The Sumerian Tablet That Describes A "Lost Star" Where Modern Telescopes Find A Black Hole

In the British Museum's basement sits a clay tablet from the library of Ashurbanipal. Catalog number K.2486. Excavated from Nineveh in 1851, it lists nine stars that vanished from the sky — bodies that should have been visible and weren't. Eight have modern explanations. The ninth, called mul-an-shub-ba — the fallen sky-star — sits at coordinates near the galactic centre. The Sumerian verb describing its disappearance translates as "poured out." Modern radio astronomy now knows that region holds thousands of stellar-mass black holes. The Sumerians described a star whose light drained out of the sky four thousand years ago.