Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)

Re:Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024) by willismonroe on Saturday January 31, 2026 @01:14PM (#46839078)

This article makes wildly erroneous claims about a genuinely very interesting ancient object. I've worked a bit on this (PhD in Babylonian Astronomy/Astrology) and published articles talking about it. It's a fascinating object but more so as a product of scholarly thinking about the heavens rather than actual observations. Even if it did record observations they would date to the Neo-Assyrian period (when/where the object was found) not to an even more ancient past.

Notably the article linked here doesn't even show the object! It only reproduces images of badly made replicas.

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Re:Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024) by griffzhowl on Saturday January 31, 2026 @02:49PM (#46840103)

Yeah, soon after I posted this it became clear it's nonsense, a few people in the thread have referred to studies that trees underneath the landslide have been carbon dated to 9400BP, while the book this article's based on claims 5500BP for an "impact"

I mainly posted this because I was beguiled by the images of the disk. I hadn't seen it before, so even these shoddy images were impressive, with the circular form, radially arranged characters and lines looking both ancient and technical. Would you recommend a source for some proper information on it? I'm curious about what it says. Googling I keep coming up with rehashings of this meteor story from websites with "Atlantis" in their names and suchlike.

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