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 K fels in Austria in the early morning of 29th June 3123 BC.