Almost immediately, the entire city was on fire.” Swords, spears, mudbricks and pottery began to melt. “Clothing and wood immediately burst into flames. “Air temperatures rapidly rose above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit,” Moore explains. Moore, an archaeologist at the University of South Carolina, for the Conversation.
It would have exploded about 2.5 miles above the city in a blast 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima, writes study co-author Christopher R. That left a space rock as the most likely cause.īecause experts failed to find a crater at the site, they attributed the damage to an airburst created when a meteor or comet traveled through the atmosphere at high speed. The researchers concluded that warfare, a fire, a volcanic eruption or an earthquake were unlikely culprits, as these events couldn’t have produced heat intense enough to cause the melting recorded at the scene. The new paper, published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, examined possible causes of the devastation based on the archaeological record. Over the years, archaeologists examining the structures’ ruins have found evidence of a sudden high-temperature, destructive event-for instance, pottery pieces that were melted on the outside but untouched inside.Īlmost immediately, the entire city was on fire. Tall el-Hammam’s mudbrick buildings stood up to five stories tall. Combined, the three metropolises boasted a population of around 50,000. It likely acted as the region’s political center, reports Ariella Marsden for the Jerusalem Post. (“otoriously sinful cities,” Sodom and Gomorrah’s devastation by sulfur and fire is recorded in the Book of Genesis, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.)Īt the time of the disaster, around 1650 B.C.E., Tall el-Hammam was the largest of three major cities in the valley. The destruction of Tall el-Hammam, a Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley, by an exploding comet or meteor may have inspired the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, a new study suggests.
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