Ancient tablet provides key to asteroid mystery

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Scientists claim to have solved the mystery of a giant asteroid impact on Austrian Alps more than 5,000 years back, by deciphering an ancient clay tablet.

The tablet, discovered 150 years ago by Victorian archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in Iraq, contains drawings of constellations and pictogram-based text known as cuneiform — used by Sumerians, the earliest civilisation in the world.

Using a computer programme that can reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago, the British scientists have cracked the cuneiform code, The Daily Telegraph reported on Monday..

According to them, the tablet, which is a copy made by an Assyrian scribe around 700 BC, is actually a Sumerian astronomer’s notebook recording events in the sky on June 29, 3123 BC.

Its symbols include a note of the trajectory of a large object travelling across the constellation of Pisces which, to within one degree, is consistent with an impact at Kfels, a town in the Austrian Alps. “All previous work has drawn a blank on what the tablet is about. It is such a big jigsaw and the pieces we have found fit together so well that I think we have a definitive proof,” co-researcher Mark Hempsell of Bristol University was quoted as saying.

The Kfels site was originally interpreted as an asteroid impact, however the lack of an obvious impact crater led modern geologists to believe it to be simply a giant landslide.

However, the current theory, outlined in a book published on Monday, A Sumerian Observation of the Kfels Impact Event, suggests that the asteroid left no crater because it clipped a mountain and turned into a fireball.

“The ground heating, though very short, would be enough to ignite any flammable material, including human hair and clothes. It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast,” Hempsell said.

He added that extreme changes caused to the rock and other substances at the site had previously led to the Kfels impact being erroneously dated to around 8,000 years ago.