- The ~ 4–5-story-tall palace complex (~ 52 m × ~ 27 m), with massive superstructures made of sun-dried mudbricks, extended ~ 11–15 m above the top of the enclosing rampart. The palace excavations reveal that most of the first-floor walls and all of the upper stories of the MB II palace are missing, with no evidence of collapsed walls across the entire upper tall. There are almost no whole mudbricks visible anywhere, and instead, small fragments of bricks are randomly strewn around as infill within the churned-up, 1.5-m-thick destruction matrix. It appears that most bricks were pulverized and blown off the site to the northeast
My mind immediately went to the Old Testament. Yeah, I mean, if you don't know about space n' shit, maybe you're out to pasture, shepherding whatever around, and are then possibly blinded while being terribly burned, running to get behind a boulder, but then the shockwave arrives, throwing you off your feet and at least partially deafening you... we might name anal sex after your destroyed city, and say "oh well they deserved it, god was angry at them for all the butt stuff"? What a deal. Still a few rocks out there:There is an ongoing debate as to whether Tall el-Hammam could be the biblical city of Sodom (Silvia2 and references therein), but this issue is beyond the scope of this investigation. Questions about the potential existence, age, and location of Sodom are not directly related to the fundamental question addressed in this investigation as to what processes produced high-temperature materials at Tall el-Hammam during the MBA. Nevertheless, we consider whether oral traditions about the destruction of this urban city by a cosmic object might be the source of the written version of Sodom in Genesis. We also consider whether the details recounted in Genesis are a reasonable match for the known details of a cosmic impact event.
