![]() All dates and ages reported here are as BCE, “Before Common Era,” and occasionally in calendar years before the year 1950 (cal BP). For archaeological periods and date ranges for the Jordan Valley, see Supporting Information, Text S1. This investigation focuses on the Middle Bronze Age II (MB II) from ~ 1800–1550 BCE. ![]() More than just a mere city, TeH comprised the urban core of a city-state that flourished nonstop for ~ 3000 years during the Chalcolithic Period and Bronze Age beginning ~ 4700 BCE until it was destroyed at ~ 1650 BCE (3600 cal BP). The site contains the stratified remains of a fortified urban center, now known as the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant 1. A mound of ancient ruins is referred to as “tel” in Hebrew and “tell” or “tall” in Arabic. TeH is a raised, two-tiered occupational mound, the largest in the Jordan Valley. Tunguska-scale airbursts can devastate entire cities/regions and thus, pose a severe modern-day hazard. Tall el-Hammam may be the second oldest city/town destroyed by a cosmic airburst/impact, after Abu Hureyra, Syria, and possibly the earliest site with an oral tradition that was written down (Genesis). An airburst-related influx of salt (~ 4 wt.%) produced hypersalinity, inhibited agriculture, and caused a ~ 300–600-year-long abandonment of ~ 120 regional settlements within a > 25-km radius. Amid city-side devastation, the airburst demolished 12+ m of the 4-to-5-story palace complex and the massive 4-m-thick mudbrick rampart, while causing extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans. Heating experiments indicate temperatures exceeded 2000 ☌. A city-wide ~ 1.5-m-thick carbon-and-ash-rich destruction layer contains peak concentrations of shocked quartz (~ 5–10 GPa) melted pottery and mudbricks diamond-like carbon soot Fe- and Si-rich spherules CaCO 3 spherules from melted plaster and melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, and quartz. The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. We present evidence that in ~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea.
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