. . . and from heaven a great star shall fall on the dread ocean and burn up the deep sea, with Babylon itself and the land of Italy, by reason of which many of the Hebrews perished,
. . . Be afraid, ye Indians and high-hearted Ethiopians: for when the fiery wheel of the ecliptic(?) . . . and Capricorn . . . and Taurus among the Twins encircles the mid-heaven, when the Virgin ascending and the Sun fastening the girdle round his forehead dominates the whole firmament; there shall be a great conflagration from the sky, falling on the earth;
Are these lines from Book V of the SIBYLLINE ORACLES eschatological nonsense? Contemporary astronomical evidence suggests a historic basis for words describing cosmic calamity. British astronomers, Victor Clube and Bill Napier, in THE COSMIC WINTER (1990) and other recent works, provide students of the past with newly discovered celestial clues which indicate that Earth has been periodically pelleted with comet fragments throughout the Holocene period. The evidence for the break-up of a large (> 50 km), short period (approximately 3.3 years), Earth-orbit-crossing comet is substantial and should be considered as hard as anything a trowel might turn up. What astronomical information cannot convey is the actual effect these periodic bombardment episodes had on human culture; only further digging and sifting will illuminate that aspect.
Some of what can be uncovered has been buried by prior premise and so can be brought to light by review of literature published over the years. For instance, the oracles quoted above are from a 1918 translation of the "Sibylline" by H.N. Bate. Further into Book V these lines appear:
And then in his anger the immortal God who dwells on high shall hurl from the sky a fiery bolt on the head of the unholy: and SUMMER SHALL CHANGE TO WINTER IN THAT DAY.
Bate notes that Book VIII contains a parallel passage with winter being changed to summer--fortunately he did not feel compelled to "correct" the lines above as others have. For example:
And then the imperishable God who dwells in the sky in anger will cast a lightning bolt from heaven against the power of the impious. INSTEAD OF WINTER THERE WILL BE SUMMER ON THAT DAY.
This comes from OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA (vol. 1) published in 1983. Not only has the passage been rationalized (If God throws down fire it should get hotter, right?), but, a fiery bolt now has become a lightning bolt.
Evidence of impact induced cold is valuable in gauging how energetic a past fall was. Based on nuclear winter studies, a cosmic collision would need to impart at least the energy equivalent of a thousand megatons TNT into the environment to produce such an effect.
A number of cultures retained stories of impact induced winter. Most telling of such lore this author has read are these amazingly informative tales of the Yakuts:
[CH]OLBON . . . is said to be "the daughter of the Devil and to have had a tail in the early days". If it approaches the earth, it means destruction, storm and frost, even in the summer; . . .
[CH]OLBON, the daughter of the Devil is a beautiful girl ... she is the bride and the sweetheart of Satan's son URGEL (Pleiades). When these two stars come close to one another, it is a bad omen; their eager quivering, their discontinuous panting cause great disasters: storms, blizzards, gales. When they unite, fathom deep snow will fall even in the summer, and all living beings, men, animals and trees will perish . . .
Both folk memories were recorded by ethnographer V.L. Serosevsky, the first in 1877, the next in 1885. The Yakuts identified Venus as colbon; however, as a later student of this culture, G.V. Ksenofontov, observed:
The Yakuts have two words for the "star": SULUS and [CH]OLBON. The first means simply "star", the second refers to stars that change their place in the sky, sometimes appearing and disappearing. Nowadays, however, it no longer--or very seldom--refers to other planets than Venus and has almost become its name. Yet, as we have seen, in legends also other [CH]OLBONS (i.e. planets) are mentioned.
What is remarkable about these particular tales is the conjunction of several pieces of information. From these lines we gather that a comet ([CH]OLBON with a tail) came close enough to influence weather on Earth--i.e. deadly storms, frost and deep snow in summer. Also, we are told that this is most likely to occur if the comet appears close to the Pleiades. In short, these legends accurately describe what can now be inferred from astronomical data on comet Encke and the ring of debris its progenitor strew about the Sun.
As the above example suggests, contemporary researchers need to be wary of assuming our predecessors' folk memories of astral events relate to bodies familiar to our time. There is considerable reason to suspect that the majority of the planets namesakes were comets--probably of the Encke family.
A conventional view comes from W.M. O'Neil's TIME AND THE CALENDARS (1975):
The word planet comes from the Greek PLANETES, the wanderers; these seven celestial bodies moved among the fixed stars. The Babylonians had a more picturesque name, BIBBU, the wild sheep, as these bodies broke through the fixed formation in which the tame sheep crossed the sky.
To call into question Greek continuity of planet identity I refer to Leonardo Taran's work on the "Pseudo-Platonic" Epinomis (1975) where in commentary on lines 986 A 8-987 D 2 Taran states:
Having previously proved to his own satisfaction that all the heavenly bodies are the greatest divine living beings and having pointed out that they are not yet honored as gods, the author explains who these visible gods are and why they are not honored in Greece. They are the eight interrelated sidereal revolutions and the heavenly bodies which travel on them, for they are all gods of the same kind. And the contemplation of this divine cosmic order is what will make a man happy both in this life and in the next. But the lack of this wisdom in Greece is due to ignorance of the true paths of the planets, a knowledge which comes from the Orient and which must be incorporated into our laws. That the knowledge of the planets comes from the Orient is to be seen in the very fact that the planets lack proper names and are called after the (traditional) gods, for this kind of appellation is due to the barbarians who first discovered the planets.
The Epinomis, which dates from around the 4th century BCE, is the earliest extant record of Greek planet names; each is given as "the star of": Cronos, Zeus, Aphrodite, etc. Clearly the planets did not inspire the earlier stories which championed these gods. The mythology associated with these names certainly better describes the break-up of a comet with an orbit that crossed Earth's path than the monotonous behavior of planets.
As for the BIBBUS, as well as the Oriental influence alluded to above I call attention to J.K. Bjorkman's article in METEORITICS (1973) which deals with much earlier texts:
We move now to a discussion of a word which probably refers to comets, BIBBU. . . BIBBU has a variety of astromantic and non-astromantic meanings. There is a lengthy omen text, the 56th tablet of Enuma Anu Enlil, which deals with various features of the BIBBU, and some of these seem to describe comets. For example:
If a BIBBU continues one day, two days in the sky and does not disappear:
If three or four BIBBUS rise one after the other at sunrise
The latter text might refer to a comet which has broken up into three or four comets . . . .
There are many more references to BIBBU, but in them the translations "unspecified planet" or "meteor" could be proposed.
Confusion of planet terminology is also evident further to the east as can be demonstrated by James Legge's translation of a passage concerning the emperor Kwei in the ANNALS OF THE BAMBOO BOOKS:
In his 10th year, the five planets went out of their courses. In the night, stars fell like rain. The earth shook. The E and Loh became dry.
With astronomical evidence in mind a simplified, but testable, hypothesis of Bronze Age collapse would involve accepting the legend of Phaethon as an event inspired myth, as Plato contended it was, and also giving credence to stories of protracted winter in the aftermath of celestial "battles," such as the Ragnarok.
During a close approach to a massive object like our planet a comet would be gravitationally disrupted (Phaethon's disentegrating chariot) independent fragments would then further break to pieces as they entered Earth's atmosphere. This debris, of various shapes and sizes, would scatter widely along the path of the fall, each piece harboring energy in proportion to its mass. The "footprint" of this event could have included some of: southern Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near East, and Northern Africa. Damage, however, would not be uniform throughout this area. If the disintegrating objects were traveling south of east, as the Phaethon story implies, the more massive fragments would travel farther and release their greater energy, explosively, lower in the atmosphere toward the southeast end of the elliptical area directly affected by the fall. In other words, the Near East would be more heavily damaged than southern Europe. A survey scaling intensity of site destruction might reflect this aspect, i.e., vitrification of soil and building materials might occur below lower altitude multi-megaton blasts.
Secondary effects of a large impact event would include: a spottily enhanced C-14 environment, making this means of dating unreliable to confirm or refute simultaneous destruction of disparate sites; a large production of oxides of nitrogen yielding dangerous ozone depletion, perhaps giving a survival advantage to darker skinned people in the aftermath, particularly in equatorial regions; acidic precipitation from the above-mentioned atmospheric chemistry; and, in the higher latitudes, impact winter, caused by suspended dust and soot.
All of these phenomena would leave evidence which careful field work could reveal. Some indicators may already be evident, such as the abandonment of many long settled sites, a large southward movement of people from the higher latitudes, and a steep, long-term (1159-1140 B.C.) decline in the annual growth of Irish bog oak that stands out in the 7,272 year long dendrochronological record, based on this species of tree. [Baillie and Munro (1988)]
Definitive evidence of impact, however, can only come from a detailed analysis of debris directly overlying destruction sites.
I urge archaeologists working on this time period to diligently collect dust and debris from cracks and crevices where violent destruction is apparent. In 1992 the current Greenland ice coring project should be complete. If a large impact occurred around 3200 years ago a significant nitric acid spike will be evident in these ice core samples. Several cores are being drilled simultaneously, so the chance of finding debris in association with the nitric acid signal should be good. An element profile on this material could then be compared with results on debris extracted from terminal Bronze Age sites. If these match, not only will there be confirmation of a violent natural catastrophe, we will also have gained a rather precise gauge of when the disaster took place.
Astronomical evidence indicates our ancestors viewed a much more active sky than we. A seemingly nonsensical notion, such as Athena being born fully formed from the head of Zeus, becomes understandable as a description of comet fragmentation. Human belief systems have been greatly influenced by the phenomena attending the progressive break-up, over thousands of years, of this large comet. The idea of a wrathful sky god or star positions influencing events on Earth are legacies of this influence.
Many astronomers believe the 1908 Tunguska impact was from a small piece of Comet Encke. This 15 to 30 megaton event leveled 2000 sq km of dense Siberian forest, but left no crater. Certainly there have been many damaging falls witnessed by people during the 15,000, or more, year period of the comet's fragmentation history. The terminal Bronze Age event was probably just one of several very energetic impacts which likely occurred in this time span.
Our less than seven hour separation from a collision with a near-Earth asteroid (1989FC) in March of 1989 underscores the fact that contemporary civilization could be thrown into a dark age by natural catastrophe. Had 1989FC encountered Earth it would have introduced the energy equivalent of more than 2,000 megatons TNT into the environment, with little or no warning. The object was discovered on photographs days after the close pass. In 1937 an even larger object, Hermes, came almost equally near Earth. Neither of these asteroids is likely to be related to the break-up of the recent large comet referred to above. The estimated population of Earth-orbit-crossing objects greater than half a kilometer in diameter is over 2,000 and its members are from various sources. Obviously our planet gets hit fairly often. What the recent large comet did was increase the likelihood of collision and establish a visible cause/effect relationship in the minds of our ancestors.
The association of disaster (etymologically, dis - evil; aster - star) with comets eventually became generalized beyond direct causal links, giving science oriented investigators reason to classify this ubiquitous notion as mere superstition. Scientific efforts to understand the past were thus {Next}