by Graham Phillips September 07, 2024
from
AncientOriginsUnleashed Website
recorded by the Ancient Egyptians in 1486 BC. (Illustration by Graham Phillips)
During the past two years the European Space
Agency's Rosetta probe
has been
circling the comet millions of
miles from Earth, making unprecedented close-range observations of
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (named after the two
astronomers who discovered it).
in September 2014 as imaged by Rosetta. (ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM /CC BY-SA 3.0 igo)
But comets, such as the focus of the Rosetta mission,
have also posed threats to earthly life.
A comet just 500 feet in diameter is believed to have caused the Tunguska event of 1908, when it exploded over a remote area of Siberia with the force of a fifteen megaton bomb, flattening 1000 square miles of forest.
But the Tunguska comet was miniscule compared to
one, estimated to have been around ten miles wide, which almost
collided with our planet three and a half thousand years ago.
Trees knocked over by the Tunguska blast. (Public Domain)
Chinese astronomers, who meticulously recorded celestial occurrences for astrological purposes, also noted the breathtaking event.
The ancient Mawangdui Silk Almanac, preserved in the Hunan Provincial Museum in Changsh, depicts the comet as one of the largest ever observed.
Not only did it fill a large part of the sky, it
had an astonishing ten tails... (The biggest comet
observed since the birth of modern astronomy, De Cheseaux's Comet of
1744, had only seven.)
However, it would seem to have concerned a genuine event.
The 22nd year of Tuthmosis III's reign
is thought to have been around 1486 BC, which is precisely the year
(by our modern calendar) that the Chinese observed the
ten-tailed comet.
Impression of the spectacular ten-tailed comet recorded by the Ancient Egyptians in 1486 BC. (Illustration by Graham Phillips)
Indeed, the ancient comet's appearance was so spectacular that it seems to have had a profound influence on religions throughout the world.
It seems that this unprecedented celestial phenomenon was taken to be the appearance of a new god:
Examples include,
The Assyrian winged disk. One of the many similar glyphs that represented deities that appeared throughout the world after the comet's appearance in 1486 BC. (Public Domain)
The symbol for the god Lao-Tien-Yeh glyph that first appeared in China during the early fifteenth century BC. (Photography by Graham Phillips)
Egyptologists have long assumed that the Aten glyph represented the sun, which no doubt it did when the pharaoh Akhenaten made Aten worship the state religion in the mid-1300s BC.
But when it first appeared in the capital of Thebes over a century earlier it is accompanied by no inscriptions specifically associating it with a solar deity.
that may originally have depicted the magnificent comet of 1486 BC.
(Hans
Ollermann/CC BY 2.0)
Throughout the world, there was a simultaneous and unprecedented period of violence.
And all this followed a period of relative peace
throughout the world that had lasted for generations.
Resultant crop failures meant the kind of scarce resources that invariably lead to conflict.
The question, however is,
But this may not have been the only effect of the cometary impact.
At the International Conference on
Catastrophic Events and Mass Extinctions held in Vienna in July
2000, scientists gathered to discuss possible threats to life on
Earth posed by asteroid and comet impacts.
It is not at present known if 12P/Pons-Brooks contains vasopressin, but if it does,
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