A Sumerian Observation of the Kofels' Impact Event

Around 700 BC an Assyrian scribe in the Royal Place at Nineveh made a copy of one of the most important documents in the royal collection. Two and a half thousand years later it was found by Henry Layard in the remains of the palace library. It ended up in the British Museum’s cuneiform clay tablet collection as catalogue No. K8538 (also called “the Planisphere”), where it has puzzled scholars for over a hundred and fifty years. In this monograph Bond and Hempsell provide the first comprehensive translation of the tablet, showing it to be a contemporary Sumerian observation of an Aten asteroid over a kilometre in diameter that impacted Köfels in Austria in the early morning of 29th June 3123 BC.

Alan Bond was predicted to be one of the 'who's who' of the 21st century by the Sunday Times. His early career was in trajectory analysis and is now MD of Reaction Engines Limited developing technologies for launch vehicles. Mark Hempsell was a lecturer in Austronautics and is a past president of the British Interplanetary Society.