Paul Iversen, a classicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, reports that the calendar includes month names used in Corinth and its colonies in northwest Greece. Other inscriptions hint at where the mechanism was made. Though some experts have dismissed this as beyond the Greeks’ abilities, Jones says he will publish evidence supporting the idea later this year. According to Michael Wright, a former curator at London’s Science Museum who has studied the mechanism longer than anyone, it modeled epicycles with trains of small gears riding around larger ones. The Greeks explained this motion with “epicycles”: small circles superimposed on a larger orbit. Because planets orbit the Sun, when viewed from Earth they appear to wander back and forth in the sky. Though the pointers on the front face don’t survive, Alexander Jones, a historian at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York, says an inscription reveals that they carried colored balls: fiery red for Mars, gold for the Sun.Īlso missing are the parts that drove the planetary pointers, leading to debate about exactly how they moved. The other showed the timing of lunar and solar eclipses.Ī dial on the back (model shown) is for eclipses.Įxperts have been working to decipher inscriptions hidden inside the mechanism, in particular to understand the mechanism’s missing pieces, some destroyed, some probably still at the bottom of the sea. There were also two dial systems on the back of the case, each with a pin that followed its own spiral groove, like the needle on a record player. Inscriptions explained which stars rose and set on any particular date. A rotating black and silver ball showed the phase of the Moon. Instead of hours and minutes, the hands displayed celestial time: one hand for the Sun, one for the Moon and one for each of the five planets visible to the naked eye-Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. And as the knob turned, trains of interlocking gearwheels drove at least seven hands at various speeds. There was a knob or handle on the side, for winding the mechanism forward or backward. Like a clock, the case would’ve had a large circular face with rotating hands. The Antikythera mechanism was similar in size to a mantel clock, and bits of wood found on the fragments suggest it was housed in a wooden case. That year, Mike Edmunds of Cardiff University in Wales and his team published CT scans of the fragments, revealing more details of the inner workings, as well as hidden inscriptions-and triggering a burst of scholarly research. It wasn’t until 2006 that the Antikythera mechanism captured broader attention. One investigator dubbed it “an ancient Greek computer.” But the X-ray images were difficult to interpret, so mainstream historians ignored the artifact even as it was championed by fringe writers such as Erich von Däniken, who claimed it came from an alien spaceship.
Holding it in your hands, you could track the paths of the Sun, Moon and planets with impressive accuracy. X-ray imaging in the 1970s and 1990s revealed that the device must have replicated the motions of the heavens.
Nothing as sophisticated, or even close, appears again for more than a thousand years.įor decades after divers retrieved these scraps from the Antikythera wreck from 1900 to 1901, scholars were unable to make sense of them. Nothing else like this has ever been discovered from antiquity. Crammed inside, obscured by corrosion, are traces of technology that appear utterly modern: gears with neat triangular teeth (just like the inside of a clock) and a ring divided into degrees (like the protractor you used in school). Get closer, though, and the sight is stunning. From a distance, they look like rocks with patches of mold.
A fter 2,000 years under the sea, three flat, misshapen pieces of bronze at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens are all shades of green, from emerald to forest.
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