Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)

archaeologyworlds.com

154 pointsgriffzhowl55 comments

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.

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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_impact_struct...

I think this paper's abstract claims that wooden debris from the landslide has been dated to 5000 years older than the Sumerian tablet: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329153343_The_produ...

Eh, so too good to be true.

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.

There are true stories that don't involve asteroids but are just as compelling. Anything by Irving Finkel, such as:

https://youtu.be/LUxFzh8r384

There is software working at

- finding correspondences (solve parts of the puzzle) and reconstructing at least part of certain documents ( https://arkeonews.net/new-ai-tool-fragmentarium-brings-ancie... , https://virtualcuneiform.org/ )

- somewhat 'infering' some missing parts ( https://voices.uchicago.edu/ochre/project/deepscribe/ ),

- 'normalizing' (find the 'standard' form) of glyphs ( https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/03/ai-models-make-prec... )

Erich von Däniken comes to mind.

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.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...

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

>> 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).

Don't feel bad. Genuinely exciting if it were true.

> 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.

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?

> 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?

I would also be interested in material on this. The pronunciation is clearly not obvious; our first attempt at reading the name "Gilgamesh" came out "Izdubar". But it's also not just gone the way, say, Old Chinese pronunciation information is.

Note that our knowledge of Akkadian pronunciation is quite a bit better than our knowledge of other old Afroasiatic languages, because Akkadian is written with vowels.

A fun example is that we know the vowel in the name of the Egyptian god conventionally called "Ra" because he is mentioned in an Akkadian text. (That "a" in the English version of the name represents an Egyptian consonant, not a vowel.)

Or… we are very good at telling amazing stories that make sense.

Humanity is awesome because we are naturally constrained in semantic-space, making it relatively straightforward to reverse engineer things that ancient humans made even if we share basically zero overlap in culture.

Not true! We loved beer then and we definitely still love it now.

And then they make tiktok

I find it an absolutely amazing (note I did not use ‘incredible’ on purpose: I consider this explanation very credible indeed). We have a creditable record of a meteor impact dated exactly 29 June 3123 BC. That’s 1,880,145 days ago as of today. It simply boggles my mind.

"The astronomers made an accurate note of its trajectory relative to the stars, which to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels."

---------

This is what I find most amazing: Sub-degree accuracy in a measurement from before chariots. The people of this time had donkey-pulled battle carts that were so slow they had to be abandoned if there was a retreat, but they were able to record and measure astronomical events this accurately.

It's also mind-boggling to consider why they were making such observations. It was all about omens that could determine the success of harvests or battles. There is certainly some of what we might now consider scientific thought going on here. They produced omen tables that exhaustively covered every combination of events they could think of, not yet realizing that some combinations were impossible (e.g. A Lunar eclipse at high noon).

Omens sound silly today, but the fundamental motivation of early astronomers was to make sense of what was going on in the heavens in order to help make better decisions on the ground. If everyone believed in these omens, they had real power and the predictions these astronomers made may have had large impacts.

Yes, it’s absolutely amazing that they were making and recording such accurate empirical measurements for entirely the wrong reasons. “As in heaven, so below.” I wonder how many of the theoretical basis we now consider to be bedrocks will be overruled by entirely incompatible paradigms by the 72nd Century (or however they will refer to it). “Like: aww look, they came up with this weird idea of a Higgs Boson and measured its mass five thousand two hundred years ago using a crude instrument they called a ‘particle accelerator’, little did they know that…”.

Although the reasoning has changed, the motivation was very similar to today. They were meticulous in making observations, made records that will probably still be around when most of ours have dissolved into entropy, and all because they thought it might help them make better decisions.

I'd like to think future scientists (or whatever we might become) will look back on scientists of today and see kindred souls toiling under a different set of conditions.

And of course they weren’t misguided in looking to the heavens for predictive potential: astronomical configuration foretold seasonal changes and indicated when it would be propitious to sow crops or harvest them. They were simply a little over-ambitious in terms of correlating one-off events to terrestrial domains (until a falling rock torches a bunch of proto-Austrians, that is).

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.

A six degree angle?! That's insane. I never considered that as a possibility.

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.

Very perspicacious remark that it's more likely than five or four... are you an astronautical engineer by any chance?

But I'm wondering about such shallow angles - wouldn't it bounce off the atmosphere or somesuch? Perhaps it's just about possible somehow: just imagine firing a kilometre of rock from a mountain at a six degree angle with enough velocity to get it into orbit, but in reverse.

At some point it might but that would depend highly on the speed of the object relative to us....

Tunguska must have been just too steep because it left a very long track and likely did not even impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

At Mach 80 a lot of things that seem compressible are not... so yes, once you get to angles like that at some point it would possibly deflect but the energy dissipated will still be massive and the shockwave will be ringing the whole planet.

In a movie, I'd definitely involve Ötzi as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi). Ötzi 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.

The plot thickens: a commenter here posted this link, which indicates Ötzi might have been roped in to this story in quite an imaginative way:

"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 or to explain the death of the Iceman as a human sacrifice to prevent a nuclear winter after the impact."

http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide...

Unfortunately the sciforums link to discussion of the pseudoscientists is dead

Ötzi and his killers might have been up there looking for the impact site, there might have been a mad rush to find the impact, they might have seen it as some sort of holy item worth killing for.

There was after all a sun cult in Europe at this time.

And we have recovered an iron dagger made from a meteorite in the 14th century BCE. So this phenomenon of tracking a meteorite impact site and finding it might go much further back in human history.

Hrm. Maybe. Though I have to wonder from how far afar, considering the energy of this thing. Be it scorched by its heat, blinded by its light, or ruptured lungs from the sonic boom it must have made over a long and wide track, leaving not that many survivors in that track. Try to find a 'best of' of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor from 2013 on YT, or elsewhere, and watch what that little thing did.

Some witnesses are speaking of the heat they felt on their faces.

Now compare the size of that thing which is assumed to be schoolbus-like at the most, with what's assumed for the 'Köfels impact'. I think it was about one kilometer.

Ouch!

Presumably none of the meteor hunters would have seen it themselves. They did have a network of trade, as well as information in those days.

You have it backwards.

It came in fast and in a flat angle from somewhere up in the Arctic, over what is now the North Sea, over what is now Germany, and smashed into/grazed the northern side of what is now the 'Gamskogel' near 'Köfels' in the Alps in Austria. The resulting cloud of glowing white hot stuff got almost ejected back into space, and mostly stayed on course North->South by inertia, sending it over the Adriatic Sea, radiating heat downwards in the process. Some of it impacted in the Levante in multiple places, some far apart, over several hours.

Skyfall!1!!

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html

http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide...

Yeah, the meteor story is rubbish. Strange Bristol Uni published this. They're an actual, legitimate, good university.

"This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels. The incoming angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometers from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point. As it traveled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometers in diameter"

This doesn't even make any sense. A 1km asteroid going many kilometers a second entered at a six degree angle, tore through hundreds of miles of atmosphere without burning up or breaking up, hit a mountain causing a landslide and only then turned into a 5km fireball and traveled down the valley (at a height of ~1500 meters above the valley floor) and just sort of evaporated?

I don't think physics works the way the author of this piece thinks physics works.

This article makes wildly erroneous claims about a genuinely very interesting ancient object. I've worked a bit on this (PhD in Babylonian Astronomy/Astrology) and published articles talking about it. It's a fascinating object but more so as a product of scholarly thinking about the heavens rather than actual observations. Even if it did record observations they would date to the Neo-Assyrian period (when/where the object was found) not to an even more ancient past.

Notably the article linked here doesn't even show the object! It only reproduces images of badly made replicas.

Yeah, soon after I posted this it became clear it's nonsense, a few people in the thread have referred to studies that trees underneath the landslide have been carbon dated to 9400BP, while the book this article's based on claims 5500BP for an "impact"

I mainly posted this because I was beguiled by the images of the disk. I hadn't seen it before, so even these shoddy images were impressive, with the circular form, radially arranged characters and lines looking both ancient and technical. Would you recommend a source for some proper information on it? I'm curious about what it says. Googling I keep coming up with rehashings of this meteor story from websites with "Atlantis" in their names and suchlike.

Sumerian and Akkadian are two different languages. This tablet is written in Akkadian and is dated in the Akkadian era. The authors claim is that the tablet is a [translated] copy of a much (much) older Sumerian tablet. Apparently the author's theory is not taken seriously by assyriologists or ancient science historians.

Reading some of the other articles on that site, it's unclear how scientifically sound the original article is. A quick Google search gives different radiocarbon dating for the landslide https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...

I don't know enough about the event to figure out the likelihood of either hypothesis, but this other data point is something to keep in mind.

How does one reliably carbon-date a site which got much extraterrestrial matter mixed into it? Whith probably different carbonisotope decay rate onsets/offsets? Because from 'not around here'?

There is something here that I do not understand. The article claims that

“[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”

But radiocarbon dating of trees buried in the landslide seems to have reliably dated the landslide to 7500 BC.

For example https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...

Update:

The Wikipedia article about the coauthor Mark Hempsell says:

“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…”

The link posted in this thread by user arto calls the theory “pseudoscience”:

“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…”

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).

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.

It was a great theory, and I was glad to have read it. Thanks for posting!

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

The tablet has been translated for the better part of a century. The problem is that many of the popular depictions of it don't give it's museum number or any other (correct) identifying information, often erroneously referring to it as a "Sumerian" object.

If you search for the museum number K. 8538 you'll find quite a bit (some still bad). That said, this article is wildly off-base.

>> “[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”

I'm pretty sure clay tables, that had to be fired to preserve them, did not function as "notebooks". Scribes probably used either unbaked clay or wax tablets to take notes, and they would erase and overwrite them constantly like etch-a-sketch.

I bought the book "A SUMERIAN OBSERVATION OF THE KÖFELS’ IMPACT EVENT" by Mark Hempsell, and Alan Bond. Tried to do a film adaptation, about 10 years ago. One part in Sumer and another in the Alps.

I'm extremely skeptical.

Good news everyone!

Hack.

slop

vibe theorising

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.

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html

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.

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

The picture of the disk is exceptionaly evoctave of the whole mesoptaimian culture/civilisation we can sense but cant quite reasemble as a whole,due in part to the other warning sign from the article, in the period reference to archaeology, which often involved dynamite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com