Hi All

The Sumerians and the Egyptians might have observed planetary objects, that were indeed regular and predictable - they left enough inscriptions. However they never, never left any indication of anything other than the planets and stars we know and love. There is not a scintillion of evidence for any extra planet. Forget all the crap preached by Sitchin and his sycophantic imitators - the texts mention NOTHING else with the regularity implied. Both recorded meteors and novae, plus any other heavenly changes, but nothing perceived as "regular" as the planets' motions.

Also the ancients associated regular celestial events with earthly, seasonal events and assumed causality - but just because we see certain things at certain times [and some things define the times!] they don't necessarily cause each other. Just like observing your clock's regularities and the stuffing of your letterbox doesn't mean that the mailman is the cause of clock ticks, nor does the household clock shrine tell the mail god when to deliver. Aztecs ripped out hearts of their enemies to make the Sun shine, but does anyone think there's a connection???

Forget all that crap. For realistic, but speculative, connections between what the ancients saw and "catastrophism" read Clube and Napier's "The Cosmic Serpent" and "The Cosmic Winter" - a reasonable theory of what "wandering stars" really meant is that some were large comets that broke up visibly to the naked eye. But gravity effects are hardly likely.

Adam