The Akkadian Collapse
About 4200 bp the Akkadian Empire collapsed in north eastern Syria.
The Imperial chorus is blaming a drought. The Imperial chorus also spent the time and money to date some basalts and volcanos in the area. That date would of course make it too old. Except that a lot of references also talk about a tephra mixed in with the wind blown sand at the time of this drought.
There is also the issue of the inconvenient archaeological evidence.
These features look like a recent interstellar impact. The impact flare would have destroyed the surface vegetation and the wind would have mobilized the soil. The tephra can also physically damage plants.
I was trying to find information about the ash at the Sodom site when I noticed the Empire running one of their hide-and-seek games with information talking about the Khabur tephra. This is what I found. Thanks to Google Maps.
The Empire used radar from the Space Shuttle to look at this area. Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) interferometric radar altimetry data [e.g., Rabus et al., 2003]. It sent people to take samples and then faked the ages of those samples. Millions of dollars were spent to hide an interstellar impact.
Ar-Ar dating of late Cenozoic basaltic volcanism in northern Syria: Implications for the history of incision by the River Euphrates and uplift of the northern Arabian Platform
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007Tecto..26.3012D/abstract
It appears that the Empire faked a cuneiform tablet (Sumerian K8538 Tablet). Since the “witness” in this tablet is describing a “standard” impact farther south in Iraq. The actual impact had interstellar velocities and created the volcanic structures at Al Raqqah. The impact flare mechanism (which is missing from the scientific literature) is responsible for most of the damage.
The Tablet has a point of origin for this comet coming from nearly opposite the galactic center (longitude 144) and from the galactic south (latitude -36). A pretty damned improbable path for an interstellar object. To make it appear like a neighborhood comet this fictional comet’s path is very close to the ecliptic plane.
The slow sluggish comet appears to be affected by the Earth gravitational field apparently looping around before impact. An interstellar impactor is moving so fast that the Earth’s gravity can barely affect it before impact.
This “Tablet” scenario pretty much screams fake.
The Empire first tried to blame the destruction of the Akkadian Empire on a drought. Then when people went investigating the drought, they found the tephra and then later clear signs of an impact. The Empire manufactures a tablet to explain away the interstellar impact as a standard impact much farther south. Currently the Empire is blaming the socioeconomic structure of the Akkadian Empire for its demise. Although the Empire may not have enough documentation about the Akkadian Empire to fill a small book. They can produce deep analysis which blames the Akkadian Empire’s socioeconomic structure to draw attention away from all of the physical evidence for an interstellar impact.
The Akkadian Empire was destroyed by an interstellar impact. That impact may have affected the entire region. An imperial secret which directly affected human history. The Empire’s oil secrets may yet destroy human civilization…. again.