{"id":8097,"date":"2021-09-29T02:12:47","date_gmt":"2021-09-29T06:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/?p=8097"},"modified":"2021-09-29T02:12:47","modified_gmt":"2021-09-29T06:12:47","slug":"researchers-present-evidence-that-a-cosmic-impact-destroyed-a-biblical-city-in-the-jordan-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/?p=8097","title":{"rendered":"Researchers Present Evidence That a Cosmic Impact Destroyed a Biblical City in the Jordan Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"
Location of Tall el-Hammam. (a) Photo of the southern Levant, looking north, showing the Dead Sea, the site location (TeH), and nearby countries. The Dead Sea Rift, the fault line marking a major tectonic plate boundary, runs through the area. Source of base image: NASA, Space Shuttle. \u201cThe Sinai Peninsula and the Dead Sea Rift\u201d. Photo: sts109-708-024, taken 12\/16\/2009. From the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center (nasa.gov\/topics\/earth\/features\/astronauts_eyes\/sts109-708-024.html). Modified by the authors using Adobe Photoshop CC2014 (adobe.com\/products\/photoshop.html). (b) West-southwest-facing view of the upper tall showing locations of the palace and temple behind the curve of the upper tall. The Dead Sea is in the background to the left.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3600 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an incredibly culturally important area,\u201d said James Kennett<\/a>, emeritus professor of earth science at the UC Santa Barbara. \u201cMuch of where the early cultural complexity of humans developed is in this general area.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But there is a 1.5-meter interval in the Middle Bronze Age II stratum that caught the interest of some researchers, for its \u201chighly unusual\u201d 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, \u201cbubbled\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe saw evidence for temperatures greater than 2,000 degrees Celsius,\u201d said Kennett, whose research group at the time happened to have been building the case for an older cosmic airburst about 12,800 years ago that triggered major widespread burning, climatic changes and animal extinctions. The charred and melted materials at Tall el-Hammam looked familiar, and a group of researchers including impact scientist Allen West and Kennett joined Trinity Southwest University biblical scholar Philip J. Silvia\u2019s research effort to determine what happened at this city 3,650 years ago.<\/p>\n

Their results<\/a> are published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.<\/p>\n

Salt and Bone<\/strong>
\n\u201cThere\u2019s evidence of a large cosmic airburst, close to this city called Tall el-Hammam,\u201d Kennett said, of an explosion similar to the Tunguska Event, a roughly 12-megaton airburst that occurred in 1908, when a 56-60-meter meteor pierced the Earth\u2019s atmosphere over the Eastern Siberian Taiga.<\/p>\n

The shock of the explosion over Tall el-Hammam was enough to level the city, flattening the palace and surrounding walls and mudbrick structures, according to the paper, and the distribution of bones indicated \u201cextreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Kennett, further proof of the airburst was found by conducting many different kinds of analyses on soil and sediments from the critical layer. Tiny iron- and silica-rich spherules turned up in their analysis, as did melted metals.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think one of the main discoveries is shocked quartz. These are sand grains containing cracks that form only under very high pressure\u201d Kennett said of one of many lines of evidence that point to a large airburst near Tall el-Hammam. \u201cWe have shocked quartz from this layer, and that means there were incredible pressures involved to shock the quartz crystals\u2014 quartz is one of the hardest minerals; it\u2019s very hard to shock.\u201d<\/p>\n

The airburst, according to the paper, may also explain the \u201canomalously high concentrations of salt\u201d found in the destruction layer \u2014 an average of 4% in the sediment and as high as 25% in some samples.<\/p>\n

Catastrophic leveling of the palace at TeH. (a) Artist\u2019s evidence-based reconstruction of the 4-to-5-story palace that was\u2009~\u200952 m long and 27 m wide before its destruction. (b) Artist\u2019s evidence-based reconstruction of palace site on upper tall, along with modern excavation. \u201cMB II\u201d marks the top of 1650-BCE Middle Bronze rubble. Note that the field around the excavation is essentially flat, unlike the view in panel \u2018a\u2019. Originally, parts of the 4-story palace were\u2009~\u200912\u2009+\u2009m tall, but afterward, only a few courses of mudbricks remain on stone foundations, labeled as \u201cwall remnants\u201d. Part of the foundation of the massive wall around the palace is at the bottom. Debris from between sheared walls has been removed by excavation. A comparison of panel \u2018a\u2019 to panel \u2018b\u2019 shows that millions of mudbricks from the upper parts of the palace and other buildings are missing.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe salt was thrown up due to the high impact pressures,\u201d Kennett said, of the meteor that likely fragmented upon contact with the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. \u201cAnd it may be that the impact partially hit the Dead Sea, which is rich in salt.\u201d The local shores of the Dead Sea are also salt-rich so the impact may have redistributed those salt crystals far and wide \u2014 not just at Tall el-Hammam, but also nearby Tell es-Sultan (proposed as the biblical Jericho, which also underwent violent destruction at the same time) and Tall-Nimrin (also then destroyed).<\/p>\n

The high-salinity soil could have been responsible for the so-called \u201cLate Bronze Age Gap,\u201d the researchers say, in which cities along the lower Jordan Valley were abandoned, dropping the population from tens of thousands to maybe a few hundred nomads. Nothing could grow in these formerly fertile grounds, forcing people to leave the area for centuries. Evidence for resettlement of Tall el-Hammam and nearby communities appears again in the Iron Age, roughly 600 years after the cities\u2019 sudden devastation in the Bronze Age.<\/p>\n

Fire and Brimstone<\/strong>
\nTall el-Hamman has been the focus of an ongoing debate as to whether it could be the biblical city of Sodom, one of the two cities in the Old Testament Book of Genesis that were destroyed by God for how wicked they and their inhabitants had become. One denizen, Lot, is saved by two angels who instruct him not to look behind as they flee. Lot\u2019s wife, however, lingers and is turned into a pillar of salt. Meanwhile, fire and brimstone fell from the sky; multiple cities were destroyed; thick smoke rose from the fires; city inhabitants were killed and area crops were destroyed in what sounds like an eyewitness account of a cosmic impact event. It\u2019s a satisfying connection to make.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the observations stated in Genesis are consistent with a cosmic airburst,\u201d Kennett said, \u201cbut there\u2019s no scientific proof that this destroyed city is indeed the Sodom of the Old Testament.\u201d However, the researchers said, the disaster could have generated an oral tradition that may have served as the inspiration for the written account in the book of Genesis, as well as the biblical account of the burning of Jericho in the Old Testament Book of Joshua.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3600 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":8100,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/media.springernature.com\/full\/springer-static\/image\/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-021-97778-3\/MediaObjects\/41598_2021_97778_Fig1_HTML.png?as=webp","fifu_image_alt":"Researchers Present Evidence That a Cosmic Impact Destroyed a Biblical City in the Jordan Valley","footnotes":""},"categories":[216],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-discovery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8099,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8097\/revisions\/8099"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}