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The clay tablet known as the “Planisphere” is British Museum K8538. It was found at Nineveh, in modern Iraq, in the library of the Assyrian royal palace, and is said to have been recovered in the 19th century by Sir Austen Henry Layard. The round tablet is Assyrian and was inscribed around 700 BC. Some argue it copies a far older Sumerian record.
In 2008, Alan Bond, founder of Reaction Engines, and Mark Hempsell published a reading of the tablet in a self-published book, A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels’ Impact Event (Writersprintshop, ISBN 1-904623-64-6). They argue that it records an asteroid strike that caused the giant landslide at Köfels in Tyrol, Austria, in 3123 BC.
What the Tablet Is Said to Show
According to Bond and Hempsell, half of the tablet records routine sky observations, such as planet positions and cloud cover. The other half describes an unusual object, called a “white stone bowl approaching”, moving fast across the sky. They say its path was recorded to within one degree against the constellation Pisces.
Using computer reconstructions of the night sky, they date the observation to just before dawn on 29 June 3123 BC (Julian calendar). They propose an Aten-type asteroid, a class with an orbit close to Earth’s, more than a kilometre across. In their reading, it came in at a low angle of about 6 degrees and hit a mountain, possibly the Gamskogel, (6.84 miles) from Köfels. The asteroid broke up into a fireball, which would explain why there is no normal crater.
The Köfels Landslide
The Köfels landslide in the Ötz valley is a sturzstrom, a very large and fast-moving landslide. About (1.99 miles)³ of rock and mud moved (1.55 miles) horizontally and 800 m vertically, making it the third largest known sturzstrom. Radiocarbon dates on trees buried by the slide put it at 9,800 ± 100 years ago.
The landslide is normally dated to around 7800 BC, long before the tablet was recorded and over 4,500 years before the Bristol researchers' date.
Wikipedia, "Alan Bond (engineer)", accessed 28 October 2026
The landslide is dated more than 4,500 years before the tablet’s proposed event.
The impact idea is older than the tablet reading. The Austrian scientist Franz Eduard Suess proposed it in 1936, and Alexander Tollmann later proposed impacts around 7640 BC and 3150 BC. Bond and Hempsell suggested that the dating samples had been contaminated, a claim that other research has denied. Later studies found no evidence of an asteroid, meteorite or comet. Geologists consider the slide to have other causes, such as “deep creep”. The fused rock found at the site, called köfelsite, can form by friction in a landslide, not only by impact.
Connection to the Taurids
The Taurid meteor stream, linked to Comet Encke, is known for bright fireballs and has been linked to past impacts. Its night-time showers peak in October and November. Some researchers think the tablet’s object could belong to the Taurid complex. The date of 29 June does not match the modern Taurid shower, though. Either the stream’s orbit was different 5,000 years ago, or the object came from another group of near-Earth objects. No direct evidence ties the tablet’s event to the Taurids. See also Could the Taurid Meteor Shower Have Caused the Great Flood? and Events around 3,100 BCE linked to a meteor impact?.
Criticisms
- Precision: John Taylor, a retired specialist in Near Eastern archaeology, argues there is no evidence that observers in 3123 BC could record a path in the sky to within one degree. Gaps in the understanding of cuneiform also make the translation uncertain.
- The “white stone bowl”: the phrase is unclear, and some scholars doubt it describes an asteroid. A reading as a spaceship, proposed by an Azerbaijani historian, has been dismissed by mainstream scholars.
- Sodom and Gomorrah: Bond and Hempsell suggested that the impact’s plume of debris burned the cities of the plain. Biblical chronologies such as Ussher’s place Sodom’s destruction around 1900 BC, and 3123 BC also falls before the biblical Flood. NASA’s David Morrison is reported to have called the plume hypothesis “incredible” without further modelling.
- Reception: the hypothesis is not accepted by the scientific community. The 2008 publication drew wide press attention, including The Telegraph and the Daily Mail, but cuneiform and impact specialists were doubtful.
Later Links
Some sources tie the event to the 4.2-kiloyear event. This was a severe drought that started around 2200 BC and probably lasted the whole 22nd century BC. It has been suggested as a cause of the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt and of the Akkadian Empire. Some analyses give a date near 2193 BC, for example a 2019 translation addendum on K8538. Either way, these dates fall about 900 years after 3123 BC.
The tablet is reported to be about 40% damaged, damage put down to the sacking of Nineveh. For the full translation and argument, see Bond and Hempsell’s book or the British Museum’s K8538 entry.
