Last March I heard about a solar flare 660 BC, so I looked around for it. It’s too early for the Greeks and Maya, the Chinese didn’t notice (I checked Spring and Autumn), the Bible is silent, and Egypt was a mess. But Assyria (including lower Iraq, in those days) was going strong, and had inherited the Babylonian interest in astrology. So I hoped to find an aurora there. I, personally, didn't. But others have - in the tupsharrû / tupshar enûma anu enlil books.
On 12 September, Hisashi Hayakawa, Yasuyuki Mitsuma, Yusuke Ebihara, and Fusa Miyake posted “The Earliest Candidates of Auroral Observations in Assyrian Astrological Reports: Insights on Solar Activity around 660 BCE” to the arxiv... where I missed it. Thanks to ScienceDaily, I find this has now been accepted for publication.
Hayakawa’s crew calculate that magnetic north was closer to Assyria, and they agree that an aurora should have been visible down there. They have located three omen records of a “red sky” which might refer to such an event – those records are rare compared to, say, planetary conjunctions.
The bad news is that the three records went undated, except for the names of scribes whose careers we can track elsewhere. Assyria did have a consistent chronology; it’s just that the omen-tablets didn’t refer to it.
But we have a lot of good news: We now have the Semitic jargon for such events. We know 660 BC wasn’t a supernova, as Brakenridge elsewhere had suspected of 814 BC. And we can suspect that Lower Egypt, Syria, and northwest China all saw 660 BC as well.
It is a matter of time before other text is found or identified concerning this event. With direct chronological content.
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