Tall el-Hammam, Jordan Valley, Jordan
Nice background comment from Phil Clapham — who got me into this
Your correspondent has some fun news to share. The Tusk is writing from downtown Amman, Jordan, after joining Trinity Southwest University on a fabulous dig for biblical Sodom.
I have been meaning for weeks to let you all in on the adventure but have been distracted more than usual by my work and preparations for the trip. Also, it seemed such a wild proposition that — until it actually happened — it seemed premature to “announce” it.
But here I am. Indeed, I can hear loud protest drums and Arabic chanting in the streets as I write (let us pray it is Pro-King).
The story of Steven “Dr. C” Collins and the Tall el-Hammam archeological dig is a wonderful tale. I know Tusk readers will hit Google and read all about it, so I will not stay up late explaining it all tonight. But what attracted me to Dr. Collins and this project was more than simply the catastrophic tangent (which was plenty). It was also the intellectual courage, deep curiosity and faithful determination demonstrated by Dr. C and his team.
Like the YDB team, Collins et al. must not only convince the professional skeptics and know-nothings — they must also persuade their colleagues and traditional intellectual allies their quest is well founded. That is a difficult job, which makes it worthy and interesting.
So, I am here for two weeks and promise to provide some pics and irregular updates. (For readers who are on Facebook and have not friended me in the past, please do if you would like to see some photos).
Quite reasonably, I cannot share any details regarding what is being found this season. But rest easy, my readers, it is extraordinary — and right up your alley.
SIS published two articles on Tall el-Hammam (tall rather than tell, an oddity of Jordan)last year and has another one due out soon. They are by one of the archaeologists, Phil Silvia (with the blessing of Collins) and I think there is remarkable evidence at this site (and the surrounding region, the plain at the top of the Dead Sea, where the river Jordan flows into that odd lake) that is was destroyed by a terrible catastrophe. It involved earthquake in that many sites in the Levant were affected but the big question is, what caused the earthquake storm that also affected the Aegean, Anatolia, and various other places at the end of the MB age. Claude Schaeffer, as long ago as 1948, was telling us about such disasters (at end of Early Bronze, Middle Bronze, and Late Bronze ages) but he was ostracised by the archaeological establishment. Earthquake storms were thought to be impossible – but Schaeffer went on the evidence he saw in the ground (particularly at Ras Shamra). The whole point of linking Tall el-Hammam with Sodom is to discover if it was destroyed by a cosmic event of some kind. It was abandoned thereafter for hundreds of years. Even Jericho, on the periphery of the Kikkar Plain, was abandoned for a large slice of the Late Bronze Age.It is a remarkable excavation and will perhaps rewrite history.
To obtain pdfs of the SIS journals willcost £18 sterling (equal to about $27 dollars). Go to http://www.sis-group.org.uk for further information. We are eager to attract catastrophists, especially people who are prepared to write good articles on catastrophic subjects, including The YDB event. In the past we have published articles by Victor Clube, Mike Baillie, Moe Mandelkehr, and speaker meetings have included such people as Patrick McCafferty and Mike Baillie, Bill Napier and Victor Clube, Euan MacKie, and various others.
Carol –
Your comment is fascinating. But it boggles the mind why SIS is doing the journal thing and charging money for information that they should be making available to everyone gratis in the effort to share their insights ad information. I am sitting here scratching my head on that one. And frankly repelled by whatever idea they might have for grabbing a few pounds Sterling from people who would support them – OTHERWISE. Are they doing the Wiley or Springer approach? If so , gag me with a spoon.
I wonder if you are happy to have that as the first response to your otherwise excellent and informative comment.
As to your list of academics, I like the list but am also wondering why any of them thin k they need to supplement their incomes with the 2 or 8 people per year who would pay for access to academic information that is almost certainly already paid for by grant moneys or was publicly funded n the first place. I am sure the extra £18 or £144 pounds will make e big difference in any of their efforts. Or if it is SIS itself that is doing the penny-wise-pound-foolish thing, I just don’t get it.
Oy vey. And sorry if this sounded hostile, but money-grabbing is not my favorite thing, nor that of anyone else here, I don’t think.
Carol –
As to the information you provided, it is all good stuff, IMHO.
If anyone wants to say that quake storms are not at all happening, they might want to look at the Sumatran tsunami 9.2 quake, which was preceded by only a few days by an 8.2 quake near Macquarie Island (a strongly suspected “hot spot”), just down the fault line.
As a strongly tentative catastrophist, I’d suspect the quake storm at the end of the MB and the others should give some suggestion of the frequency of impacts, even in the Time of Man. It annoys me immensely when geologists talk so blithely of catastrophic events millions of years ago with their wide and unstated temporal ranges, with those ranges based on severely subjective and merely qualitative geologic age dates. Yes, they’ve adjusted the dates of the ages over time, but they are IMHO not much more solid than the nearly totally un-anchored ranges of ceramics or stone points. Thereis every bit as much evidence of impacts as there is for the dating of either of those, but because impacts are catastrophic and ceramics’ evolution is uniformitarian, the latter is given an easy pass while the former needs to jump though hoops day in and day out, running all sorts of gauntlets and dealing with raised bars.
200 years ago the uniformitarians didn’t have such gauntlets to run, because after all, the catastrophists of the time were naively and innocently falling in line with the Biblical flood, which was to be avoided at all costs. Thus, even then the uniformitarians were given an easy pass in the ABNF period. ABNF being “Anything but Noah’s Flood”.
And we’ve been stuck with ABNF ever since. And the presence of the Creationists aren’t helping matters. They make it too esy for the MSM researchers to simply shy away from anything catastrophist, while also making it necessary for any catastrophists to back away from any hint of the Biblical Flood of Noah.
One can’t disagree with the geologists and their anti-quake-storm thinking, because in a uniformitarian world no such thing should happen. But even though they supposedly have adopted a modified uniformitarian POV, that is not really true, about their POV, since they still push all catsstrophes millions of years in the past – in spite of the date of Barringer’s crater (as one example).
They refuse to admit that SL/9 means a damned thing. Nor Tunguska. As a for instance, if SL/9 had hit Jupiter as one body, the devastation on Jupiter might have been much more immense. But hitting Earth? Out of the question – even though even Fragment G would have probably destroyed one quarter of humanity immediately and another half in the next decade. (My own back of the envelope numbers…) Or if Tunguska – a mere airburst – had hit over Chicago, the rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1871 would have almost all been undone, and at the cost of a few hundred thousand lives.
I don’t think SIS are into money grabbing. We are set up as a public charity and any money is funnelled back into the society. People give of their own time free of charge. Any monies accrued is used to pay for speaker meetings (which are not free) or to pay for the web site itself (which has to be hosted and maintained) and when we can afford it, to pay for conferences. Hence, we sponsored the 1997 SIS Cambridge Conference which set in motion the Benny Peiser CCNeT forum (Benny hosted it) and which for a time was the premier catastrophist information channel (until Benny moved on to the CAGW theme). It costs money to produce printed journals and lots of people still prefer to read the printed page rather than a computer screen. In fact, some of our members are not online and never will be. That serves to show we have an aging reader base but we do actually have quite a few young ‘uns as well. The whole idea of the society is to print material you can’t read anywhere else – the sort of thing that you might call non-consensus. For many years catastrophism has been non-consensus or fringe and uniformitarianism has ruled the roost. Nobody is saying that evolution is not a reality – but we recognise a shift from Darwinism, and that is evolution by catastrophism (in big jumps and spurts as organisms seek to fill a void by extinctions). We also recognise the Holocene is marked by a series of ‘events’ and these have a bearing on climate anomalies picked up in the recent populism of climate science. It is what caused these events to happen that matters. The most comprehensive research on one of these, at roughly 2300BC, was by an American retiree, Moe Mandelkehr, who wrote a succession of articles for SIS. He gathered together an enormous amount of evidence from archaeology, geology, climate change,migration of humans, and so on, that I think has never been bettered by any other catastrophist. Mike Baillie defines the event as double pronged, one at 2345BC and another at roughly 2200/2150BC, and in archaeological and old world terms they mark the end of the Sumerians, followed by the end of the Akkadians. The latter migrated into Babylonia (Iraq) from central Syria at the end of the first event, and disappeared at the end of the latter. Anne Marie Courty, one of the Cambridge Conference speakers,has dedicated her career since then to finding physical evidence in the ground of a cosmic event at this point in time.
Oh, I forgot. Han Kloosterman has also been a speaker at one of our meetings. We have an article looking at his career in the next issue
George –
I hope your time in Jordan is everything you expected/hoped.
Whether your team finds out the connection between Tall el-Hammam and Sodom or not (hopefully yes, but you never know), the story of Sodom was certainly catastrophic as told in the Bible. The uniformitarians brush it off as a mythical – and therefore imaginary – tale. And just WHY do they do that? Because – BECAUSE – it is catastrophic. No other reason. Something that much out of the gradualist norm, after all, can’t be real, right?
The uniformitarians being wrong about catastrophes in the time of human history, though, doesn’t necessarily make the Tall el-Hammam connection to Sodom. Perhaps. Perhaps not.
But for sure, it is worth taking the time to investigate. It may be trite to say so, but Schliemann was told Troy was a myth, and he proved them wrong. So one never knows. Some sites have been misidentified for a time before a better identification was able to be made. Sodom, for example, is said (based on SOME aspects of the evidence) to have been at the south end of the Dead Sea, but no one has nailed it down quite yet. That is what happens when really BIG catastrophes happen – the evidence gets so erased, and so little survives, and even what does survive can be so mixed up or damaged that the evidence may not make clear sense anymore. Especially when covered up by deposits – sand, dirt, etc. – the best evidence may be right under our feet and not be found until later generations of researchers.
Giza may be the most famous of all ancient sites, but since I first went there 42 years ago great things have been found that WE walked over quite a few times, not suspecting what was there. Sites as big as cities take time – a LOT of time – to uncover things in a scientific way so that the evidence yields up all of its secrets.
Your dig may be only one of scores or hundreds at Tall el-Hammam over time. Be VERY happy you wee part of it, no matter what the story ends up being in the end.
Hahaha – as I recall, being at such sites and looking for ‘stuff’ you get really hyper aware of your surroundings and in trying to piece together what you are experiencing. It is a VERY awake time. Enjoy it!
About 15-20 years ago I read a preliminary report on several excavations in this area.
What I remember the most is the level of destruction found at nearly every site. Dozens of small villages were thought to have been destroyed by earthquakes and fire, or by warfare.
At at least, one site the bodies of the dead remained where they fell.
The researchers were puzzled by the level of destruction, as no single “kingdom” had the manpower to achieve that level of destruction.
The other puzzling facet of the area is that the structures and remains show signs of burning before the buildings collapsed.
And since the structures were nearly exclusively adobe, it’s hard to imagine mud burning with such intensity that it would char remains in the open.
Again we run into the idea that burning mud brick buildings could burn hot enough to do anything.
One of the things I would like to bring up is how the imagery from parts of the old testament can be interpreted as wintnessing a cosmic impact event.
Let’s not forget this time period coincides with the fall of akkad and the failure of the Indus valley city states.
A new paper also shows that the climate change induced by the impacts changed the environment in China.
No, this is the interesting thing. The timescale does not coincide with the end of Akkad or the failure of the Indus civilisation. That occurred between 2300 and 2000BC – the end of the Early Bronze Age. Tall el-Hammam was destroyed towards the end of the Middle Bronze Age. In conventional chronology the site destructions at this time (as earthquake also destroyed Jericho and Megiddo at the same time, both on fault lines) are blamed on the conquest of Palestine by the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III. Obviously, that can’t be true if natural disaster was to blame. It is not just a matter of putting the destruction of Sodom into a chronological foothold but the implications elsewhere, and not least where to locate the many campaigns of dynasty 18 Egyptian pharaohs who created an empire in what was then Canaan. Its called putting a spike into a well accepted consensus theory.
Why do destruction by esrthquake, and conquest by Pharoh have to be mutually exclusive? After all, what better time to crush an enemy than just after they’ve been hit by a natural catastrophe?
Please excuse the spelling. This itty bitty phone screen is hard to see when bouncing in the back seat.
George –
(I hope you are not too busy to read this….)
May I request that you ask if you can do a “Man on the street” interview with one of the major participants of the dig there at Tall el-Hammam – and publish it here? Even a 5-8 minute interview would be cool.
If not, keep on digging! If you meet any radioactive Chinese, you’ve dug too far…
http://phys.org/news6114.html Steve; I found another piece to my Drake Passage puzzle. I need to get lost on line more often.
Jim –
Keep at it, online. YES, getting lost online grows your info base, which bit by bit expands your ability to cross reference and critique. It is not a bad “non-direction” to go in, that “getting lost online” direction… I have lots of fun with it, all the time. And things keep on coming back around at me. Like old friends. . . LOL
In my own Einsteinian Random Walk online today I ran across this one:
http://www.2010-q-conference.com/theseasteroidsth/combes-2010-aster.pdf
“THESE ASTEROIDS THAT GRAZE THE EARTH
Definition and classification of the different categories of objects
by Michel-Alain Combes (Translated by Anne-Marie de Grazia)”
It is written by a seemingly dedicated Velikovskian (and therefore catastrophist), who does a decent job of delineating the NEAs for us. Some will be closed-minded to his planetary breakup genesis of some of the NEAs (it appears to me that he asserts 60-75%). Some will be open-minded and non-committal about the planetary breakup idea. But the rest of his info is good and solid and non-arguable. And that is why I am recommending a read-through of it. Those who disagree with the planetary genesis of some of the comets can blow off that part and still get some good and solid review of NEAs – and perhaps some new info, at the least.
Steve; As I was searching for more info on Drake Passage and was going nowhere so I shifted back to YDB. I came across the article that dated the cape York meteorite to 12000-13000 yrs ago. 8 very large pieces were recovered and brought back to civilization for research and display. There was no mention of any crater involved with these impacts so they had to have occurred on the ice cap and were left behind as the ice retreated or trans ported down hill from higher on the ice pack by the glaciation motion. My point here is that if these were pieces of a large cosmic body that blew apart then there could be other pieces that could have come down further south and west of there in the same time frame causing major damage to the already deteriorating ice sheets without leaving any trace cratering as in Greenland.
Jim, whatever article that was about Cape York, can you post the link here?
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/52/E5035.full Steve; This is the only one I can relocate. There were 2 others. All the other articles just give a rough date of 10,000 yrs ago approx. You should get a kick out of the author. The given age is at the end of the article.
Jim –
Petaev et al had this to say specifically about the Cape York event:
“The huge Cape York IIIAB iron meteorite shower from West Greenland is thought to have fallen at about the time of the YD (~10,000 years ago), but it has comparable concentrations of Ir and Pt that cannot account for the very high Pt/Ir ratio found in the ice core.”
“LARGE PLATINUM ANOMALY IN THE GISP2 ICE CORE: EVIDENCE FOR A CATACLYSM AT THE
BØLLING-ALLERØD/YOUNGER DRYAS BOUNDARY? Michail I. Petaev” – see http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2013/pdf/1046.pdf
Take that and absorb it into your thinking.
Petaev concluded with this:
“The main conclusion of our study is the detection of an unusual event during the Bølling-Allerød – YD transition period that resulted in deposition of a large amount of Pt to the Greenland ice. The nature of the event remains uncertain, but our results clearly rule out an impact or airburst of a chondritic bolide. If an impact was involved, the impactor had a very unusual composition deriving from a highly fractionated portion of a proto-planetary core.”
Oh, with my bugaboo about the makeup of chondritic meteors and the planetary nebula accretion idea, that last phrase “a proto-planetary core” gets my brain going…LOL
Petaev all but completely rules out a terrestrial event, based on the PT-UR ratios:
“Finding a terrestrial source of Pt is more difficult. The Laacher See supervolcano exploded ~12,900 years ago and spread tephra over Western Europe and Greenland, but this material is not expected to be Pt-rich. Some island arc volcanoes can apparently fractionate PGEs [e.g.,16], but whether a volcanic eruption could produce such a large Pt anomaly remains to be studied.”
One observation might be that normally almost all of the ejecta materials of an impact are terrestrial materials, so that such elevated levels of Pt are, in themselves amazingly odd.
Hahaha – The Bos.
“The Pt anomaly predates ammonimum [sic] and nitrate peaks in the GISP2 core by decades, eliminating the possibility that the source event triggered wildfires, as proposed by the impact hypothesis.” [No reference cited for this statement.]
WOW. We really have to give The Bos credit for his very scientific sounding “by decades”. “BY DECADES? HOW MANY DECADES, BOS? 3? 7? 50? Talk about sloppy science.
Oy vey.
The Bos pulls out his “anti-YDB” crowbar with a lot of futility, in this kibitz – expecting anyone to fall for his completely vague “by decades” assertion to actually mean anything.
But then The Bos also asserts something that simply isn’t even true about the Petaev paper:
“Because there is no corresponding Ir spike, Petaev et al. challenge the impact hypothesis by proposing a highly fractionated iron meteorite.”
WHAAAAAT??!!! Petaev proposing an iron meteor challenges an “impact hypothesis”?????
Doesn’t The Bos even know enough about impacts to know that meteors are also impacts? Is he THAT uninformed? Or does he only allow for his computer modeled air bursts – that only airbustrts are “impacts”?
Ice cores:
Once again, though, if you get a scientist out of their comfort zone/field of knowledge, they aren’t so smart. The Bos is assuming precision in ice cores that doesn’t exist. They are good only for like 150- to 200-year resolution, though don’t quote me on the exact numbers. The gases and elements found are able to migrate up or down in the process of being compressed, and especially in the process of extraction, blurring the results. In other words, where they are found is not necessarily where/when they were deposited in the ice. So one can claim SOME precision, but not much. But Bos’ unbelievably vague and nonsensical “by decades” has to be taken as a joke – on him.
[Wiki***] “The time resolution (i.e. the shortest time period which can be accurately distinguished) depends on the amount of annual snowfall, and reduces with depth as the ice compacts under the weight of layers accumulating on top of it. Upper layers of ice in a core correspond to a single year or sometimes a single season. Deeper into the ice the layers thin and annual layers become indistinguishable.” [no footnote on this passage]
13 kya is relatively shallow, as the GISP core goes back a bit more than 100,000 years (at a depth of ~3000 meters or so).
[Wiki] “Shallow cores, or the upper parts of cores in high-accumulation areas, can be dated exactly by counting individual layers, each representing a year. These layers may be visible, related to the nature of the ice; or they may be chemical, related to differential transport in different seasons; or they may be isotopic, reflecting the annual temperature signal (for example, snow from colder periods has less of the heavier isotopes of H and O). Deeper into the core the layers thin out due to ice flow and high pressure and eventually individual years cannot be distinguished. It may be possible to identify events such as nuclear bomb atmospheric testing’s radioisotope layers in the upper levels, and ash layers corresponding to known volcanic eruptions. Volcanic eruptions may be detected by visible ash layers, acidic chemistry, or electrical resistance change. Some composition changes are detected by high-resolution scans of electrical resistance. Lower down the ages are reconstructed by modeling accumulation rate variations and ice flow.
Dating is a difficult task. Five different dating methods have been used for Vostok cores, with differences such as 300 years per meter at 100 m depth, 600yr/m at 200 m, 7000yr/m at 400 m, 5000yr/m at 800 m, 6000yr/m at 1600 m, and 5000yr/m at 1934 m.[24]
Different dating methods makes comparison and interpretation difficult. Matching peaks by visual examination of Moulton and Vostok ice cores suggests a time difference of about 10,000 years but proper interpretation requires knowing the reasons for the differences.[25]”
NOTE: The YDB age of 13,000 ya is at a depth of about 1700 meters. Thus, that depth has a resolution of about 6000 years per meter. This translates to about 6 years (layers) per millimeter – or about 0.0065 inches per year, if my math is right. That is QUITE compressed at that level meaning that the ice and its constituents have been pushed around a lot by the ice above.
The Bos doesn’t indicate in this that he has consulted with ice core academics, and he lists no co-authors, so he makes these statements without expertise (which makes him on my level?…LOL). I am rather shocked at his sloppiness in not consulting someone with expertise in this. REALLY BAD. (That is why he ballparked the “by decades” issue, thinking anyone would fall for it. If I am not 100% not sloppy here, I don’t have to be. But for The Bos to be so careless in a PAPER? Ouch!
*** I don’t pretend that Wiki is the last word on anything, but on non-controversial subjects it is a good starting point.
Petaev – who seems to be Bos’ one and only ice core resource, replied to The Bos with this: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/52/E5036.full?sid=2cc6f1d6-2bb7-4fba-987b-e4dc77e73f5b – “Reply to Boslough: Is Greenland Pt anomaly global or local?”
In it Petaev addressed only the Platinum spike. He concludes that,
“We believe that the controversy about the scale of the Pt-depositing event, whatever its nature was, could only be resolved by additional analyses of ice samples from Greenland and other localities worldwide. Moreover, given the very high Pt concentrations at the anomaly, such analyses can be successfully performed on ice samples as thin as ∼1 cm, potentially allowing establishing a finer structure of the Pt anomaly with ∼0.5-y resolution.”
So, Petaev says I am wrong about the resolution of the Pt spike. I will disagree on that. If the depth has 6 years per millimeter and if 1 cm = 10 millimeters, then Petaev’s resolution is 60 years. That does not compute to a 0.5 year resolution. Those numbers don’t work.
The full Petaev paper is here: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2013/pdf/1046.pdf
Regarding the Petaev paper, there are actually two versions. One was given at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference and is here: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2013/pdf/1046.pdf
The PNAS version, with a slightly different title, is here: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/32/12917.full?sid=2cc6f1d6-2bb7-4fba-987b-e4dc77e73f5b#ref-10
The latter includes this (missing from the other):
How Peteav can possibly NOT conclude an ET source for these Pt findings is simply ridiculous. He jumps through every conceivable hoop in order to dodge the only conclusion possible.
In this passage he finds that the ONLY comparable Pt findings are at two huge meteor impact sites. For Sudbury he parses the phrasing so as to not make it a 2×4 in the side of the head that Sudbury is an impact site. Then Peteav compounds his mealy-mouthed approach by even including Sikhote-Alin, and then at the end of the paper/presentation slides around the YDB impact conclusion and finds that a 30-year variance in the timing is more important and carries more weight than the forensics that point absolutely at an impact. That the 30-year variance also almost certainly has a range of 75 years he ignores. Such a range would put the two events within the same time window. But by claiming that the 30 years is 30 years – and not minus 45 years to plus 105 years – he is able to dodge the evidence of the forensics and pander to those who are skeptics.
As I’ve said before, that is one of the problems with the YDB evidence. Clear evidence is characterized as “iffy” while REALLY iffy counter-evidence is given full weight. In other circles this is called having a double standard. In some it comes under the heading “Confirmation Bias.”
GRRRRRR!!!
I guess if you keep calling the elephant in the room a sofa someone will eventually sit on it.
Steve; Here’s a link to an article that has a pic of a grain of melted quartz. When I first came to the tusk I was asking about some stones I have that look just like that only bigger (baseball to grapefruit size) I was never able to get a good pic, but this one is exactly like the stones I have. You can see the “pinholes” throughout the piece. I was told that my stone was dolomite but why would it have all that holing and a smooth polished surface on it?
Daaaaah! I didn’t leave the link! http://www.messagetoeagle.com/etimpactnewevidence.php#.VPPN1xf9PX4 Bad case of brain Gas
Steve, Remember they told Robert Eisenman the DSS would not be released in his lifetime. How did that work out for them ?
Tony –
Hahahahahahaha . . . I agree.
I happen to know a great deal about Eisenman and all of that. I’ve probably forgotten more than I still remember, but yeah, that was a coup of the first order. Besides having gotten interested in that before the age of 8 (literally) in the 1950s, in the decade straddling the Eisenman “events” I worked several times with a company named “Eisenmann”, so I thought there might be something cosmic in the coincidence.
I ALSO had, early on (the 1960s and 1970s), concluded from the similarities of the DSS writings and the biblical accounts that the two groups (early Christians and DSS people) were in all likelihood the same people. Eisenman certainly went in that direction. At those earlier times the DSS people were linked to a time 200 BC. I thought the link there was faulty at best and wishful thinking at worst (meaning not logical and very strained). I can’t even remember the name of the group offhand at 200 BC. Like I said, I may have forgotten (stuff I DID know) more than I remember. Patience proved me more right than wrong. Thanks in large part to Robert Eisenman. I also, BTW, disagreed with the connection with the Essenes. Norman Golb (sp?) in about 1994 laid out the whole thing in a way that I could understand what had happened. The Essenes were NOT present at Qumran. It was a military outpost. The DSS were the scrolls from the Temple in Jerusalem, which every effort was made to keep them safe from the Romans in the Jewish War of 70 AD to 73 AD. Qumran just happened to be the last refuge, after which they were lost to history because those who sequestered them in the caves at Qumran were captured and killed before they could pass on the location to anyone else. The Romans swept south toward Jerusalem and the last “redoubt” was Qumran as the Romans swept east to the Dead Sea and north to Jericho area. The Romans took almost NO prisoners. The Jewish people had pissed them off really, really badly. This was the beginning of the Diaspora. And the Temple treasure and the temple scrolls were lost. The writesr of the scrolls were not some super-holy mystics in a secluded location separate from the main Jewish thinking and life. The writers were IN Jerusalem, with its multiplicity of Jewish thinking – which is completely reflected in the texts. The “Scriptorium” at Qumran is a figment of archaeologists’ imaginations. In this last I disagree with Eisenman, but then who am I? A nobody…LOL
Golb hit it on the head and after 35 years or more I was able to accept the overall picture of what happened.
Now that you mention DSS, I’m reading Ralph Ellis (King Jesus). Again our timing seems to be on a parallel course (smiles). Anyway, pretty much says all the things you have listed above except he states that Qumran was a “school”. It seems some of the scrolls have “spelling” mistakes that a seasoned scribe would not have made but, perhaps a student in training would. In other words, this was a place rich people sent there kids to get educated into “Rome hating anarchists”. He places Josephus there also.
Also, included with this bunch is Robert Feather (copper scroll). Just moving into this “sons of light” and “sons of darkness” stuff. Most interesting.
Steve and Dave
Kindred spirits! Steve we’re on the same page, I just got a late start on the DSS, 12 years of catholic school (60’s and 70’s) and never heard a word about them. Picked up every Eisenman book in the 90’s. Josephus said essenes lived in all the cities and towns.
Hippolytus of Rome (d.250 AD) in his book The Refutation of All Heresies stated that the Pharisees, Zealots and Sicarii were ESSENES! Looks like Hippolytus worked from the original Josephus.
Steve, I read the WUWT debate with the trolls from last year, Bravo. Climate change at the YD what could have caused it? Then I remembered the Hubble telescope picture of comet schwassman- wachmann 3 breaking apart and all the dust and other debris that spread away from the main body and bingo, I got it. Who said all the dust had to enter the atmosphere? I’m sure that most of the dust stayed IN SPACE around the earth blocking the sunlight, how many years would it take for the solar wind and earths gravity to sweep it away, let me guess 1,300 years.
Hello Tonny
The orbit of shattered comets debris is in the vicinity of the parent comet axis orbit. I imagine that the meeting of the Earth’s orbit with the orbit of the debris is similar to current events. There are few days (or hours) peak of these encounters, but the events (meteor) continue to occur a few days before or after the peak.
Of course, depending on the amount of material and dispersion in the orbit axis of comet, the event may last several days, depending on the size of the fragments, millions of small atomic bombs exploding around the world 24 hours would be enough.
http://ccar.colorado.edu/asen5050/projects/projects_2001/white/meteor.htm
tes test
Site a little Glitchy George?
Have been trying to add a comment for a while.
Whoops Hooo, it went through.
So, that is quite the carbon layer there.
How does it fall within the stratigraphy of the site?
Being able to the such a stretch of time is cool.
One thing in did notice, there are no other such pronounced layers showing signs of fire. Even given the number of earthquakes and rampaging armies that have moved through the area.
Hi George,
I’m not a spammer!
George did you have your magnet and microscope with you when you dug the awesome burn layer?
Hi Cervin,
It was just the “Borg” wanting us now and forever!
Hi
test
I have a small question which really really puzzles me. Being in construction and construction engineering, we always (well 99% anyway) did soil compression testing, etc etc (you don’t want the building to slowly sink???).
Why is it that soil engineers (geologists) aren’t called in to do core drills, etc on all of these sites.
I’m sure it’s strictly a monetary thing, but it would make a lot of sense.
Welcome, Tony Estevez! Great to see a new face commenting at CT.
Thank you George, been a lurker for years and I thought I’d join the fun.
So far it’s more fun than I ever imagined lol!!!