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The Sumerian K8538 Tablet the Great Meteor Impact Devastating Mesopotamia

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The Sumerian K8538 Tablet the Great Meteor Impact Devastating Mesopotamia ! ! ! THE SUMERIAN K8538 TABLET THE GREAT METEOR IMPACT DEVASTATING MESOPOTAMIA JOACHIM SEIFERT FRANK LEMKE! ! ! ! ! ! ! Correspondence to: [email protected] Website: hp://www.knowledgeminer.eu • hp://www.climateprediction.eu ! APRIL 2014 ! ! ! ! ©2014 Joachim Seifert ! ! ! J. Seifert, F. Lemke: The Sumerian K8538 tablet. The great meteor impact devastating Mesopotamia Abstract. The K8538 is the world’s first scientific 2. First image - the comet’s approach during the first 8 documentation on approach and terrestrial impact of a nights large comet on Earth. Observations were made on top of 3. Second image - the comet continuation from the 9th an astronomical tower, located 100 km close to the impact day on site. The report is presented in form of a sequence of eight 4. Third image - the comet with a large coma reaches pictures, explAining the comet’s first AstronomicAl Orion sighting, the appearance of comet tail and coma, the 5. Fourth image - the comet path from the 9th to the 19th growing comet size, the comet flight across the sky and night finally, its visible impact beyond the horizon, i.e. the 6. Fifth image - observations for the 20th day and 20th impact flash lighting of the sky and the subsequent night elevation of ash plumes, glowing beyond the horizon, 7. Sixth image - the 21st day and it’s comet impact at spreading North and West. The impact itself is not noon described as a blast pressure wave but rather as an ash 8. Seventh image - event observations in the 21st night, and dust tempest, rising out of mud sediments from the after the impact crash Tigris and Euphrates river delta, where the hot comet 9. Eighth image - the comet’s path measured in daylight found its burial. The astronomical observer carried out of the 21st day trigonometrical measurements to record the flight path in 10. The mirror image of the comet’s path the sky, flying distances and flying times. The observer 11. The Mul-Apin cult and the origin of constellations started his measurements as soon as the comet showed its 12. Dating the K8538 astronometrical tablet spectacular size, coma and tail, which convinced the 13. Sumerian history after the comet’s impact observer, that an extraordinary celestial event was about 14. Summary to take place. The K8538 is a full comprehensive analysis ! of the comet event; its eight-picture sequence is cohesive. 1. INTRODUCTION The tablet is a masterly work, explaining with as lile text The tAblet K8538 is the singulAr, most difficult a maximum amount of impact event features. The tablet is Babylonian tablet to decode. For this reason, only a few a late Babylonian copy of the early old Sumerian original. scientists tried this challenge over the past 150 years. Wrien cuneiform signs of two zodiacal constellations, According to the renowned assyriologist Ernst F. Weidner, Orion and Triangulum, are later Babylonian copy scribe it is “one of the most enigmatic Babylonian documents additions and were not part of the Sumerian original. The [with an] unique and enormously difficult text”. K8538 tablet had high priority in Babylonian times, The tablet is on display in room 55 of the British because it provided the documented evidence that the Museum in London. [1, fig. A1 in annex]. It was recovered comet emerged out of the constellation Triangulum, Mul- in archaeological excavations at the site of the ancient Apin, onto which late Babylonian astronomy and religion town of Nineveh. Sir Austen Henry Layard conducted the rested. The tablet eyewitness account shows Mul-Apin as excAvAtions during the yeArs 1847 to 1852, After celestial seat of Gods and celestial source of destructive discovering the ruins of the Royal Library of King meteors on Earth. For this reason, the K8538 was guarded, Ashurbanipal, which was burnt down in 612 BC, when the copied and refreshed over more than 1,500 years, until the town of Nineveh was razed entirely by military force. The late Babylonian period, after the observed meteor impact Nineveh site remained not occupied for centuries, which in 2,193 BC. The tablet does not deal with any Babylonian aided the preservation of the tablet collection. Layard’s zodiacal astrology. The described cosmic impact on Earth recovered clay tablets were sent to London, about 20,000 is the so-called 4.2 kyr event, shown in our other Holocene in number. climate change studies. The comet impact is responsible In 1880, ArchibAld SAyce And Robert BosAnquet for a 300 year long drop in global temperatures combined discovered the tablet’s astronomical relation and titled it with lasting mega-droughts, which led to the collapse of “Astrolabe” [2]. The first step towards a content analysis, various ancient civilisations around the world. was done by Leonard William King, who produced a Citation. Seifert, J., Lemke, F.: The Sumerian K8538 tablet picture facsimile of the tablet [3, fig. A2 in annex]. His - The great meteor impact devastating Mesopotamia, 2014, work was published in 1912 [4]. hp://www.knowledgeminer.eu/climate_papers.html His transliteration of cuneiform writing signs in the picture facsimile is perfect, however, he did not translate CONTENT facsimile signs into modern language. He hoped to receive 1. Introduction more information from additional astronomical tablets by n2 J. Seifert, F. Lemke: The Sumerian K8538 tablet. The great meteor impact devastating Mesopotamia joining an archaeological expedition to the same site at recognise sequences, sizes, arrangements, placing and Nineveh, but nothing usable could be unearthed. spacing of individual symbols. The full cometary event King presumed thAt K8538 wAs a “PlAnisphere”, story is not those given in sparse cuneiform, but the showing the night sky over Nineveh. overwhelming content is given in symbolic arrangement, The next work on K8538, 3 years later, by Ernst F. such as in today’s power point pictures, containing Weidner [5] was published in 1915. On 6 pages of his symbols, short notes, memory hints, arrows, boHom lines, book, he aempted to interpret all 8 individual tablet etc. The symbols have to be explained by the show sections but the text remAined to him mysterious, presenter. In our case of K8538, we had to assume the role enigmatic, unidentifiable magic. He rejected King’s term of an historical show presenter and re-establish the lost “Planisphere”, because star distributions on the tablet do sense of symbol arrangements. Every line, each sign not coincide with the Nineveh sky. His major contribution placing, sign numbering, sign spacing and distribution on was a valid numeration of a 1 to 8 sequence for reading the tablet contains an inherit message. There is neither tablet sections and, secondly, the observation, that the wasted space, unimportant space fill, duplicity, poetic and round tablet had to be turned for individual section literary shallowness on the tablet. The tablet is a master’s reading. work of compressing an enormous amount of information Since Weidner`s work, for many decades, until the onto one small tablet. For this reason, Assyriologists with 1980’s, nobody tried decoding of the tablet. Interest esteemed cuneiform reading skills did not try to take up resumed in 1989, when the author Johannes Koch [6] the challenge. E. Weidner freely admied that he did not published a Babylonian star constellation book, in which get far in his symbol interpretation, therefore he resigned he included K8538. His approach, unfortunately, was not to place K8538 into the corner of enigmatic witchcraft. a translation and sign-by-sign interpretation of the tablet, One hundred years have passed since King and Weidner; but rather a picking of presumed Babylonian celestial we are certain that both would be pleased to hear that the constellAtions out of the tAblet, to supplement his enigmatic K8538 had finally been decoded. BAbyloniAn celestiAl work. His AstronomicAl AnAlysis For our explanations, we present the Rykle Borger focusses on additional Babylonian literature, such as the Index numbers for eAch text sign, following the Mul-Apin texts, the Astrolab B-I-18 and the K-11251 procedural steps of Bond and Hempsell. tAblets. Over 110 pAges, he cAlculAtes heliAcAl And ! acronychal star rises. He dedicated only one single page, 2. FIRST IMAGE - THE COMET’S APPROACH number 113, to the wording of the K8538 text. His DURING THE FIRST EIGHT NIGHTS conclusion about the tablet was that it must have served We start with the triangle at the right hand side in As An unknown tool for Assisting AstronomicAl figure 1. Within, in its tip, there are seven dots closely observations in Nineveh. marked, seven stars, unmistakably the “Seven Sisters”, the Twenty years later, two authors, Alan Bond and Mark PleiAdes. The observer plAced them into a triAngle, Hempsell [7] finally made real progress. At the beginning retracted from the tip of the image, to be able to place of their book, they point out, that until 2008, quote: “there more information around it, as compared to a position hAs never been a comprehensive And consistent directly in the very tablet center. translation of this unique tablet [which] might relate to an As next feature, there is an important center line with impact of a Near Earth Object”. Bond and Hempsell, for writing above and below it. This is the true comet flight the first time, offered a comprehensive transcript tablet, line, which continues from this image 1 in a straight line with sign numbers according to the Assyrian-Babylonian into the opposite image 4. sign Index List [8]. The internet presentation of K8538 by The comet flight line is described with B-129a-1-105, the British Museum should also be mentioned as step above: The line of “positions of the one and same“ (of one forward. same celestial flight object), and below this comet flight Weidner recognised that the K8538 tablet is divided line: B-129a-56, which is identified as the constellation into a sequence of 8 images, from 1 to 8, and for image TriAngulum, Mul-Apin, shown As a coArsely mAde reading, one has to turn the tablet according to the triangular drawing, showing from where the flight line sequence number.
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