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October 2024 Hi to everyone I’m taking a break during the first two weeks of October, so there will be minimal activity on the site apart from the ongoing project of replacing broken links. Back Soon, Tony September 2023. Hi Atlantipedes, At present I am in Sardinia for a short visit. Later we […]Read More »
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Sodom and Gomorrah
Tollmann, Alexander
Alexander Tollmann (1928–2007) was born in Vienna. He had been a 
professor at the Institute of Geology at Vienna University from 1969. Tollmann was also a founder of the Austrian Green Party.
In 1992 together with his geologist wife Edith, also now deceased, he published a work[1184] describing two cometary collisions in the 11th and 8th millennia BC. This is available online in German with the Introduction in English(d). Frank Dörnenburg has written a highly critical review (in German) of this book, concluding with the comments – Alles in allem habe ich mit ein wenig Internetsuche und Schulstoff die Basisbeweise des Buches aushebeln können, und diese nicht auf Fehler sondern unzweideutige Manipulationen der Autoren zurückführen können. “All in all I have with a little Internet search and schoolwork can nullify the basic proofs of the book, and this can not be reduced to unambiguous error but manipulation of the authors. Ich kann Autoren die bei so etwas derart dreist zu Werke gehen nicht trauen, und jeden Beleg nachzuprüfen ob sie wenigstens da die Wahrheit gesagt haben, dafür ist mir meine Zeit zu schade. I can authors with something so brazenly works will not be trusted, and verify each document if they have at least as telling the truth, but my time is too precious.” (Google translator) >Dörnenburg was not a lone critic, as many other academics offered negative and sometimes nasty reviews(k).<
With a mass of technical data, they also claim that there was an earlier impact around 11,000 BC when a comet struck the northern hemisphere in fragments.
Wikipedia offers an interesting critical review(b) of the Tollmanns’ theory, while the Golden Age Project established by Christian O’Brien presents a more sympathetic assessment(c).
These Late-Glacial impacts are suggested as the cause of the ‘Debacle’ flood in Ontario and the ‘Spokane Flood’ in the Columbia Basin. The Tollmans then claim that a second cometary impact occurred in 7552 BC that broke into seven pieces, one of which fell in the Atlantic. They maintain that the consequences of this event were the Flood of Noah and the Holocene Extinctions.
>Heinrich P. Koch has proposed a similar impact scenario as the Tollmann’s with an extraterrestrial body fragmenting before impacting the Earth, generating catastrophes on a global scale(j).<
The Tollmanns backed up their claim with the results from field studies around the Köfels crater in the Austrian Tyrol. In 2008 two British researchers, Alan Bond & Mark Hempsell, controversially proposed[0426] that the Köfels impact was caused by an asteroid that was recorded on an Assyrian cuneiform tablet, which itself is a copy of an earlier Sumerian document dated to 3123 BC. It is also suggested that the same event was responsible for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Towards the end of his life Tollman appears to have become somewhat irrational, for example, based on the prophecies of Nostradamus as well as a local ‘prophet’, Alois Irlmaier, together with the solar eclipse of August 11, 1999, and other signs, he predicted a global catastrophe for August 1999 and retreated to a bunkered existence, fearing the impending destruction(f).
Over ten years later other scientists claimed that a field of craters around Lake Chiemsee, in southeast Bavaria, was caused by fragments from a huge comet or asteroid that broke up in the atmosphere(a). The Wikipedia entry for the ‘Chiemgau impact hypothesis’ dismisses the hypothesis as an “obsolete scientific theory”. However, others beg to differ(g)(h).
>It should be noted that Lake Chiemsee is just north of the Austrian border and only about 50 km from the Köfels crater. Artefacts, including coins, seem to have been strongly heated on one side. This fact, together with Roman reports of stones falling from the skies and dendrochronology has suggested a date of around 200 BC for the event.>At the 2010 Quantavolution Conference in Paris, a conflicting date of 465 BC was proposed(i).<
(a) http://www.chiemgau-impact.com/
(b) https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tollmann%27s_hypothetical_bolide&printable=yes
(c) https://www.goldenageproject.org.uk/19giantcomet.php
(d) https://web.archive.org/web/20160322021248/https://www2.uibk.ac.at/downloads/oegg/Band_84_1_63.pdf
(e) http://fdoernenburg.de/alien/alternativ/fun/fun03.php (German)
(f) See Archive 2968) mixed German & English
(h) Chiemgau Impact: Comet Smashed Into Southern Germany In 200 BC (archive.org) *
(i) The Chiemgau Comet (2010-q-conference.com) *
(j) Heinrich P. Koch – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog) *
See Also: Asteroids and Comets, Emilio Spedicato and Gernot Spielvogel.
Köfels Impact
The Köfels Impact area in the Austrian Tyrol was identified by Alexander & Edith Tollmann as one of a number regions affected by an encounter with a comet/asteroid that resulted in its fragmentation prior to impact. The Tollmanns theorised that the flood of Noah and the Holocene extinctions were a consequence of these impacts.
The Köfels event has recently been linked in a book[426], A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels Impact Event, by Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell, to an Assyrian cuneiform tablet that apparently describes an earlier Sumerian observation of an encounter with an asteroid. The same encounter has also been suggested as the cause of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
In October 2015, there were reports that the sites of Sodom and Gomorrah had been finally located(a).
November 2018 saw a further claim(b) that Sodom and possibly other the ‘cities of the plain’ (Gen. 13) had been destroyed by a meteoric airburst, similar to the Tunguska or the more recent Chelyabinsk events. This catastrophe took place north of the Red Sea in what is now Jordan according to archaeologist Phillip Silvia of Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque.
Silvia’s conclusions have been confirmed by Dr. Steven Collins(c) who has excavated at the Tell el-Hammam site and describes his findings in a book, co-authored with Dr. Latayne C. Scott, Discovering the City of Sodom [1625].
Roger M. Pearlman has suggested[1596] that Atlantis can be equated with the Sodom of Genesis!
(c) More Evidence Confirms Tall el-Hammam as Sodom – Assist News (archive.org) *
James, Peter
Peter James (?- ) graduated in ancient history and archaeology at Birmingham University and engaged in postgraduate research at University College, London.
James came to public attention when, in collaboration with Nick Thorpe, Nikos Kokkinos, Robert Morkot and John Frankish, he authored Centuries of Darkness [346] in which he explored the problems of the chronology of the Mediterranean and Near East in the second millennium BC. It generated much controversy, which continues as the authors’ website(c)(d) demonstrates.
The following years saw the production of an impressive three-volume work by David Rohl[229][230][232] offering similar ideas on a New Chronology for the region.>Initially, James and Rohl had jointly researched the flaws in Velikovskian chronology for a number of years, which resulted in a paper(e) written for the SIS in 1982. Rohl has published this document on his website as he “felt it would be useful to republish the ‘first outing’ of the New Chronology theory here since the original paper is difficult to find. It also serves to put the record straight about when and how the revision of the Third Intermediate Period took shape.”<
Unfortunately the collaboration ended over divergent views regarding the identification of the biblical Shishak, Rohl favouring Ramesses II, while James opted for Ramesses III.
James has also been studying the Atlantis question since the early 1970s. Paul Dunbavin recounts that James had originally favoured Megalithic Britain as Atlantis. Francis Hitching in The World Atlas of Mysteries[307] notes how James calculated the date of the demise of Atlantis as 3600 BC. He arrives at this by accepting the commonly agreed date for the beginning of Egyptian civilisation of 3100 BC. He then adds the 1,000 years, which Solon was told by the Egyptian priests, was the time that had elapsed between the Atlantean Athenian war and then arbitrarily subtracts 500 years to compensate for an assumed nationalistic exaggeration of Egypt’s antiquity; a habit common to many ancient kingdoms.
However, when he finally published his work on the subject, The Sunken Kingdom [047], he controversially offered a site in Anatolia in western Turkey as his preferred location for Atlantis. Unfortunately, he has been unable to obtain permission from the authorities to dig at the site and hopefully substantiate his theory. The book is supported by a website(a).
A few years earlier, Eberhard Zangger published The Flood From Heaven, in which he also placed Atlantis in western Anatolia, specifically in Troy. James offers a few critical comments including what he considers a major weakness in Zangger’s theory, namely that Troy did not ‘sink beneath the waves in a single day and a night’. [p.201]
James was highly vocal in disputing the dendrochronological dating of the Uluburun shipwreck discovered in 1982 off southwestern Turkey. The initial date given was 1315 BC, later revised to 1305 BC but due to a lack of bark on the piece of wood tested a definitive date was impossible. Even if the bark had been attached it would still only have provided the date that the tree had been felled not the date of the shipwreck(b). Subsequently, the more imprecise radiocarbon dating gave a date of ‘around’ 1300 BC.
James is also co-author, again with Nick Thorpe, of Ancient Inventions [757], which is a 672-page tome that offers a fascinating account of the inventive capabilities of ancient civilisations. In this 1994 book, he comments that “Plato’s yarn is largely a work of fiction” [p.455], which makes you wonder why, just a year later, he published The Sunken Kingdom!
Seven years later James and Thorpe teamed up again to compile Ancient Mysteries [1922], which covers familiar subjects, such as Nazca, Sodom & Gomorrah, the Vinland Map and the Maya.
(a) https://www.knowledge.co.uk/the-sunken-kingdom/
(b) https://www.centuries.co.uk/uluburun.pdf
(c) https://www.centuries.co.uk/replies.htm
(d) https://www.centuries.co.uk/faq.htm
(e) David Rohl Official Blog *
Baltic Sea
The Baltic Sea however improbable at first sight as a candidate for the location of Atlantis has a number of features that cannot be ignored. The area was subjected to post-glacial inundations following the last Ice Age. Tacitus, the respected Roman historian placed the Pillars of Hercules or at least one set of them, in the Baltic.
It was reported by Konrad Kretschmer towards the end of the 19th century that another German writer only referred to as Hafer proposed in 1745 that Atlantis had been located in the Baltic with its capital situated on the island of Rugen.
Jürgen Spanuth based his Atlantis theory on an unambiguous identification of the Atlanteans with the Hyperboreans of the Baltic region. His map of the Atlantean Empire is shown on the right. The German writer Doris Manner attempted to identify the legendary Baltic city of Vineta with Atlantis.
The Italian writer Felice Vinci has recently offered[0018,0019] compelling arguments that support his contention that much of Greek mythology has its roots in northern Europe. He focuses on the epic poems, IIliad and Odysseus, attributed to Homer, to demonstrate a Baltic origin for the stories. Vinci suggests that the Atlantis story should also be reviewed in the light of his own research. He also offers some interesting views on the size of Atlantis.
Spanuth’s views on the subject of Nordic influences on Greek poets and writers are also worth a read[017.163].
>Although Iman Wilkens also proposed a northern Europe location for the Trojan War, with Troy itself situated in southern Britain. However, he does locate a few of the participants in the Baltic.
Further relocations were proposed by Mauro Biglino and co-author Cinzia Mele who discovered two distinct wooded areas in Finnish territory called Sodom & Gomorrah. Further investigation revealed dozens of geographical ‘coincidences’ using Google Earth and the Finnish toponymy site Nimiarkisto.fi. Details are given in their two books, Gli Dei Baltici Della Bibbia [1907] (The Baltic Gods of the Bible) and La Bibbia il Regno del Nord? [1908] (The Bible: The Kingdom of the North?), both in Italian only.<
Perhaps the strongest argument against the Baltic Hypothesis is geological when Plato records that sometime after the war both Athens and Atlantis suffered catastrophic destruction as a consequence of a powerful earthquake and floods. Unlike the Aegean, the Baltic was not noted for earthquakes and they lie over 1,200 miles from each other. It is unknown for an earthquake to simultaneously cause even minor damage at two locations so far apart and would appear to be impossible when one of them is seismically stable.
The British Daily Mail of Jan. 27th, 2014 reported(a) that Swedish divers had discovered the remains of an 11,000-year-old settlement under the Baltic at Hano, off the coast of Skane County, which was quickly labelled ‘Sweden’s Atlantis’!
Baër, Carl Friedrich
Carl Friedrich Baër was Swedish, but lived in Paris where he was pastor at the
Lutheran chapel in the Swedish embassy (1742-1784). He believed that Plato’s Atlantis story was a corruption of Bible history and that in fact Atlantis was located in the Holy Land. He went further and attempted to link the twelve tribes of Israel with the ten kings of the Atlantean federation. On one of the maps in his book, first published in 1762[140], he placed the Atlas Mountains in modern Yemen and has the Red Sea named as Mare Atlanticum, presaging the more recent work of Jaime Manuschevich. Furthermore, Baër links the destruction of Atlantis with the biblical story of the demise of Sodom and Gomorrah.
His book, in French, can now be read or downloaded online(a).