How 3,000-year-old Babylonian tablets help scientists unravel one of the weirdest mysteries in space

Among the most enigmatic mysteries of modern science are the strange anomalies which appear from time to time in the earth’s geomagnetic field. It can seem like the laws of physics behave differently in some places, with unnerving and bizarre results — spacecraft become glitchy, the Hubble Space Telescope can’t capture observations and satellite communications go on the fritz. Some astronauts orbiting past the anomalies report blinding flashes of light and sudden silence. They call one of these massive, growing anomalies the Bermuda Triangle of space — and even NASA is now tracking it. 

With all the precisely tuned prowess of modern tech turning its eye toward these geomagnetic oddities, you might not expect that some key scientific insights about them could be locked inside a batch of 3,000-year-old Babylonian cuneiform tablets. But that’s exactly what a recently published study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests. 

“The geomagnetic field is one of the most enigmatic phenomena in earth sciences,” said study co-author Lisa Tauxe in a release. “The well-dated archaeological remains of the rich Mesopotamian cultures, especially bricks inscribed with names of specific kings, provide an unprecedented opportunity to study changes in the field strength in high time resolution, tracking changes that occurred over several decades or even less.”

This newly discovered connection between ancient Mesopotamian writing and modern physics is more than an amusing academic fluke. It highlights just how much is at stake for 21st-century scientific progress when budget-slashing lawmakers, university administrators and private industry investors shovel funding into STEM field development while neglecting — and in some case, actively destroying — the humanities. 

Led by the University College London, the team of researchers who studied the clay cuneiform captured key data about an ancient anomaly thought to be quite similar to the so-called Bermuda Triangle of space (or the South Atlantic Anomaly, as NASA calls it). Studying the clay’s iron oxide grains in a method known as archaeomagnetism, researchers were able to see a snapshot of the aberration known as the Levantine Iron Age Anomaly.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes.

Both the SAA and LIAA represent instances where, for a limited period of time, the earth’s magnetic fields are much weaker or stronger in a specific region than they should be — acting out of step with our normal magnetic north and south poles, and producing unsettling phenomena. There are substantial differences between the anomalies, but they both offer geoscientists clues about how our planet’s deepest core effects its most far-flung adventurers. And researchers’ latest measurements confirm high-paleointensity geomagnetic spikes occurred during the LIAA, hinting that there may be more similarities under the surface. 

It wouldn’t be the first time that the LIAA was examined through the lens of historical artifacts, though. In 2017, researchers followed the archaeomagnetic trail east along the 30-degree longitude line through near-Levant eastern Anatolia, Turkmenistan to Georgia (3,000 km from Lavant) where they examined hundreds of ancient baked-clay fragments and pottery shards in a bid to find the differences in paleointensity. In other instances, Moroccan stalagmites helped draw the map of the LIAA. 

“We often depend on dating methods such as radiocarbon dates to get a sense of chronology in ancient Mesopotamia. However, some of the most common cultural remains, such as bricks and ceramics, cannot typically be easily dated because they don’t contain organic material. This work now helps create an important dating baseline that allows others to benefit from absolute dating using archaeomagnetism,” co-author Mark Altaweel said of the recent UCL study. 

Even so, archaeomagnetism isn’t a silver bullet that can completely replace the linguistic analysis of inscriptions like these. Nor is it even a straightforward endeavor. Despite advances in the past five years or so, archaeomagnetism is still methodologically complex and often tedious work, often cautious data sifting to arrive at accurate interpretations. The more accurate of which come from analyzing layers upon layers of strata. 

But when combined with the expertise of the humanities — from historians and linguists, to religious scholars and anthropologists? Archaeomagnetism opens up new worlds of study across all disciplines. 

In fact, the team’s results show that the strength of the magnetic field in Mesopotamia was more than one and a half times stronger than it is in the area today, with a massive spike happening sometimes between 604 B.C. and 562 B.C. By combining the results of archaeomagnetic tests and the transcriptions of ancient languages on the bricks, the team was able to confirm this spike likely occurred during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II. 
  
Hand in hand with the sciences, the LIAA trail was illuminated by historical accounts of descriptively similar events, recorded from ancient authors as far west as the Iberian peninsula and well into Asia. Archaeomagnetism has now allowed researchers to not only confirm the presence of the LIAA in ancient Mesopotamia from 1050 to 550 B.C. — itself a first for science — but offers cultural historians a new way to verify and apply context to a vast tide of early scientific information. 

Interdisciplinary interdependence 

The symbiotic interdependence between the humanities and sciences deepens further in the thicket of time when one considers that the original locations of the team’s fragments likely include the earliest known centers of astrology and mathematics in Sumeria, such as Nineveh near modern-day Mosul, Iraq. At the ancient city’s royal library of the Assyrian Empire, a site dating back to around 650 B.C., a trove of thousands of tablets were excavated in the mid-1800s containing precise astronomical data surpassing that found in any previous discovery. 

Among those, the "The Plough Star" tablets bear inscriptions dating to 687 B.C. and are the first known instances of humans tracking lunar and planetary orbits through both the solar ecliptic and 17 constellations. The same trove yielded the awe-striking collection known as the Astronomical Diaries, currently held in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, originating from near modern-day Baghdad. The oldest of which dates to 652 B.C. The latest, 61 B.C.

Hermann Hunger and David Pingree, the foremost historians on their excavation, minced no words on their value to to modern science. 

“That someone in the middle of the eighth century BC conceived of such a scientific program and obtained support for it is truly astonishing; that it was designed so well is incredible; and that it was faithfully carried out for 700 years is miraculous,” they wrote.    

In his 2021 book, “A Scheme of Heaven,” data scientist Alexander Boxer cites the two historians and observes that the “enormity of this achievement” lay in the diaries’ preservation of a snapshot of celestial knowledge of the age which — paired with accounts of weather patterns, river water tables, grain prices and even political news — allow us to pinpoint historical events from thousands of years ago, in time-windows as narrow as just a day or two.

“Rivaled only by the extraordinary astronomical records from ancient China, the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries are one of, if not the longest continuous research program ever undertaken,” writes Boxer. 

The cuneiform tablets studied by the UCL team extend this interdisciplinary legacy of the sciences and humanities beautifully by allowing us to read not only the celestially relevant data of geomagnetic history, but by reaffirming the importance of early cultural studies. One fragment, for instance, is dedicated by Nebuchadnezzar II to a temple in Larsa. The site was devoted to carrying out astrological divination traditions, and it’s where we get our earliest clue about the authorship of the Astronomical Diaries. 

Charmingly, that clue appears in the court testimony of a temple official who gets scolded for sounding a false-alarm about an eclipse, embarrassing the temple scholars in front of the whole city.

From clay star-lore to solar magnetic storms

These Neo-Assyrian and Old Babylonian astrologers gave us more than antics, though. In further records at Nineveh, they would ultimately help researchers at the University of Tsukuba — some 2,700 years later — track what were likely massive solar magnetic storms in the area, enabled by geomagnetic disruptions that may be yet linked to the LIAA.

In their dutifully recorded daily observations, one astrologer records a “red cloud” while another tablet-writer observes that “red covers the sky” in Babylon.

“These were probably manifestations of what we call today stable auroral red arcs, consisting of light emitted by electrons in atmospheric oxygen atoms after being excited by intense magnetic fields,” the authors said. "These findings allow us to recreate the history of solar activity a century earlier than previously available records…This research can assist in our ability to predict future solar magnetic storms, which may damage satellites and other spacecraft."

So when a state legislature hands out tax incentives and sweetheart deals to industry-friendly science departments with corporate-funded research teams — but scratches out budget line items funding classes in ancient pottery — then it’s as much in the interest of science departments to speak up as it is the beleaguered chairs of the arts. And when short-sighted administrative fiends gut ethics and philosophy classes from the required curriculum of computer science and biochemistry majors, it’s not just a problem for the cultural studies professors.  

Just like it wasn't only an “arts and culture” problem when US war-vultures looted 17,000 Mesopotamian antiquities following the 2003 invasion of Iraq only to hoard them in some disgusting Hobby Lobby warehouse — or when hundreds of thousands of cuneiform clay tablets ended up in the hands of dealers after the 1991 Gulf War — or when some gutless third-rate jackal in Oklahoma tried to flip the actual inscribed-stone Epic of Gilgamesh. The looting, destruction and loss of cultural history is the sciences’ problem too. 

When universities short sell the arts and humanities, we humanities students might lose our poetry, but we can write more. The science folk, on the other hand, might cost themselves another 75 years of research and $70 billion in grants trying to re-invent the Babylonian wheel because the destruction of its historical blueprint was “an arts problem.” 

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon's Lab Notes, a weekly newsletter from our Health & Science team.