The city of Tall el-Hammam near the Dead Sea was liquidated about 3,600 years ago, after which the area has become uninhabitable for centuries, scientists said in a study published last week.
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According to The Times of Israel, the event may have inspired a later biblical account of the “God-destroyed sinful city of Sodom.” According to the description of the book of Genesis in chapter 19, the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone.
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According to scientists, it was a more significant incident than the “Tunguska meteorite”, which exploded in 1908 over the Siberian region of Tunguska, when the original asteroid apparently “detonated” 1000 times more energy than the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, The Times of Israel recalls with reference to a professional magazine. Nature.
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More populous than Jericho or Jerusalem
In any case, the Jordan locality of Tall el-Hammam was a flourishing civilization center in the Middle Bronze Age, which was up to four times larger in size and population, such as the more famous nearby Jericho or even Jerusalem, according to representatives of the Prague Faculty of Science, Charles University (UK).
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However, like other settlements around Jordan, a tragic fate awaited him – around 1600 BC, after civilization, the country collapsed for 600 years.
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Illustration view of the palace before and after destruction
Photo: Faculty of Science, Charles University
The Jordan Valley is located at a tectonic break between the African and Arab lithospheric plates. The lower layer consists of carbonaceous sediments, on which are layers of igneous rocks, then layers of shale and at the top various alluvium. In the upper part there is a river with a number of side springs, there was even a large lake. According to archaeologists, geologists and other experts, the sum of these characteristics creates suitable conditions for agriculture, similar to, for example, those in Egypt, where there is also agricultural land surrounded by desert.
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“Therefore, this area has been used for agriculture for a long time, which led to the accumulation of crops and subsequently to the creation of fortified human settlements. The area experienced its civilizational peak in the High Bronze Age, when there were three important settlements in this area: the largest Tall el Hammam, Tall Nimrin and Jericho. About 50,000 people lived here, “described the Czech geophysicist Günther Kletetschka from the Faculty of Science, Charles University, who was part of the research team.
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Site of excavations in the palace
Photo: Faculty of Science, Charles University
Archaeological work in Tall el-Hammam since 2005 has, according to him, gradually indicated that the destruction of the city must have had a very special cause. The walls that surrounded the city were in one part as if “cut”, a similar pattern is evident in the high-rise palace inside the city. The main material of the buildings were dried bricks, which have noticeable traces of high temperatures on the surface. Many bones were found among them, which were crushed in an unusual way.
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Therefore, local archaeologists have contacted an international group of scientists who have long been involved in the analysis of places that have undergone temperature and destructive changes in the past due to an extraterrestrial body.
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Melted at 2000 ° C
The scientific part of the research was largely focused on how the relevant materials react to high temperatures – the aim was to determine at what temperatures similar changes in materials could occur. It turned out that a large part of the samples were melted at high temperatures, about 18 percent were melted even at a temperature above 2000 degrees Celsius.
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Melt stones in the vicinity of preserved skeletal remains
Photo: Faculty of Science, Charles University
At the same time, there were also materials in the relevant layer that occur very little in the earth’s crust, such as heavy metals such as gold, platinum or iridium, in the melt state. The analysis found that the proportion of these metals corresponds to the proportions of these elements, which occur in meteorites or comets.
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Another trace was the presence of so-called shock quartz, ie quartz with a strangely deformed crystal lattice, which requires a lot of energy and which are the result of impacts or nuclear explosions.
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“All these traces led the scientific team to think that they could have been traces of the impact of an alien body,” Kletetschka said.
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Where is the crater?
However, the collision of the earth’s surface with an alien body would leave a mark in the form of an impact crater, which, however, is missing on the spot. However, Kletetschka and his colleagues encountered a similar pattern when researching the Tunguska event.
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They assume that there is a phenomenon known as “airburst”, ie the explosion of a porous body in the Earth’s atmosphere, thanks to which the material is sucked from the earth very quickly, melted and “rains” back in the form of small particles. This mechanism would also explain the “cutting” of the city’s castle and palace, as well as the selective destruction of the city on the one hand.
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Area map
Photo: Faculty of Science, Charles University
However, it was still necessary to rule out the possibility that the rocks were melted by another powerful natural force of terrestrial origin – ie lightning. Kletetschka had to analyze the material in terms of magnetism. Rocks that are melted by lightning are magnetically saturated, ie their magnetism reaches the maximum possible extent. However, it turned out that the samples of molten rocks were magnetically saturated by only about one percent, so lightning strikes could be ruled out.
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“Here, as in Tunguska, there are so-called microspheres, ie balls of molten material less than a tenth of a millimeter in size, which form at high temperatures. This place is also connected with the Tunguska event by the absence of a crater in the presence of other, relatively clear traces of the impact of an alien body. If we add to this the testimony in the Old Hebrew literature, which may have echoed the longer orally transmitted tradition, the idea of an explosion of an alien body seems to be relatively well-founded, “Kletetschka concluded.
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