The Middle Bronze Age Civilization-Ending Destruction of the Middle Ghor

Doctoral Dissertation by Phillip J. Silvia PhD

This volume is a reformatted printing of the Ph.D. dissertation of Phillip James Silvia for Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is a scientific study of the occupation history of the Middle Ghor, the nearly circular plain that lies just north of the Dead Sea in the Great Rift Valley. This study documents the existence of a major urban center (Tall el-Hammam) from the Chalcolithic Period through Middle Bronze Age (roughly 4600 to 1650 BCE) and significant human presence distributed across multiple nearby sites that came to a sudden and violent end, leaving the area unoccupied for 600-700 years. Evidence is presented to support the author’s hypotheses that the source of destruction was a meteoritic airburst event, and that the cause of the extended occupational hiatus was depletion of the topsoil and poisoning of the remaining subsoil with Dead Sea salts by the airburst. Although it was not the author’s purpose in presenting this data to defend the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain, the evidence, analyses and conclusions presented in this volume clearly support the claim of Dr. Steven Collins that Tall el-Hammam is Sodom.