I think this paper's abstract claims that wooden debris from the landslide has been dated to 5000 years older than the Sumerian tablet: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329153343_The_produ...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...
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
We "reconstructed" Sumerian through the fairly intuitive process of finding reference works describing the language, and reading them.
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 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.)
It's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about asteroids.
"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."
http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide...
Unfortunately the sciforums link to discussion of the pseudoscientists is dead
There was after all a sun cult in Europe at this time.
And we have recovered an iron dagger made from a meteorite in the 14th century BCE. So this phenomenon of tracking a meteorite impact site and finding it might go much further back in human history.
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.
http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide...
“[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC”
But radiocarbon dating of trees buried in the landslide seems to have reliably dated the landslide to 7500 BC.
For example https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...
Update:
The Wikipedia article about the coauthor Mark Hempsell says:
“Hempsell got public audience as author of the book "A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event", with Alan Bond proposes a theory not accepted by the scientific community…”
The link posted in this thread by user arto calls the theory “pseudoscience”:
“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…”
Now it seems very suspicious that the article claims that the tablet is from 3123 BC, when it was excavated from the palace of Ashurbanipal (650 BC).
vibe theorising
But the article appears to be a copy of a press release from the University of Bristol from 2008.
do you know about the acedemic/beurocratic practice of "shelving" ?, I am quite certain that it applies to whover "publishied" the original.