The Asteroid Behind the Bible's Most Famous Disaster

The spine of the episode is K8538, the Nineveh Planisphere — a round clay tablet, five and a half inches across, pulled from King Ashurbanipal's 30,000-tablet library after Austen Henry Layard dug into the mound across the Tigris from Mosul in 1849. The library survived because Nineveh's burning in 612 BC baked the clay hard and sealed the rooms. The episode's central claim comes from two rocket scientists, Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell, who argued the tablet isn't a text at all but an eyewitness sky map: eight slices of night sky whose constellation positions, run backward in planetarium software, kept returning one date — just before dawn on June 29, 3123 BC, seen from southern Mesopotamia, with a white object crossing out of Pisces at six degrees above the horizon.

Project that six-degree track northwest 2,000 miles and, on Bond and Hempsell's reading, it ends at Köfels in the Austrian Alps, where three quarters of a cubic mile of mountain came down in a single event, leaving beds of frictionite — rock melted by friction — and shock-fractured quartz. Their model is a kilometer-wide object skipping through the atmosphere so shallowly it never cratered, releasing thousands of Tunguskas' worth of energy and sending a plume 40 miles up. The episode then follows the fallout idea south: Steven Collins, running an archaeology program at a small evangelical university in New Mexico, spent 15 seasons digging Tall el-Hammam north of the Dead Sea — a Bronze Age city ten times the size of Jerusalem that died all at once around 1650 BC, leaving one-sided melted pottery, mud brick glazed to glass, shocked quartz, iridium, and a destruction layer averaging 4% salt, which the team reads as vaporized Dead Sea rained back onto the fields. A third object, the Nebra sky disc — looted from a German hilltop in 1999, sold for 31,000 marks, and recovered in a 2002 Swiss hotel-bar sting — shows the same Pleiades cluster the Nineveh scribe drew.

Then the show turns on its own story. Professional Assyriologists mostly reject Bond and Hempsell's reading of K8538, seeing a ritual calendar rather than a report. The best dating for the Köfels slide is around 7,500 BC — more than 4,000 years before the tablet's supposed morning — and many geologists think a landslide that size melts rock on its own. The 2021 Tall el-Hammam airburst paper drew more than 180 challenges, was picked apart by airburst physicist Mark Boslough, and was retracted in April 2025; the team republished an expanded version a month later in a journal founded by backers of the same airburst ideas. What the critics can't dismiss, the episode argues, is Abu Hureyra, a village on the Euphrates that burned with the same melt-glass fingerprint 12,800 years ago — and Boslough himself, whose new study of the Taurid stream puts its next close passes in 2032 and 2036, with searches in 2019 (blocked when protests closed the Hawaii telescope) and 2022 ruling out giant objects but leaving room, by the search team's own math, for up to 1,000 Chelyabinsk-sized rocks.