in that area, but all but the small town of Zoar. The historian Strabo thought he knew of the location.
There’s also a rough time for the event: It occurred in the morning, maybe just after sunrise.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:08 am
tacitus:
Beware of second-guessing ancient accounts. Just ask the historians who thought the tales of Caligula turning a Roman temple into his front porch was propaganda - until archaeologists found exactly that a few years ago.
Whatever the size of Sodom and Gomorrah, we know they were considered major towns and that Zoar was small compared to the other towns in the plain.
April 14th, 2008 at 9:01 am
I, too, view a lot of Biblical archeology with bemusement. I have nothing against trying to test whether or not ancient accounts actually had any reality or were just fictions; it can be an interesting process. Consider the discovery of Troy; people thought the Iliad was entirely fictional until that got dug up. (It’s still probably largely fiction, to be fair. But Troy existed, which is interesting.) But some people dive into the pursuit of Biblical archeology with a zeal that seems downright religious to me — as if rather than just trying to learn about ancient peoples, their real intent is to prove the Bible. Why aren’t there as many people trying to prove the Aeneid? Or heck, why not Beowulf, while we’re at it? Some people *do* use these ancient texts as jumping-off points for archeology, since there’s something really cool about matching a text to some real-world landmarks. Brings the ancient peoples to life a bit better. You can test some of the events in a saga, for instance. Did Erik the Red really come to the New World? That’s an interesting question. So is the question of whether or not two major cities in the Mideast got wiped out by some huge natural disaster (volcanoes and meteorites are popular explanations). I can respect that. But I get the feeling that a lot of Biblical archeologists are trying to go a step further. For them, it’s about validating their scripture.
Me, I believe in God, and I believe in the Jesus described in the Bible. But I feel no need to validate scripture. I don’t worship the Bible. I know it was written by people. I thus get a little uncomfortable when I see people (usually Jews or Christians) attempting to find the things described in the Bible. They usually seem to have an expectation that the Biblical story is accurate, and rather than looking for the nugget around which a particular story may have grown, they look for the story in its entirety, treating it with a reverence which is incompatible with an objective search for truth.
April 14th, 2008 at 9:56 am
I am well aware that there can be a grain of truth to ancient accounts, but one aspect of those accounts that does appear to be fairly common is exaggerated estimates of population sizes. Roman historians were notoriously bad at judging the size of armies and population centers of early Rome (already hundreds of years in the past). They quote numbers for battles and population centers that are far beyond anything that the archaeological evidence would suggest was reasonable. The same goes for the Jewish Exodus from Egypt (if it happened at all). The ruins of the ancient Biblical cities that have been found are just not that big. So while the most ancient of places listed in the Bible were probably regarded as large metropolises of the day (if they did exist), by modern standards they would almost certainly be considered nothing more than small towns or large villages today.
April 14th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Calli
Actually, to be accurate, There are at least 12 “Troy’s” located on the Hisarlic archeological site in Turkey. The name is used for reference more than as a historically accurate nomenclature. Troy VII is the one most likely referred to in the Hittite texts as Wilusa, likely translated in Greek as Ilion. And even this is disputed. And as such, there’s no concrete evidence that this city was destroyed as described in Homer’s Illiad. It’s just known that the city matches up with the timeline and was likely destroyed by war. The point I make is that the STORY of the Iliad IS entirely fictional, despite the discovery of the “Troy” site. The only thing that’s possibly true about it is that Homer’s Troy may have existed and may have been destroyed by war. There’s just no more evidence to say anything more than that.
Well, because no-one is attempting to base an entire belief system or social system on these books. They are taken quite literally as they were inteded… as works of fiction. Do you spend any of your time trying to prove elements of other works of fiction? Do you see the difference between the Aeneid and the Bible and why people spend time trying to show that the Bible shouldn’t be taken literally? Because many, many people DO take it literally and then try to dictate policy based on its literal translation… policies that are in many cases detrimental (see creationism, ID, etc…). I don’t see this problem with the Aeneid, or
That’s a healthy attitude, and I’m glad to hear it… although the problem for many fundamentalist christians is their inability to accept the Bible only in part. For them it is either all literally true, or not. There is no middle ground, no room for artistic license, or interpretation. And that’s when things get interesting. It’s good to hear from a christian who is able to understand the difference.
April 14th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Um, don’t you mean his son, Leif Erikson? (And it seems legend has it that Erik himself stayed behind, btw.)
April 14th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Torbjörn Larsson, OM said:
>Um, don’t you mean his son, Leif Erikson?
That’s Leif, Erik’s son. Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.
So Phil, are you gonna have a few words with Nancy Atkinson over at Universe Today, your sister site?
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04/10/evidence-of-asteroid-impact-for-sodom-and-gomorrah/
April 14th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
The point of the Sodom and Gomorrah myth is to teach people to be hospitable to strangers. I think if you ask a rabbi, you’ll find that it’s a teaching instrument; looking for history (geography, geology, etc.) misses/ruins the entire value of the mythology. (ignore any xtian/muslim misinterpetations of judaic texts)
April 14th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
The message from Sodom and Gomorrah is that if your neighbours want to have “relations” with your guests offer up your daughters instead. I think there is something in that for all us, don’t you?
April 14th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
tacitus:
There’s really no reason to assume the Exodus didn’t take place. For one thing, there’s that Canaanite tablet begging the Egyptians for help against the Hebrew. There’s also non-biblical references to many of the same cities.
Doubt ancient accounts if you wish, just be aware that all too often the naysayers get stung by actual discoveries.
April 14th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
The discovery of Troy didn’t prove that the events of the Iliad took place. Likewise with Canaanite tablets mentioning the Hebrews. Sometimes absence of evidence does mean evidence of absence.
For example while Jericho existed there is no archaeological evidence that validates the biblical story of the tumblin’ walls.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
KC:
There is no reason to assume the Exodus did take place either. A great deal of fiction is written in the US alone every year with very little to no basis in fact. There is a difference between skepticism and naysaying. Naysaying is pure “it didn’t happen.” Doubting one historical account as being one hundred percent factual is perfectly valid, by contrast.
Else we would have to accept Herodotus’ account of flying serpents unless “disproven.” We have no other record, despite exhortations of other philosophers that it was “well known” such things existed, nor do we have any physical evidence. But saying one doubts this account, is it being a naysayer?
Many of the events of Exodus (or for that matter the Charlton Heston movie based around it) are unlikely in the extreme, to include the nonbibilical yet commonly held assertion that Hebrews built the pyramids: the pyramids which were in existence for one thousand years at the supposed time of the writing of Exodus.
April 15th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Oh, and KC:
the two stories are similar: both are allegories of how the doctrine of hospitality is a hallmark of civilized folk, and how groups that lack it are criminal and evil; both even follow the same pattern: person(s) are invited in by “good” local, other “evil” locals demand him/them, are appeased with something else
April 15th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Pat:
There’s superficial similarities between the OJ Simpson trial and Shakespeare’s Othello. We’ve all heard of parallels between Lincoln and JFK’s assassinations. When you look at both in depth, the similarities turn out to be superficial. There are so many differences between the Sodom and Gomorrah account and the one in Judges that I really can’t see how it’s possible to infer the latter is a retelling of the former.
As to the Exodus, some assume it didn’t happen simply because it’s in the Bible. The Canaanite plea for help is very interesting in that there’s independent confirmation of the Hebrew crossing the Jordon and conquest of cities.
About Jericho: The walls in the tel originally thought to be from the time of Joshua have turned out to be from about a thousand years later. There may not be any remains left from the time of Joshua. That is still a topic of debate among archaeologists.
April 15th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Maybe it was Gozer
April 15th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
“Did Sumerians see an impact?”
Since their civilization was around for many thousands of years, it is almost certain that at least one of them witnessed the fireball from a meteorite that reached the ground.
April 16th, 2008 at 11:11 am
[…] original takedown is here, and even though I wrote it before I realized that the Bad Astronomer, StumbleUpon, and other internet opinion-makers would make it the most popular post ever on this […]
April 16th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Mark Hempsell, one of the co-authors of the book that I eviscerate in my post, the one that Phil graciously linked to, has left some comments on my blog. Comments about asteroids that are - weird, I guess I’d call them, but then asteroids are my thing and I fancy that I know quite a bit about them. Anyway, I’ve posted a response. Just putting this here for the sake of completeness, so when someone finds this a couple years from now, they can follow the story in all its gory detail….
April 16th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
LOL. Only…you didn’t notice my name. My father isn’t “Lars”. Patronymics are very rare these days. (Sure, you can argue that it wasn’t then. But then it’s no longer redundancy you are arguing, but history.)
April 16th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
If the existence of Troy proves the historical accuracy of the Iliad, then the existence of San Francisco proves the historical accuracy of the Maltese Falcon. BTW, there is also an historical marker near the corner of Bush and Stockton memorializing Miles Archer.
April 18th, 2008 at 11:29 am
This is not to say that ancient cultures did not record impacts for which we do have substantial evidence for.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/science/14WAVE.html?ex=1321160400&en=35b395ffd080eb47&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.
On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.
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When the chevrons all point in the same direction to open water, Dallas Abbott, an adjunct research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., uses a different satellite technology to look for oceanic craters. With increasing frequency, she finds them, including an especially large one dating back 4,800 years.
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Dr. Masse analyzed 175 flood myths from around the world, and tried to relate them to known and accurately dated natural events like solar eclipses and volcanic eruptions. Among other evidence, he said, 14 flood myths specifically mention a full solar eclipse, which could have been the one that occurred in May 2807 B.C.
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