Does Sumerian Cosmogony Validate Bode's Law?

In a previous diary, I pointed out that the ancient Sumerians, some 7000 years ago, knew of the existence of Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus, three worlds that are not visible to the naked eye. They also claimed that Earth had once been half of a planet whose other half was now the asteroid belt. In the 1700s, Johann Bode attempted to predict the location of the then-known planets with a simple mathematical formula. His calculations didn't come that close and his "law" has since been demoted to "interesting idea that didn't work out". But...what if...it does work out when applied to the Sumerian's original layout of planets?

The Sumerians knew the orbital periods of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto--planets they shouldn't have even known existed because they are invisible to the naked eye. (This factoid is not controversial, by the way--it is well-known that the Sumerians, who were avid astronomers, kept detailed ephemeredes on their tablets, which have survived.) But the Sumerians also knew that Uranus' rotates on its side; they knew that Pluto was formerly a moon, not a planet with an independent orbit; they knew that Neptune has a ring.

According to Sumerian cosmogony, when our solar system formed, it did so without Earth positioned between Venus and Mars. Instead, in place of the asteroid belt, there was a planet they called Tiamat (mother of life). When the rogue planet Nibiru fell into the solar system, one of its four moons collided with Tiamat, breaking it in two. The shattered half became the asteroid belt; the other half fell into an orbit closer to the Sun and became Earth.

If true, one would expect Earth's crust to still bear the scar of this collision--and it does; that scar is the Pacific Ocean, where the crust is only about ten miles thick. (The crust is about twenty-five miles thick everywhere else.) Even now, the continental mass that was left on one side of Earth after the collision--Pangaea--having broken up, has pieces drifting toward the Pacific to fill in the void.

In 1772, the director of the Berlin Observatory, Johann Bode, printed a theory that the solar system formed according to simple geometric principles. (The theory, known as Bode's Law when I was in fifth grade, was actually discovered by Johann Daniel Titius in 1766 and is now known as Titius-Bode's Law.) It proposes (in somewhat simplified terms) that each planet of the solar system is twice as far from the Sun as the one closer in.

This isn't quite true, but investigators of Bode's Law were still motivated to see if it wasn't kind of true. Remember, in the 1700s science was enamored of a "clockwork universe" in which all the parts followed simple, mechanistic rules set down by a "Master Clockmaker." So they tweaked the numbers and came up with a system that more closely matched the observation. In this system, a mathematical formula,

a = 0.4 + (0.3 x k)

where k = 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 (continuing with powers of 2) produces values of a that nearly match the number of astronomical units each planet's orbit lies from the Sun. (An astronomical unit, or AU, is the Earth's distance from the Sun--about 93,000,000 miles.) That gives us the following table:

Planet	k	T-B rule distance	Real distance (AUs)	Miles	Discrepancy
Mercury	0	0.40	0.39	36,270,000	-2.56%
Venus	1	0.70	0.72	66,960,000	2.78%
Earth	2	1.00	1	3,000,000	0.00%
Mars	4	1.60	1.52	141,360,000	-5.26%
(Asteroid Belt)	8	2.80	2.77	257,610,000	-1.08%
Jupiter	16	5.20	5.2	483,600,000	0.00%
Saturn	32	10.00	9.54	887,220,000	-4.82%
Uranus	64	19.60	19.2	1,785,600,000	-2.08%
Neptune	n/a	n/a	30.06	2,795,580,000	n/a
Pluto	128	38.80	39.44	3,667,920,000	1.62%

The first thing we see from this chart is that the Bode's Law prediction is pretty darn close to the reality in most cases. Of course, we do have to include the asteroid belt as a "planet". But it's interesting to note that the asteroid belt was discovered because Bode's Law predicted something should be in that space. More disturbing is that Neptune doesn't fit into the pattern at all. That didn't bother Bode and his pals, because Neptune wasn't discovered until 1846 (not including the Sumerians, or Galileo who spotted it in 1612 but thought it was a fixed star). Pluto, however, picks up with the next "slot", though its distance from the Sun is misleading since it has a rather elliptical orbit--it actually comes closer to the Sun than Neptune for part of it!

In any case, as much as the fans of Bode's Law wanted it to be true, the results were ambiguous enough that no one was certain whether the formula revealed a numerical coincidence or if some underlying aspect of celestial mechanics had been discovered. Neptune's discovery, and the fact that Neptune--which is a big planet--didn't fit into the pattern caused Bode's Law to fall into disregard.

But now, with this new astronomical information from the ancients, it might be possible to revive Bode's Law after all--that is, if Bode's Law described the celestial mechanics of a forming solar system.

First, the table had to be redrawn, with Earth removed and Tiamat put in place of the asteroid belt. Also, we can remove Pluto, since the Nibiruans claimed it was a former moon of Saturn that Nibiru had drawn away from that world into its own orbit, after some time spent orbiting Neptune. (Pluto's orbit does intersect with Neptune's, indicating it was at least once a moon of that planet.) I also decided to dispose of Titius' "fudge factor" (k), hoping to find some simpler formula to predict the orbits of the planets of the early solar system.

My first stab, using multiples of 2 as Bode did, didn't turn out to match the reality very well.

However, when I worked with a multiplier of 1.91, the results were much more intriguing. So you can repeat this, I set up a spreadsheet with the Sumerian planets listed (with Tiamet, without Earth). I gave Mercury its known distance from the Sun as a starting value, then multiplied the distance of each planet by the one before it by 1.91 to predict a new distance, and got this:

Planet	Real Distance	Predicted Distance	Discrepancy
Mercury	36,270,000.00	36,270,000	0.0%
Venus	66,960,000.00	69,275,700	-3.5%
Mars	141,360,000.00	132,316,587	6.4%
Tiamat	257,610,000.00	252,724,681	1.9%
Jupiter	483,600,000.00	482,704,141	0.2%
Saturn	887,220,000.00	921,964,909	-3.9%
Neptune	1,785,600,000.00	1,760,952,977	1.4%

With one exception (Mars), my predicted distances are much closer to the reality than the original Bode's Law predictions. And in the original predictions, Mars was also the farthest off (not including Neptune). Besides, Mars, according to the Sumerian tablets, was knocked out of its original orbit by another near passage of Nibiru. What's more, not only is Neptune not an exception, as it was in the original table--the real planet comes quite close to the predicted distance.

Does this prove anything? No. The original version of Bode's Law didn't prove anything, either. In spite of the suggestion that it does reveal a rule of celestial mechanics, one star system's planets are not enough to be statistically significant. We'd need to apply the rule to many systems to be sure.

Still, this little exericise may be another small piece of the puzzle that is the Sumerian legacy to the modern world, as it lends credence to the possibility that the Sumerians were right, and Earth did not form in its present position, and that the presence of another, still unknown planet in this system is responsible for both the asteroid belt and Earth's modern orbit.

And, if it turns out that the Sumerian's cosmognony was valid, then the work of Bode and Titius is validated as well.