Cosmic collision
the mystery shrouding the sudden collapse of Middle East civilisations more than 4,000 years ago might just have been solved.
A two-mile-wide circular depression which looks like an impact crater has been found through studies of satellite images of southern Iraq. Scientists say that the depression raises the possibility of a meteor hitting the Middle East with an intensity equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs.
Four thousand years ago, there was shallow sea at the place where the crater lies today. It is believed that any impact would have caused devastating fires and flooding which might have wiped away early cultures around 2300 bc including the Akkad culture of central Iraq; the end of the fifth dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom, following the building of the Great Pyramids and the sudden disappearance of hundreds of early settlements in the Holy Land.
Before this recent discovery, archaeologists attributed the decline of these civilisations to various factors from wars to environmental changes. Now astronomers have indicated that meteor impacts could be behind these tragedies of history.
A geologist at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Sharad Master found the crater's faint outline on satellite images of the Al