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.
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 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.
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."
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
So you're confidently stating it's not the normal behaviour... Can you tell me what the average speed is for human drivers outside elementary schools at drop-off times?
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.
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