Ancient Astronomy Around the World - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 36

broken up among the inner planets around 3000 b.c., filling the
sky with comets and meteor showers to trigger a new, global interest
in the sky [ 35 ] .
At least two impact events, and possibly three, then and after,
might support the idea. Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell reckon
that a low density 1 km rock asteroid with a mass of 800 million
metric tons passed over Sumeria at 14 km/s on June 29, 3123 b.c.,
clipping the Gamskogel ridge and impacting the Köfels area in the
Austrian Tyrol, triggering a massive landslide that erased the main
crater, while smaller fragments caused other impact features in
the area. “As the object travelled up the Adriatic Sea… and across
the Alps the supersonic shock would have caused considerable
destruction on the ground beneath the trajectory. The impact…
would release energy equivalent to 1.4 × 10 10 t TNT. [The plume]
would rise… to some 900 km before falling over the Levant and
Sinai causing considerable destruction over a wide area…. There
would have been many direct casualties, near 100 % mortality
over areas of thousands of square kilometers in both the Alps and
the Near East. There would also have been a severe global climate
change that caused further death and social disruption” [ 35 ] . The
formation of the Henbury craters near Alice Springs in Australia
(see above) is in the right time period, but the meteorite fragments
from there are nickel-iron, implying that the object came from
the Asteroid Belt, rather than the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud,
which are the sources of comets. The third event, which takes us
to astronomy in the Bible, is Noah's Flood.
The oldest surviving account of the Flood is in the Sumerian
“Epic of Gilgamesh” and dates from around 2250 b.c. [ 36 ]. Other
flood legends are found elsewhere in the world, but differ in major
details. Versions of the Gilgamesh story are found in Egypt, the
Hittite kingdom, India and China, and the Biblical one - which
was picked up by Jewish exiles in the Babylonian captivity - is the
only one that leaves out the impact. Not knowing that, Isaac Asi-
mov nevertheless suggested that there had been one, in the Persian
Gulf, in his essay “The Rocks of Damocles” [ 37 ]. It began with “a
cloud no bigger than a man's hand” (a distant mushroom?), then
a tsunami (“the fountains of the deep were unleashed,” and the
Ark was carried inland to Ararat), and only after that the sky grew
dark and “the windows of heaven were opened” with torrential