A paper on the Mechanism appears in tomorrow’s Nature. In brief what it is these days is a rather unimpressive looking lump of heavily corroded metal. I have a photo of it somewhere, but it’s a very bad blurry photo which doesn’t do justice to its lumpy unimpressiveness. Fortunately Wikipedia has this much better photo.
The reason why it’s news is that there’s been a lot of painstaking work to try and see beyond the corrosion, and its proven spectacularly successful. The mechanism has been examined using X-ray tomography, which is where X-rays are used to build up a cross-section of a subject slice by slice without physically pulling the subject apart. The results are confirming that Greek technology could be staggeringly sophisticated.
The mechanism was found in the early 1900s. It was found when some sailors sheltered from a storm off the island of Antikythera. They went sponge diving, but one of the divers returned to the ship and told the captain of the corpses he’d found on the sea bed. The other divers went to confirm his story and found the wreck of a Roman vessel which sunk in the first century BC. The corpses were bronze and marble statues, some of which can be found in the National Museum of Greece today. Along with these finds were recovered some cogs congealed by rust into lumps.
The problem is what would cogs be needed for? The device was throughly investigated by Derek de Solla Price and his conclusion was startling. The device may have looked like clockwork, but it was no clock. Instead he argued it was an analogue computer, used for calculating the position of the sun, moon and planets against the celestial sphere.
The letter in Nature for Nov 30 2006, announces the findings of the X-ray team and appears to confirm this astronomical hypothesis. The X-rays have enabled more of the mechanism to be read, an inscription on the back door appears to include astronomical periods, including the Saros cycle of 223 synodic months, a synodic month being the period from one new moon to the next. The inscription on the front door is fragmentary but with lines like “brings towards the Sun up to — and conjunction” it would take a powerful imagination to conclude it wasn’t some form of calculation device.
As a piece of interdisciplinary work it’s all really impressive. The recording of the inscriptions should be more than enough to give epigraphists to argue over, and a full publication of that will follow. There will also be a data-set online at www.antikythera-mechanism.gr, which at the time of writing is inaccessible, presumably due to the quantity of traffic its getting. The conclusions drawn from the inscriptions and imaging of the gears also appears to be eminently reasonable. There is a danger, when you know what the right astronomical answer is, that you interpret the historical data to fit the answer. So far I haven’t seen that here. Gaps in the inscription are there, and questionable readings where the glyphs may say one thing or possibly another are professionally acknowledged. The skill of the work is hard to underestimate. It’s not simply a 2000 year old jigsaw. It’s like putting together a 2000 year old jigsaw where are the pieces that haven’t been chewed by the dog of time are missing, and no picture on the box to say how the thing should look.
It does open up some more questions. One is if the Greeks were capable of producing such sophisticated items then why wasn’t there a scientific revolution earlier? It’s like Greek history now has its own Needham question. Another reasonable question is why did these devices disappear so completely from the archaeological record? In his news item François Charette argues that just as Greek astronomy was preserved by the Arabs, so too was Greek technology in the form of Astrolabes.
This is a story where potentially the discoveries are as exciting as the scientists say they are. However as Rob Rice noted:
It is neither facile nor uninstructive to remark that the
Antikythera mechanism dropped and sank–twice. The first time was around 76 B.C., when the intricate astronomical computer was lost with the rest of a treasure-ship’s cargo. The second time came after Derek de Solla Price analyzed and published its construction and nature decades after its recovery. Since his Gears from the Greeks in 1975, little attention has been paid to our most exciting relic of advanced ancient technology.
Hopefully the new evidence this team has uncovered will help this project avoid the same fate.
Links:
The project’s website
In search of lost time by Jo Marchant at Nature (free access), an excellent write up of why this is so interesting.
X-tek’s page on their work for the project.
The Wikipedia entry for the Antikythera Mechanism.
The press release.
Technorati Tags: antikythera, antikythera+mechanism, ancient+astronomy, ancient+greece
Now that is remarkable. One wonders just how many significant accomplishments by various cultures have been lost, or how many times knowledge has been forgotten.
[...] Justin Mullins at New Scientist discusses this remarkable device and what it might have been used for. Also see Alun’s fine post at his blog Archaeoastronomy discussing the relic, the findings, and the implications. [...]
[...] Archeoastronomy points to a stunning piece of research on the “the Antikythera Mechanism”, a corroded lump of metallic stuff found on a Roman wreck which sank around 76 B.C. Recovered early in the last century, it was found to contain gears - gears! - which created an enduring mystery which has been conclusively solved a century later with X-ray tomography. I’ll let Alun Salt tell you tne answer, and point you to the relevant note in Nature. [...]
I don’t know if this is typical for your blog, but I just thought I’d let you know that this entry is the top post on WordPress’s home page. I grabbed a screenshot for you in case you miss it.
This is so exciting I can hardly sleep. Some of us already knew by studying Mythology that preliterate cultures knew of lunar and orbital astronomy. This is so exciting to have this tool recreated. Love the pictures you have here Alun!
This is like, as exciting as Christmas.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/11/30/astronomy.calculator.reut/index.html
no comment
[...] Alun Salt, “The Antikythera Mechanism“, Archaeoastronomy blog, Nov. 29, 2006. [...]
I was away in Cardiff yesterday, attending a talk on the latest findings at Bryn Celli Ddu, so I missed the excitement. I saw I was at No. 1 this morning, which I think is the first time its happened. Whenever I get a large number of visitors I tend to wonder what I’ve done wrong.
There’ll be follow ups on this and the Bryn Celli Ddu talk some time in the future, but I don’t know when yet. It depends on whether I can get back down to Cardiff again in the near future.
I’m out most of today too, which means I probably won’t be able to point to some of the other good blog entries on the topic like this one.
Wow, this is a great find.
[...] This week’s issue of Nature also several off-topic, but very interesting papers: Freeth et al have recontructed the gear function of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient astronomical calculator discovered on a Greek island in 1901. The device dates back to the second century BCE, and is the earliest known geared mechanism. Its discovery turns on its head the notion that technology advances with time. The remaining fragments of the mechanism are covered in astronomical inscriptions and contain more than 30 interlocking, moving parts. The Antikythera mechanism was used to calculate the movements of the sun and moon, and possibly the planets. It could also be used to predict the dates of eclipses. Read more about the Antikythera mechanism over at Archaeoastronomy. [...]
You know, in the medieval period the Europeans had a device known as an “armillary sphere”. I had always wondered if the medieval notion of the heavens was inherited from books, or from a representation device. It looks like this technology could have been passed on from the Romans.
Probably the “Greek computer” thing about the Antikythera device got dropped because Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods crowd glommed onto it so hard. I mean, if it’s a computer, it must be an _alien_ computer! And so on.
It’s very unfortunate, because little Greek mini-steam engines and stuff like this are much more interesting than aliens.
This has been getting a lot of press. It started back in September.
http://thaed.wordpress.com/2006/09/07/the-antikythera-mechanism/
I’ve often thought that this was lost by the Greeks because it wasn’t even widely known at the time and the concept wasn’t well preserved in documents.
[...] The Antikythera Mechanism « Archaeoastronomy have always found this device fascinating, implying as it does a previously unrealized depth to Greek (and probably other culture’s) technological sophistication - it’s like the Baghdad battery (tags: Greek Antikythera Mechanism computer mystery ancient) [...]
I would like to suggest that an instrument that is, or was, used to track the positions of the Sun, Moon and planets through the zodiac, as well as the dates of eclipses, would be one that was primarily used by astrologers.
It is therefore incorrect to refer to this discovery primarily as an astronomical one.
The same would apply if one were to find an ancient sextant, which would be primarily referred to in a maritime or navigational context, rather than an astronomical one.
I feel that credit should be given to the most applicable context.
[...] Salt, “The Antikythera Mechanism,” [...]
I think the reason why devices like this aren’t seen in the archaeological record is twofold. The first is that most of them were probably melted down for reuse once they broke (or became otherwise discarded) and the other is that they simply haven’t been recognised for what they are. Contextless cogs will be assumed to date from periods known to have cogs, and corroded lumps of bronze may not be investigated as closely as they could be - after all, it was only by chance that they discovered the mechanism, after it mysteriously split apart some years after being recovered. Mike Edmunds (the senior researcher on the project) hopes that this work will prompt museum curators to look at the corroded lumps of bronze in their collections a little more closely, just in case they are gears.
this make you think about how primitive they actually were it is probly the best find ever (my own opinion but yours may be different)