Mystery finally revealed! 5,500-Year-Old Sumerian Star Map

For over 150 years

scientists have tried to solve the mystery of a controversial cuneiform clay tablet that indicates the so-called Köfel’s impact event was observed in ancient times.

 
Köfels impact event

The Köfels impact event is a hypothetical incident where a kilometre-long asteroid crashed into the Alps, near Köfels, Austria in the June of 3123 BCE. Upon the asteroid's crash, a ridiculously large amount of plumage rose, blotting out the Sun for a few days, and raining debris hundreds of miles away.

The Köfels impact has been proposed as a naturalistic explanation for the Israelite story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the Greek story of Phaeton's death. The asteroid's movement has allegedly been recorded on a Sumerian Cuneiform tablet, one of the earliest known pieces of writing.

The circular stone-cast tablet was recovered from the 650 BC underground library of King Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, Iraq in the late 19th century.

Long thought to be an Assyrian tablet, computer analysis has matched it with the sky above Mesopotamia in 3300 BC and proves it to be of much more ancient Sumerian origin.

The tablet is an “Astrolabe,” the earliest known astronomical instrument. It consists of a segmented, disk-shaped star chart with marked units of angle measure inscribed upon the rim.

Did you Know Sumerians Invented The System of Time And We Still use it today?

One might find it curious that we divide the hours into 60 minutes and the days into 24 hours - why not a multiple of 10 or 12? Put quite simply, the answer is because the inventors of time did not operate on a decimal (base-10) or duodecimal (base-12) system but a sexagesimal (base-60) system.

For the ancient Sumerian innovators who first divided the movements of the heavens into countable intervals, 60 was the perfect number. The number 60 can be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30 equal parts.

Moreover, ancient astronomers believed there were 360 days in a year, a number which 60 fits neatly into six times. The Sumerian Empire did not last. However, for more than 5,000 years the world has remained committed to their delineation of time.