While a lot of energy is being spent on the Mayan Long Count end date of 2012AD, very few investigators (if any) are looking into the start date of 3114BC and possible reasons for that date. My long held belief is that the only feasible event an ancient culture could have predicted for 2012 is the approach of a comet or asteroid. My article on Comet Caesar explains the potential for a comet that visits us every 1000 years or so to be the reason for the existence of the Long Count calendar. The theoretical last approach (approx 987AD) would not have been recorded because in the Dark Ages we don’t even have a record of Halley’s Comet. 3000+ years ago there aren’t any useful records of comets. And 2000 years ago Comet Caesar was big news.

Well, here’s a candidate for circa 3114BC:

A clay tablet that has baffled scientists for more than a century has been identified as a witness’s account of an asteroid that destroyed the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah 5,000 years ago. Researchers believe that the tablet’s symbols give a detailed account of how a mile-long asteroid hit the region, causing thousands of deaths and devastating more than one million sq km (386,000 sq miles).

…At its heart is a clay tablet called the Planisphere, discovered by the Victorian archaeologist Henry Layard in the remains of the library of the Royal Palace at Nineveh. Using computers to recreate the night sky thousands of years ago, they have pinpointed the sighting described on the tablet – a 700BC copy of notes of the night sky as seen by a Sumerian astrologer in one of the world’s earliest-known civilisations – to shortly before dawn on June 29 in the year 3123BC. Half the tablet records planet positions and clouds, while the other half describes the movement of an object looking like a ’stone bowl’ travelling quickly across the sky.

The description matches a type of asteroid known as an Aten type, which orbits the Sun close to the Earth. Its trajectory would have put it on a collision course with the Otz Valley. It came in at a very low angle – around six degrees – and then clipped a mountain called Gaskogel around 11km from Köfels,’ said Mr Hempsell.

‘This caused it to explode – and as it travelled down the valley it became a fireball.

… The explosion would have created a mushroom cloud, while a plume of smoke would have been seen for hundreds of miles. Mr Hempsell said another part of the tablet, which is 18cm across and shaped like a bowl, describes a plume of smoke around dawn the following morning.

… Geologists have dated the landslide to around 9,000 years ago, far earlier than the Sumerian record. However, Mr Hempsell, who has published a book on the theory, believes contaminated samples from the asteroid may have confused previous dating attempts.

Academics were also quick to disagree with the findings, which were published in A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels’s Impact Event. John Taylor, a retired expert in Near Eastern archaeology at the British Museum, said there was no evidence that the ancient Sumerians were able to make such accurate astronomical records, while our knowledge of Sumerian language was incomplete.

Comets can and do break up (either partially or completely) and leave a trail of asteroids that continue along the same orbit, which is why we have meteor showers like the Leonids. It is possible that the impact described above is from an object that broke off from Comet Caesar. Alternatively, the Long Count calendar could describe a combination of an actual event in 3114BC and a prophecy that the event is cyclical.

Tags: Köfels, Nineveh, Planisphere, Sumerian