An Ancient Disaster: Researchers present evidence that a cosmic impact destroyed a biblical city in the Jordan Valley. Scientists have found evidence of a cosmic airburst event around 1650 BCE that devastated the ancient city of Tall el-Hammam in the southern Jordan Valley, causing extreme temperatures and depositing high concentrations of salt.
This event, potentially inspiring the biblical tales of Sodom and Jericho’s destruction, might have also led to a mass abandonment of cities in the region during the “Late Bronze Age Gap.” In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3,600 years ago or roughly 1650 BCE), the city of Tall el-Hammam was ascendant.
Located on high ground in the southern Jordan Valley, northeast of the Dead Sea, the settlement in its time had become the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant, having hosted early civilization for a few thousand years.
At that time, it was 10 times larger than Jerusalem and 5 times larger than Jericho. “It’s an incredibly culturally important area,” said James Kennett, emeritus professor of earth science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Much of where the early cultural complexity of humans developed is in this general area.” A favorite site for archaeologists and biblical scholars, the mound hosts evidence of culture all the way from the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, all compacted into layers as the highly strategic settlement was built, destroyed, and rebuilt over millennia. But there is a 1.5-meter interval in the Middle Bronze Age II stratum that caught the interest of some researchers for its “highly unusual” materials. In addition to the debris one would expect from destruction via warfare and earthquakes, they found pottery shards with outer surfaces melted into glass, “bubbled” mudbrick and partially melted building material, all indications of an anomalously high-temperature event, much hotter than anything the technology of the time could produce…
No comments:
Post a Comment