Archaeologists have found evidence that in 1650 BCE (Middle Bronze Age), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, an ancient walled city in the Jordan Valley close to the north end of the Dead Sea. An eyewitness description of this catastrophic event — which was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska in Siberia — may have been passed down as an oral tradition that eventually became the written Biblical account about the destruction of Sodom.
The extent of the cosmic airburst at Tunguska, Siberia (1908), superimposed on the Dead Sea area. Image credit: Bunch et al., doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-97778-3.
The ruins of Tall el-Hammam (a mound of ancient ruins is referred to as ‘tel’ in Hebrew and ‘tell” or ‘tall’ in Arabic) are situated in a part of the Great Rift Valley known as the Middle Ghor, defined as the southern end of the valley between Lake Tiberias, Israel, and the Dead Sea.
The site contains the stratified remains of a fortified urban center, now known as the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant.
More than just a mere city, Tall el-Hammam comprised the urban core of a city-state that flourished nonstop for 3,000 years during the Chalcolithic period and Bronze Age beginning 4700 BCE until it was destroyed at 1650 BCE.
Tall el-Hammam has been the focus of an ongoing debate as to whether it could be the Biblical city of Sodom, one of the two cities in the Old Testament Book of Genesis that were destroyed by God for how wicked they and their inhabitants had become.
One denizen, Lot, is saved by two angels who instruct him not to look behind as they flee. Lot’s wife, however, lingers and is turned into a pillar of salt.
Meanwhile, fire and brimstone fell from the sky; multiple cities were destroyed; thick smoke rose from the fires; city inhabitants were killed and area crops were destroyed in what sounds like an eyewitness account of a cosmic impact event. It’s a satisfying connection to make.
“All the observations stated in Genesis are consistent with a cosmic airburst, but there’s no scientific proof that this destroyed city is indeed the Sodom of the Old Testament,” said Professor James Kennett, a researcher in the Department of Earth Science and Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“However, the disaster could have generated an oral tradition that may have served as the inspiration for the written account in the book of Genesis, as well as the Biblical account of the burning of Jericho in the Old Testament Book of Joshua.”
Catastrophic leveling of the palace at Tall el-Hammam: (a) artist’s evidence-based reconstruction of the 4-to-5-story palace that was 52 m long and 27 m wide before its destruction; (b) artist’s evidence-based reconstruction of palace site on upper tall, along with modern excavation; MB II marks the top of 1650-BCE Middle Bronze rubble; note that the field around the excavation is essentially flat, unlike the view in panel ‘a;’ originally, parts of the 4-story palace were over 12 m tall, but afterward, only a few courses of mudbricks remain on stone foundations, labeled as ‘wall remnants’ part of the foundation of the massive wall around the palace is at the bottom; debris from between sheared walls has been removed by excavation; a comparison of panel ‘a’ to panel ‘b’ shows that millions of mudbricks from the upper parts of the palace and other buildings are missing. Image credit: Bunch et al., doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-97778-3.
The extensive, ongoing excavations at Tall el-Hammam have continued for fifteen consecutive seasons since 2006, involving principal investigators assisted by graduate and doctoral students and large numbers of volunteers from across North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Near East.
The excavations of the final phase of the Middle Bronze Age II stratum revealed highly unusual materials.
In addition to the usual debris patterns typical of ancient cities destroyed by warfare and earthquakes, the archaeologists found pottery sherds with outer surfaces melted into glass, some bubbled as if ‘boiled;’ melted and ‘bubbled’ mudbrick fragments; partially-melted roofing clay (with wattle impressions); and melted building plaster.
These suggest that the destruction of Tall el-Hammam was associated with some unknown high-temperature event.
“There’s evidence of a large cosmic airburst, close to this city called Tall el-Hammam, of an explosion similar to the Tunguska event, a roughly 12-megaton airburst that occurred in 1908, when a 56-60-m meteor pierced the Earth’s atmosphere over the Eastern Siberian taiga,” Professor Kennett said.
The shock of the explosion over Tall el-Hammam was enough to level the city, flattening the palace and surrounding walls and mudbrick structures, and the distribution of bones indicated ‘extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans.’
“We saw evidence for temperatures greater than 2,000 degrees Celsius (3,632 degrees Fahrenheit),” Professor Kennett said.
Destruction layer in the palace at Tall el-Hammam: (a) photo of excavation in an exterior food preparation area of the palace; #1 marks MB II debris that was most likely deposited by post-fire erosion; #2 points to charcoal-rich ‘dark layer’ indicating a major fire in the palace; contains fragments of plaster and limestone spherules; blue arrows mark its top; #3 points to the cross-section of excavated clay flooring; (b) close-up photo of the same palace sampling sequence as in panel ‘a;’ (c) photo of broken pots with carbonized grains embedded in MB II 1.5-m-thick debris matrix, mostly composed of pulverized mudbrick and plaster fragments and limestone spherules; debris matrix is found in the space between all palace walls; note charcoal inside the broken pot; the end of a scale stick with 10-cm divisions is at upper left; (d) charred palace roof timber surrounded by 1.5-m-thick charcoal-rich debris matrix of pulverized mudbrick. A scale stick shows 10-cm markings. Image credit: Bunch et al., doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-97778-3.
For the researchers, further proof of the airburst was found by conducting many different kinds of analyses on soil and sediments from the critical layer.
Tiny iron- and silica-rich spherules turned up in their analysis, as did melted metals.
“I think one of the main discoveries is shocked quartz,” Professor Kennett explained.
“These are sand grains containing cracks that form only under very high pressure.”
The airburst may also explain the anomalously high concentrations of salt found in the destruction layer — an average of 4% in the sediment and as high as 25% in some samples.
“The salt was thrown up due to the high impact pressures. And it may be that the impact partially hit the Dead Sea, which is rich in salt,” Professor Kennett said.
The local shores of the Dead Sea are also salt-rich so the impact may have redistributed those salt crystals far and wide — not just at Tall el-Hammam, but also nearby Tell es-Sultan (proposed as the Biblical Jericho, which also underwent violent destruction at the same time) and Tall-Nimrin (also then destroyed).
The high-salinity soil could have been responsible for the so-called Late Bronze Age Gap, in which cities along the lower Jordan Valley were abandoned, dropping the population from tens of thousands to maybe a few hundred nomads.
Nothing could grow in these formerly fertile grounds, forcing people to leave the area for centuries.
Evidence for resettlement of Tall el-Hammam and nearby communities appears again in the Iron Age, roughly 600 years after the cities’ sudden devastation in the Bronze Age.
“The airburst/impact hypothesis would make Tall el-Hammam the second oldest known city/town to have been destroyed by an airburst/impact event that produced extensive human casualties, after Abu Hureyra, Syria, 12,800 years ago,” the scientists said.
“Similarly small but devastating cosmic events are expected to recur every few thousand years, and although the risk is low, the potential damage is exceedingly high, putting Earth’s cities at risk and encouraging mitigation strategies.”
A paper on the findings was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
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T.E. Bunch et al. 2021. A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea. Sci Rep 11, 18632; doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-97778-3
