awheckery: leradr:Sumerian star map from Ninive 3000 b.C. nope.I was halfway through an intense tag
awheckery: leradr:Sumerian star map from Ninive 3000 b.C. nope.I was halfway through an intense tag essay wondering why a Sumerian star map was in Nineveh, a famously Assyrian city, when I went on a deeper dive, and now I gotta make a reblog about itThis clay planisphere tablet is item K.8538 in the British Museum, and has been dated to the 7th century BCE, as part of the Library of Ashurbanipal. For those not inclined to click through to the link, the curator’s comments (with an appropriate citation) read thusly:Celestial planisphere; in this stylised map the sky has been divided into eight sections. It represents the night sky of 3-4 January 650 BC over Nineveh. The rectangular shape at the top has been identified as the constellation known today as Gemini and the stars contained with an oval shape are the Pleiades. The two triangles in the lower right mark the bright stars of Pegasus.The misattribution as to origin and age comes from a more recent, widely disseminated and sensationalist ‘theory’ from two aerospace engineers named Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell, in their 2008 self-published book A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels’ Impact Event. Note I said engineers; neither of them have any background in history, linguistics, astronomy, meteorology or geology, which, uh… Lemme just quote this entertainingly salty and well-cited Wikipedia note on their work:In a self-published book co-authored with Mark Hempsell, Bond claimed to have deciphered an Assyrian clay tablet dated to 700 BC that they argued might describe an asteroid strike causing a landslide at Köfels in Tyrol in 3123 BC. They relate this to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The landslide is normally dated to about 9800 years ago, long before the tablet was recorded and over 4500 years before the Bristol researchers’ date. Bond and Hempsell have suggested that there was contamination, a claim that has been denied by other research. The impact theory had already been proposed in 1936 by the Austrian scientist Franz Eduard Suess and later on by Alexander Tollmann, who hypothesized impacts in around 7640 BC and 3150 BC, respectively. The question of whether an impact caused the landslide has been researched by others and no evidence was found for an asteroid, meteorite or comet, and geologists consider it to have been caused by other factors such as ‘deep creep’.(tl;dr don’t buy the sensationalist hype, it’s only 2700 years old but still cool as hell)Assyrian star map from Nineveh, circa 650 BCE -- source link