Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)
by griffzhowl on 1/31/2026, 7:32:51 AM
https://archaeologyworlds.com/5500-year-old-sumerian-star-map-recorded/
Comments
by: urxvtcd
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.
1/31/2026, 9:12:29 AM
by: INTPenis
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<p>It's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about asteroids.
1/31/2026, 8:40:58 AM
by: arto
<a href="https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html</a><p><a href="http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide-of-kofels-geology-between.html" rel="nofollow">http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide...</a>
1/31/2026, 9:40:36 AM
by: mjd
There is something here that I do not understand. The article claims that<p>“[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 BC”<p>But radiocarbon dating of trees buried in the landslide seems to have reliably dated the landslide to 7500 BC.<p>For example <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169555X15002548" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...</a><p>Update:<p>The Wikipedia article about the coauthor Mark Hempsell says:<p>“Hempsell 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 community…”<p>The link posted in this thread by user arto calls the theory “pseudoscience”:<p>“Despite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed observations of a meteorite by the Sumerians…”<p>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).
1/31/2026, 10:05:06 AM
by: metalman
slop<p>vibe theorising
1/31/2026, 9:42:07 AM