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Jeff Emanuel: The Kofels impact, the Planisphere Tablet, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah -- an |
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Monday, 31 March 2008 |
Today, Fox News reprinted a London Times article which said that the 150-year mystery of the cuneiform "Planisphere Tablet" had been solved, and that the 2,700 year old inscription had been found to be a transcription of a 5,100-year-old eyewitness account of an asteroid that scorched Mesopotamia on its way to the Austrian Alps, where it impacted in what is now Köfels.
The article, titled "Researchers: Asteroid Destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah", caused the hackles of some thinking Christians to be raised -- with valid (albeit misdirected, borne out of a lack of understanding) reason.
Speaking as an archaeologist and someone who has an unfinished degree in astrophysics, the information contained in the story here, while clearly written by an author with little or no understanding of myth, history, religion, archaeology, and the nexus of the four, amounts to a plausible interpretation of the available data.
I would like to read Dr. Hempsell(Hempsall?)'s text to find out exactly what new information he had, and how he developed his conclusions; however, again, based on the information presented in the article, the headline is indeed completely plausible.
Consider:
The vast majority of human μυθος is based on, or steeped in, some interpretation of actual natural or historical events. These are folded into religious dogmates, and/or are handed down as part of the oral or literary tradition, often with supernatural explanations or as morality tales.
Therefore, a real event that took place in the time range of ca. 3123 B.C. (by the way, congrats to the Times for not falling into the "BCE" fad) could have been recorded by people at the time for what it was (the destruction of one or many cities), and could have, by the time of the Classical Greek civilization, have worked itself so far into the μυθος of the by-comparison-modern culture that it was an event that could only be remembered and described as an act of the gods.
Remember, the "Ancient Greeks" that we know -- those that inhabited, and created, the Classical world of southern Europe -- were an entirely different people and civilization from the Myceneans who fought the Trojan war, and are even further removed -- by Millennia -- from the Neolithic people who would have been inhabiting the Continent (or the Cyclades) at that time.
By 4,000 B.C., the Neolithic -- the advent of farming, and its accompanying settled communities -- was just beginread
read full story from Jeff Emanuel
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