Scientists may have the answer to the ancient mystery of the Antikythera mechanism, after more than a century

National Post Staff 3/12/2021


For more than 100 years, scientists have deliberated the mystery behind the ancient Antikythera mechanism, a 2,000 year old Greek astronomical calculator with the ability to exhibit the movement of the universe, including five known planets and predict the phases of the moon and the solar and lunar eclipses.

© Provided by National Post A digital model of how the calculator may have looked and worked in the first century B.C.

Currently only a third of the device — often defined as the world’s first analogue computer — remains in a collection of 82 battered fragments, including 30 corroded bronze gearwheels, further baffling scholars.


Researchers also don’t know why the Antikythera mechanism was built. It could have been a toy, or a teaching tool, they posited.

“Although metal is precious, and so would have been recycled, it is odd that nothing remotely similar has been found or dug up,” Wojcik said. “If they had the tech to make the Antikythera mechanism, why did they not extend this tech to devising other machines, such as clocks?”

However researchers at the University College of London believe they may have finally cracked the code and hope to prove it by building a replica using modern machinery to test their theory. “We believe that our reconstruction fits all the evidence that scientists have gleaned from the extant remains to date,” Adam Wojcik, a materials scientist at UCL, told The Guardian .

If their theory is correct, then they hope to rebuild the mechanism using a technique from antiquity, they wrote in a paper published by science journal Nature .

The calculator first came to light in 1901 after it was recovered by sponge divers looking for treasures within an archaic ship sunken off the coast of Antikythera, a Greek island. Scholars believe the ship sank during a storm in the first century BC while passing between Crete and the Peloponnese while en route to Rome from Asia Minor.

The device is heavily corroded, but scholars examining it noticed several inscriptions on the mechanism, which provide a kind of user’s manual to operating the calculator. It also included more than 30 bronze gearwheels connected to dials and pointers.

The team believe that the device may have displayed the movement of the sun, moon and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn on concentric rings. However, as the calculator assumes that the sun and planets revolve around the Earth, the planets’ paths are much more difficult to recreate than if the Sun was at the centre.

They also propose adding a hypothetical feature, called the ‘Dragon Hand’ that indicates when eclipses would happen, to replace a similar hand once used by the clock. “The way that the Saros Dial on the Back Plate predicts eclipses essentially involves the lunar nodes , but they are not described in the extant inscriptions,” the paper reads. Lunar nodes are where the Moon’s orbit intersects that of the Earth.

The UCL team wrote that it drew on the works of previous scholars and engineers to reconstruct the mechanism, particularly that of Michael Wright.

Wright, a former mechanical engineer at the Science Museum of London, was instrumental in figuring out how most of the mechanism work, enough to build a working replica. Drawing on his work, researchers used inscriptions on the mechanism and a mathematical method described by Parmenides, an ancient Greek philosopher, to design gear arrangements to move planets and other bodies correctly.

Their solution allows nearly all of the mechanism’s gearwheels to fit within a space only 25 mm deep.

Though hopeful, it isn’t clear whether the new model could accurate replicate the workings of the calculator. For one, the concentric rings that constitute the calculator’s display would have to rotate on a set of nested, hollow axles, and researchers aren’t sure how ancient Greeks would have made the mechanism possible without a modern-day lathe (a machining tool used to shape or rotate metal and wood).

“The concentric tubes at the core of the planetarium are where my faith in Greek tech falters, and where the model might also falter,” said Wojcik. “Lathes would be the way today, but we can’t assume they had those for metal.”

Experts recreate a mechanical Cosmos for the world's first computer

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

Research News

 

Researchers at UCL have solved a major piece of the puzzle that makes up the ancient Greek astronomical calculator known as the Antikythera Mechanism, a hand-powered mechanical device that was used to predict astronomical events.

Known to many as the world's first analogue computer, the Antikythera Mechanism is the most complex piece of engineering to have survived from the ancient world. The 2,000-year-old device was used to predict the positions of the Sun, Moon and the planets as well as lunar and solar eclipses.

Published in Scientific Reports, the paper from the multidisciplinary UCL Antikythera Research Team reveals a new display of the ancient Greek order of the Universe (Cosmos), within a complex gearing system at the front of the Mechanism.

Lead author Professor Tony Freeth (UCL Mechanical Engineering) explained: "Ours is the first model that conforms to all the physical evidence and matches the descriptions in the scientific inscriptions engraved on the Mechanism itself.

"The Sun, Moon and planets are displayed in an impressive tour de force of ancient Greek brilliance."

The Antikythera Mechanism has generated both fascination and intense controversy since its discovery in a Roman-era shipwreck in 1901 by Greek sponge divers near the small Mediterranean island of Antikythera.

The astronomical calculator is a bronze device that consists of a complex combination of 30 surviving bronze gears used to predict astronomical events, including eclipses, phases of the moon, positions of the planets and even dates of the Olympics.

Whilst great progress has been made over the last century to understand how it worked, studies in 2005 using 3D X-rays and surface imaging enabled researchers to show how the Mechanism predicted eclipses and calculated the variable motion of the Moon.

However, until now, a full understanding of the gearing system at the front of the device has eluded the best efforts of researchers. Only about a third of the Mechanism has survived, and is split into 82 fragments - creating a daunting challenge for the UCL team.

The biggest surviving fragment, known as Fragment A, displays features of bearings, pillars and a block. Another, known as Fragment D, features an unexplained disk, 63-tooth gear and plate.

Previous research had used X-ray data from 2005 to reveal thousands of text characters hidden inside the fragments, unread for nearly 2,000 years. Inscriptions on the back cover include a description of the cosmos display, with the planets moving on rings and indicated by marker beads. It was this display that the team worked to reconstruct.

Two critical numbers in the X-rays of the front cover, of 462 years and 442 years, accurately represent cycles of Venus and Saturn respectively. When observed from Earth, the planets' cycles sometimes reverse their motions against the stars. Experts must track these variable cycles over long time-periods in order to predict their positions.

"The classic astronomy of the first millennium BC originated in Babylon, but nothing in this astronomy suggested how the ancient Greeks found the highly accurate 462-year cycle for Venus and 442-year cycle for Saturn," explained PhD candidate and UCL Antikythera Research Team member Aris Dacanalis.

Using an ancient Greek mathematical method described by the philosopher Parmenides, the UCL team not only explained how the cycles for Venus and Saturn were derived but also managed to recover the cycles of all the other planets, where the evidence was missing.

PhD candidate and team member David Higgon explained: "After considerable struggle, we managed to match the evidence in Fragments A and D to a mechanism for Venus, which exactly models its 462-year planetary period relation, with the 63-tooth gear playing a crucial role."

Professor Freeth added: "The team then created innovative mechanisms for all of the planets that would calculate the new advanced astronomical cycles and minimize the number of gears in the whole system, so that they would fit into the tight spaces available."

"This is a key theoretical advance on how the Cosmos was constructed in the Mechanism," added co-author, Dr Adam Wojcik (UCL Mechanical Engineering). "Now we must prove its feasibility by making it with ancient techniques. A particular challenge will be the system of nested tubes that carried the astronomical outputs."

###

The discovery brings the research team a step closer to understanding the full capabilities of the Antikythera Mechanism and how accurately it was able to predict astronomical events. The device is kept at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

The UCL Antikythera Research Team is supported by the A.G. Leventis Foundation, Charles Frodsham & Co. and the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers.

The team is led by Dr Adam Wojcik and made up of Professor Tony Freeth, Professor Lindsay MacDonald (UCL CEGE), Dr Myrto Georgakopoulou (UCL Qatar) and PhD candidates David Higgon and Aris Dacanalis (both UCL Mechanical Engineering).

Gravitational Wave Experts Discover 'Remarkable' Ancient Computer's Secrets
Story by Jess Thomson •

Image of the Antikythera Mechanism (main) and gravitational waves (inset). The same statistical analysis used to study gravitational waves was used to predict the number of holes on a broken ring of the mechanism.

© ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS / University of Glasgow

Special techniques used to study ripples in the universe may have helped researchers solve an ancient mystery.

Statistical modeling methods that were developed to study gravitational waves have been used to predict the structure of a broken section of a millennia-old artifact, according to a new paper in The Horological Journal.

These techniques allowed researchers to tell how many holes there were in one of the broken rings of the Antikythera mechanism, the ancient computer featured in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek analog device dating back to between 100 and 200 BC that is considered the world's first known computer. Discovered in 1901 in a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera, the device is thought to have been used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendrical and astrological purposes.

The mechanism is composed of a complex system of bronze gears and dials housed in a wooden case. It has 30 gears, which is an incredibly sophisticated design for its time.

Its complexity suggests that the ancient Greeks had developed advanced knowledge of gear-based technology, far more advanced than previously thought for that era.

Related video: Gravitational Waves Create A 'Cosmic Symphony' That Scientists Are Tuning Into (Space)   Duration 3:41   View on Watch

Modern imaging techniques, such as X-ray computed tomography, have been used to study the internal structure and functions of the mechanism. It has slowly become apparent that it was used to calculate the locations of the planets, predict eclipses, and track the months and years.

Thanks to X-ray imagery in 2020, one of the device's rings was discovered to have regularly spaced holes. Because the ring was broken, it wasn't clear how many rings it had originally, but researchers estimated between 347 and 367.

According to the new paper, the ring is likely to have had 354 holes, corresponding to the moon's cycle. According to their calculations, the ring having 354 holes is hundreds of times more likely than having 360 holes.

"We present a new analysis of the positions of holes beneath the calendar ring of the Antikythera Mechanism," the researchers wrote in the paper. "We significantly refine their estimate for the number of holes that were present in the full ring. Our 68 percent-credible estimate for this number, taking account of all the data, is 355.24 [plus or minus about 1.4].

"If holes adjacent to fractures are removed from the analysis, our estimate becomes 354.08. A ring of 360 holes is strongly disfavoured, and one of 365 holes is not plausible, given our model assumptions."

This mystery was solved using similar statistical modeling techniques as those used to study gravitational waves, which are ripples in the fabric of spacetime created by the movement of massive objects traveling outward from the source.

"Towards the end of last year, a colleague pointed to me to data acquired by YouTuber Chris Budiselic, who was looking to make a replica of the calendar ring and was investigating ways to determine just how many holes it contained," paper co-author Graham Woan, a professor at the University of Glasgow School of Physics & Astronomy, said in a statement.

"It struck me as an interesting problem, and one that I thought I might be able to solve in a different way during the Christmas holidays, so I set about using some statistical techniques to answer the question."

After using this technique, the scientists discovered the number of holes was likely 354 or 355.

"Previous studies had suggested that the calendar ring was likely to have tracked the lunar calendar, but the dual techniques we've applied in this piece of work greatly increase the likelihood that this was the case," co-author Joseph Bayley, also a researcher at the University of Glasgow, said in the statement.

"It's given me a new appreciation for the Antikythera mechanism and the work and care that Greek craftspeople put into making it – the precision of the holes' positioning would have required highly accurate measurement techniques and an incredibly steady hand to punch them."

While we will never truly know how many holes the ring actually had, the analysis gives pretty strong evidence for there having been 354.

"It's a neat symmetry that we've adapted techniques we use to study the universe today to understand more about a mechanism that helped people keep track of the heavens nearly two millennia ago," Woan said.

"We hope that our findings about the Antikythera mechanism, although less supernaturally spectacular than those made by Indiana Jones, will help deepen our understanding of how this remarkable device was made and used by the Greeks."

The Promethean Antikythera Computer of Greek Civilization

BY EVAGGELOS VALLIANATOS 

APRIL 25, 2023
 APRIL 25, 2023

Painting of the Antikythera Mechanism by the Greek mathematician Dionysios Kriaris. One sees the Cosmos, the front of the computer, and the back with the black spirals of the 19-year Metonic calendar and the 18-year predictive Saros dial. Courtesy Kriaris

Overview

Suppose you could travel back in time to the third century BCE, and visit Alexandria, the capital city of the Greek kingdom of Egypt. Arguably it was the most enlightened, wealthy, and powerful of all the Greek states that flourished after the death of Alexander the Great.

Alexandria was famous for: its Mouseion, university- institute of advanced studies, and the Great Library which was the repository of all the collected wisdom and knowledge of the Greek and Mediterranean world. The Great Library was rather as if you had merged Cambridge, with Harvard, MIT, and the Library of Congress. Among its collections one could find the works of epic poets like Homer and Hesiod, tragic poets like Aeschylos, Sophocles, and Euripides, historians like Herodotos and Thucydides, as well as philosophers like Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and scientists like Demokritos, Hippokrates, Alkmaion of Croton, Aristarchos of Samos, Eratosthenes, Euclid, Archimedes, Hipparchos, Geminos, Ptolemaios and Galen.

However, if you were to travel forward in time to visit Alexandria 800 years later, in the fifth century of our era, you would find no trace of the Great Library of Alexandria, nor of its sister Mouseion-university. Both had been destroyed by Christian religious zealots. In 415 of our era, a mob of Christian monks told the world that Christianity had no need of the Greeks, nor of their philosophy, science, or literature. To drive home their point, they publicly murdered and tore limb from limb Hypatia, the mathematician and philosopher who headed a leading school of philosophy in Alexandria.

In the 6th century, Justinian, the Christian Emperor of the Eastern Roman empire (Medieval Greece), closed and suppressed the Platonic Academy in Athens, which had existed for more than 900 years. These attacks upon the culture of ancient Greece heralded an enveloping wave of darkness and ignorance for both East and West. This anti-intellectual, Christian fanaticism plunged Europe into the Dark Ages, for almost a thousand years.

These officially sanctioned attacks on Greek philosophy and science gave Christian monks a license to destroy and obliterate treasures of science, including some of the works of Archimedes, the mathematical and engineering genius of the 3rd century BCE. The monks literally scraped the ink from the parchment pages of Archimedes’ scientific texts and then re-filled the erased pages with the texts of religious hymns.

It happened.
Modern dramas with ancient Greek science

In 1998, an American paid $ 2 million for a 769-year-old Christian prayer book known as a palimpsest (a manuscript from which the original text had been scraped-off and which had then been used again). Christian prayer-texts were superimposed over the erased scripts of three works of Archimedes. The slim hope of revealing the lost thoughts of Archimedes was the sole reason why the philanthropist was willing to pay a vast sum of money for the ‘ghost’ of a vanished book.

In 2005, seven years after the Archimedes palimpsest surfaced in New York, an even greater drama was unfolding in the basement of the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens. A team of Greek, British and American scientists and engineers had been struggling to “decode” the secrets of an ancient Greek astronomical device: the “Antikythera Mechanism.” This ancient astronomical computer had been raised from the waters of the tiny Aegean island of Antikythera by sponge divers in 1900. However, in 1900, the technology which could probe the innermost workings of this eroded and encrusted lump of metal did not exist.

Meanwhile, Greek, and foreign scientists kept photographing and handling the fragile surviving fragments of the ancient device. This precipitated the break-up of the mechanism to some 82 fragments.

Front and back sides of the 7 largest and most important fragments of the Antikythera computer. Fragment A is the governing part of the device, enclosing 27 of the surviving 30 gears. Some of those gears are visible on the back side of Fragment A. The back side of Fragment B shows the spirals of the 235-month 19-year Metonic calendar. Courtesy Tom Malzbender and Hewlett Packard.

The early twentieth-century investigators of the Antikythera device also played a guessing game, calling it different names and proposing wrong explanations of its origins and functions. In general, they were reluctant to admit it was part of Hellenic culture. Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist and historian of science and professor at Yale, rejected those doubts and documented in his 1974 seminal report, Gears from the Greeks, that the Antikythera computer was “a singular artifact, the oldest existing relic of scientific technology.” It took another 30 years or so of technological advances before science was able to confirm and advance Price’s findings.

Using microfocus X-ray computed tomography (X-ray CT) and polynomial texture mapping (PTM), belonging to British and American companies, scientists were shocked to discover an interior mechanism of meshed toothed gears, which pointed to a sophisticated and complex mathematical instrument. From the nearly invisible inscriptions engraved on the front and back plates of the bronze device, the experts estimated that the computer was probably manufactured in the 2nd century BCE. In other words, it was over 2,200 years old.

The gears in the interior of the bronze Antikythera astronomical computer. Most of these surviving gears are inside Fragment A. Painting by the Greek artist Evi Sarantea. Courtesy Sarantea.

How can the sale of a Medieval Christian prayer book, (a palimpsest written over the works of Archimedes), possibly be linked to the x-ray investigation of the Antikythera device? In fact, they are parallel threads of the same narrative, which illuminate the fate of Greek science and civilization.

What happened to the advanced work of scientists like Archimedes during the Dark Ages?

Did the ancient Greeks really develop a sophisticated science and technology more than 2,000 years ago? Moreover, if they did achieve such levels of complexity, is the Antikythera Mechanism the product of those same advanced technologies?

Greek computer of genius

My research for writing my book on the Antikythera Mechanism, reveals that the ancient Greeks did indeed develop an advanced science and advanced metal fabrication technologies, which enabled them to build the Antikythera machine. This is extremely important because, to date some classical scholars and scientists have labored under the illusion that modern science is largely the product of post 15th century European thought. They forget that without the mathematical physics of Archimedes Galileo might have been a priest of barber but not a famous physicist. Moreover, they believe that the Greeks never developed technology, much less the advanced technologies needed to construct a mechanical computer and universe, such as the Antikythera Mechanism. In fact, some of the enemies of Hellenic civilization say the Antikythera Mechanism is a time machine, the handiwork of extraterrestrial astronauts.

This propaganda against the Greeks fits nicely with the hubris of scientists dismissing Greek achievements. They say, modern science has taken us to the moon. How can the ancient Greeks possibly be compared to us, they ask. The Greeks fought their wars with bows and arrows, did they not? We have ICBMs, satellite guided predator drones and nuclear weapons. Why should we care if the Greeks ever developed advanced technology?
Why the Greeks?

“We are all Greeks.” These were the heartfelt words of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1821: “Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their roots in Greece.”^[1] Shelley was one of many Philhellenes who fought alongside the Greeks during the War of Independence, in the heroic struggle to expel the Turkish occupiers of their homeland.

Jacob Burckhardt, the famous Swiss cultural historian, was grateful to the Greeks for laying the foundations of Western culture, enabling men to become civilized. He said in 1872 that the Europeans see the world through the eyes of the Greeks and to abandon them would be to accept their own decline.^[2]

In 1948, the English poet W. H. Auden suggested that the people of the West owe their very existence to the Greeks. He said the Greeks taught us to think about thinking, that is, to ask questions. Without the Greeks, he said, “we would never have become fully conscious, which is to say that we would never have become, for better or worse, fully human.”^[3]

In the late 1950s, E. J. Dijksterhuis, Dutch historian of mathematics and natural sciences, said that any inquiry on the origins of present-day knowledge inevitably leads us back to Hellas, especially in mathematics and natural sciences.^[4]

And in 1999, the English scholar and historian, Charles Freeman, argued that the Greeks “provided the chromosomes of Western civilization.”^[5]

These scholars are right. The Greeks are us. Greek science made the Antikythera astronomical computer. The Greeks thought of science and technology existed mainly for the good of society as well as for understanding nature.

Computer of heavens and Earth

The Antikythera Mechanism was not merely a bauble for the elite to educate themselves about the heavens. It was the workhorse of an evolving technology which provided knowledge about the heavens, connecting the Greeks to Nature, their culture. and the gods.

The Antikythera computer illuminates the relevance of Greek thought and engineering to our own times. Our computer-based society is undoubtedly built on the marvels of high technology. However, if technology is not used for the ‘public good’ it can undermine society rather than being a benefit to it, as we see in the current misplaced excitement about Artificial Intelligence.

Galen, the Greek medical genius of the 2nd century of our era and the greatest physician after Hippocrates, put it bluntly. If wealth is put before virtue, he said, it spoils and corrupts science.^[6] In marked contrast, the Antikythera device came into being to serve the public good. It brought the heavens nearer to Earth and into human understanding. It served as an accurate calendar of human events and a calendar of the celestial universe, a moving map of the constellations and a mirror of nature and the heavens.

We admire the ancient Greeks for their invention of Democracy. We celebrate their unsurpassed achievements in providing us with the foundations of: literature, epic poetry, theater, architecture, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and the Olympic Games.

Greek foundations of modern science

It is the fact that the Greeks, laid the foundations of modern science, the ultimate touchstone of knowledge and power, that makes them so important to us. That is why the discovery of a vandalized book of Archimedes was big news and the decoding of a 2200-year-old Greek computer has been of extraordinary importance.

The Antikythera discovery was undoubtedly the key to unlocking a better understanding of ancient Greek science. This ancient computer gives us profound new insights into the science and philosophy of ancient Greece that has reshaped our conception of the origins of Western science. Moreover, on a purely human level, the story of the discovery of the computer, the researchers and scholars who unraveled its secrets is a compelling drama in its own right. Why did Modern Greek scientists wait a century and the initiative of foreign scientists before they embarked on the decoding of this ancient computer? Could it be that the state of Greece could not afford the research? Indebted Greece has been looted by foreigners, so it could not even think of the importance of the Antikythera computer. But the few Greek scientists that grasped the significance of the ancient device value it much more than their British and American colleagues.

Laptop predictive computer

An additional view of the interlocking toothed gears of the Antikythera computer. Modified by Alexander Nicaise of the Skeptical Inquirer. Courtesy Nicaise.

The complicated set of interlocking cogs and wheels of the Antikythera Mechanism were governed by a differential gear. Ιn itself this was a technological marvel of enormous importance. It could accurately predict the phases of the Moon. Throughout the twentieth century and for almost two decades of the twenty-first century, archaeologists, scientists, and historians of science struggled to unlock the true nature of this ancient computer. Finally after the new discoveries of Derek de Solla Price in 1974 and again those discoveries of 2005, the picture is clear.

The Antikythera device played the role of a mechanical universe. In fact, it was a predictive mechanical universe in itself, carrying out the predictive legacy of the Titan god Prometheus (forethought). It predicted eclipses of the Sun and the Moon. It computed the motions and positions of the planets. It provided an accurate calendar for farmers, who were concerned over when to sow and harvests. It enabled priests to make sacrifices to the gods at the correct season, that is, when the gods expected the offerings.

The Antikythera computer also tracked the Panhellenic religious and athletic festivals like the Olympics. It was powered by a simple manual crank. Yet, for all its simplicity, this portable (laptop) astronomical device was a product of an advanced science and technology. Its triumph was to unite the heavens and the Earth, to illuminate the workings of the Cosmos for human inspection and to provide practical knowledge that enriched the lives of its users.

An early reproduction of the Antikythera Mechanism by Dionysios Kriaris. The front or Cosmos does not include the planets, but it shows a golden sphere of the Sun at the center and a smaller sphere depicting a phase of the Moon. This Cosmos is surrounded by two spherical zones, the outside representing the 365-day year calendar. The inside circle is the Zodiac of 12 constellations. Behind the Cosmos, we see the upper spiral of the 19-year Metonic calendar. The lower spiral is the 18-year predictive Saros dial. Courtesy Kriaris.

This sophisticated predictive machine embodied the scientific method and philosophy of Aristotle (fourth century BCE), the mathematics of Archimedes (third century BCE), the engineering of Ktesibios and Archimedes (third century BCE), and the mathematical astronomy of Hipparchos (second century BCE). It was Hellenic civilization in miniature.

Notes

1. The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: The Modern Library, 1994) 501. ↑

2. Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, tr. Sheila Stern, ed. Oswyn Murray (New York: St. Martin Press, 1998) 12. ↑

3. W.H. Auden, Forewords and Afterwords, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1973) 32. ↑

4. E. J. Dijksterhuis, “The Origins of Classical Mechanics from Aristotle to Newton” in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) 164. ↑

5. Charles Freeman, The Greek Achievement (New York: Penguin Books, 2000) 434. ↑

6. Galen, The Best Doctor is also a Philosopher 57-61, in Selected Works, tr. P. N. Singer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). ↑

Evaggelos Vallianatos is a historian and environmental strategist, who worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency for 25 years. He is the author of seven books, including the latest book, The Antikythera Mechanism.

 

Antikythera mechanism: Greek computer that predicted eclipses 2,000 years ago

Copyright Wikicommons

By Cristian Caraballo

Published on 20/07/2026 - EURONEWS

A shipwreck off the Greek island Antikythera revealed in 1901 a bronze mechanism over 2,000 years old that tracked lunar and solar cycles and eclipses, now seen as the first analogue computer.

In 1901, a group of sponge divers came across, off the Greek island of Antikythera, the remains of a Roman shipwreck. Amid amphorae and statues they found a corroded block of bronze and wood which, for years, no one quite knew how to interpret. In time it would become one of the most closely studied objects in archaeology: a geared mechanism dated to between 150 and 100 BCE, designed to calculate astronomical positions and predict eclipses.

A shipwreck hiding more than it seemed

The artefact is now kept in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, and its dating places its manufacture in the late 2nd or early 1st century BCE, coinciding with the sinking of the ship that was carrying it.

One of the most widely cited hypotheses, set out in the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, points to an origin linked to the Corinthian colonies, possibly Syracuse, and therefore to the school of Archimedes, although its exact authorship remains unconfirmed.

The device incorporated more than 30 hand-operated bronze gears that modelled the cycles of the Moon, the Sun and the known planets, and used an epicyclic gearing system, similar to a modern differential, to compensate for orbital irregularities.

On the front, a small sphere, half white and half black, rotated to show the exact lunar phase. On the back, at least four dials represented the Metonic cycle, the Saros cycle, the calendar of panhellenic sporting games and the exeligmos, used to refine eclipse predictions.

Decades of X‑rays to crack a mystery...

Deciphering those pieces, fragmented and corroded by the sea, took decades. In 1959, physicist Derek de Solla Price began studying the 82 recovered fragments; later, together with Greek nuclear physicist Charalampos Karakalos, he captured the first X‑ray and gamma‑ray images of the mechanism’s interior. This revealed 27 gear wheels, some with as many as 127 and 235 teeth, a level of precision that astonished the scientific community and in 2017 led Google to dedicate a doodle to it as the first mechanical computer in history.

Image of the graphic SkoreKeep

...that actually worked?

Not everything is certain. Several subsequent studies by Tony Freeth and Alexander Jones, which simulated the mechanism, found that its indicator for the position of Mars could be off by as much as 38 degrees, a margin of error which the researchers attribute not to manufacturing defects but to the limits of Greek astronomy itself at the time.

A more recent study goes further and suggests that even the smallest manufacturing error could have caused the mechanism to jam or slip, reopening the question of whether the machine ever became fully functional or whether, in practice, it was more cumbersome than useful.

Interest in the mechanism has not faded. Replicas on various scales have been built around the world for educational purposes, such as Mexico’s Monumental Antikythera Mechanism project, designed to train a new generation of physicists and engineers.

2007 model I. Mogi

Its driving force, researcher Raúl Pérez Enríquez, sums up the enduring fascination with the artefact like this: "It is the universe of the ancient world seen from a new perspective, with the Earth at the centre and the planets revolving around it, just as the Greeks imagined it more than two millennia ago."

Researchers Make Breakthrough in Study of Mysterious 2000-Year-Old Computer Found in Shipwreck

Victor Tangermann
Tue, 2 July 2024 

Researchers say they've used cutting-edge gravitational wave research to shed new light on a nearly 2,000-year-old mystery.

In 1901, researchers discovered what's now known as the Antikythera mechanism in a sunken shipwreck, an ancient artifact that dates back to the second century BC, making it the world's "oldest computer."

There's a chance you may have spotted a replica, directly inspired by it and featured in the blockbuster "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" last year.

Well over a century after its discovery, researchers at the University of Glasgow say they've used statistical modeling techniques, originally designed to analyze gravitational waves — ripples in spacetime caused by major celestial events such as two black holes merging — to suggest that the Antikythera mechanism was likely used to track the Greek lunar year.

In short, it's a fascinating collision between modern-day science and the mysteries of an ancient artifact.

In a 2021 paper, researchers found that previously discovered and regularly spaced holes in a "calendar ring" were marked to describe the "motions of the sun, Moon, and all five planets known in antiquity and how they were displayed at the front as an ancient Greek cosmos."

Now, in a new study published in the Oficial Journal of the British Horological Institute, University of Glasgow gravitational wave researcher Graham Woan and research associate Joseph Bayley suggest that the ring was likely perforated with 354 holes, which happens to be the number of days in a lunar year.

The researchers ruled out the possibility of it measuring a solar year.

"A ring of 360 holes is strongly disfavoured, and one of 365 holes is not plausible, given our model assumptions," their paper reads.

The team used statistical models derived from gravitational wave research, including data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a large-scale physics experiment designed to measure ripples in spacetime millions of light-years from Earth.

The technique, called Bayesian analysis, uses "probability to quantify uncertainty based on incomplete data, to calculate the likely number of holes in the mechanism using the positions of the surviving holes and the placement of the ring’s surviving six fragments," according to a press release about the research.

Surprisingly, the inspiration for the paper came from a YouTuber who has been attempting to physically recreate the ancient mechanism.

"Towards the end of last year, a colleague pointed to me to data acquired by YouTuber Chris Budiselic, who was looking to make a replica of the calendar ring and was investigating ways to determine just how many holes it contained," said Woan in a statement.

"It’s a neat symmetry that we’ve adapted techniques we use to study the universe today to understand more about a mechanism that helped people keep track of the heavens nearly two millennia ago," he added.

It may not amount to the kind of discovery fit for a Hollywood action blockbuster script — but it's an intriguing new ripple in a mystery that has puzzled scientists for over a century nonetheless.

"We hope that our findings about the Antikythera mechanism, although less supernaturally spectacular than those made by Indiana Jones, will help deepen our understanding of how this remarkable device was made and used by the Greeks," Woan said.

More on ancient Greece: The Riddle of the Antikythera Mechanism Deepen

The First Computer- Second Century B.C.

The New York Times is reporting this amazing discovery, which pre-dates the first modern computers of the Ninteenth Century by thousands of years.

A century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C.

The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the world’s first computer, has now been examined with the latest in high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography. A team of British, Greek and American researchers was able to decipher many inscriptions and reconstruct the gear functions, revealing, they said, “an unexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period.”

Historians of technology think the instrument is technically more complex than any known device for at least a millennium afterward.

The mechanism, presumably used in preparing calendars for seasons of planting and harvesting and fixing religious festivals, had at least 30, possibly 37, hand-cut bronze gear-wheels, the researchers reported. An ingenious pin-and-slot device connecting two gear-wheels induced variations in the representation of lunar motions according to the Hipparchos model of the Moon’s elliptical orbit around Earth.

The Ancient Greeks also had steam power that they used to make toys with and other technological advancements so here is the question historians ponder;
Why No Industrial Revolution in Ancient Greece?

Ancient civilizations were quiet advanced as antiquarians have known for hundred of years, hence the Atlantis Myth as a meme of this. And no we did not need aliens to help us with out technological development.

Rather ancient civilizations may have had a religious reason for not advancing technology. Being pagan civilizations they would have a different world view , that of magick ,than the the later Christian civilizations that would bring forth modern capitalism, science and the industrial revolution.

Despite their hierarchical social structures, ancient civilizations were based on use value rather than exchange value. The latter came into existence with the transition from the middle ages to the Rennisance.Modern capitalism and the industrial revolution in technology is the result of the change from use to exchange value.

It is also a change in world view, from one that sees science as a way to know god, gnosis, to one that has 'faith'. Thus by the end of the Rennisance a materialist science devoid of religious morality was begining to come into existence as the Rennisance humanitarians rediscovered gnosis and Hellenistic philosophy that truimphed in the Enlightenment.The decline of the Catholic church gave rise to civil society and a greater openess to ideas including science and technology.

The development of Protestantism allowed for a more flexible Christianity able to adapt to the technology of the industrial revolution and the advent of captialism. A Christianity of towns folk and merchants rather than of priests and peasants which had been the power of the Holy Roman Empire and its Church State. The creation of a non-Catholic Church in England, gave rise to protestantism and puritanism which embraced technology as it transformed its agriculutral economy into a capitalist one.

The conflict between science and Christianity that is still with us today is an ancient conflict between Hellenistic paganism, gnosis, and catholic faith.

Even relatively more recent civilizations have been amazing scientists with their technology such as the recent discovery of nano-tech used in the creation of the Damascus steel.

See:

Science

Technology

Ancient civilizations

Computers

Astronomy

Pagan

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Light and Life from the Sun God Helios

SCIENTIFIC PAGANISM

Evaggelos Vallianatos

 June 24, 2026

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Silver tetradrachm (4 drachmas) of the island of Rhodes depicting Sun god Helios, 205-190 BCE. Courtesy Ebedokle Collection, Numismatic Museum, Athens.

Prologue

A Greek friend from Canada, Dr. Nikos Chrystodoulou, sent me an article about an American company, Cambrian Nuclear, working with Athlos Energy, a Greek nuclear company founded in 2024, and the Greek government, potentially planning to build a nuclear power factory in Greece. But because Greece is not free of earthquakes, most likely these companies are recommending to Greek government officials a floating nuclear power plant on the waters of the Aegen Sea. Dr. Chrystodoulou, a nuclear power engineer with 22 years of working experience for the Chalk River Nuclear Labs and 6 years for Canada’s Nuclear Safety Commission, said to me in an email that the announcement about nuclear power plants in Greece must have been some kind of a joke. However, before I address the irresponsible and dangerous nuclear electricity proposal, I will travel back in time to see how the ancient Greeks treated the Sun, source for life-giving, inexhaustible and harmless energy.

Sun God Helios

For thousands of years, the Greeks expressed their ευσέβεια / eusebeia / respect / veneration for several gods. Homer and Hesiod, great epic poets of the late 13^th century BCE, defined the gods. They were divine anthropomorphic beings, icons of the enormous powers of nature and the Cosmos. They were human-like polymaths, which sometimes specialized in a major interest or field of knowledge or what Greeks called πολιτισμός / civilization.

 

For example, the chief god and father of the Olympian gods, Zeus, mirrored immense power and everlasting justice. He protected the family, foreigners visiting Greece, Panhellenic games like the Olympics, and civilization. His daughter, Athena, was the goddess of intelligence, war and freedom. She protected Athens. Hephaistos was the personification of metallurgy, engineering and advanced technology. Demetra, sister of Zeus, was the Earth herself, Gaia / Ge. She inspired and helped Greeks to cultivate wheat and other bread-making crops. She was family farming and prosperous countryside. The Greeks credited her for their agriculture and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Dionysos, son of Zeus, was, like Demetra, a pillar of rural life and Hellenic civilization. He was wine, theater, tragedy and freedom. The theater of Dionysos was for centuries a school of democracy and freedom. Other gods included Apollo, god of light, prophesy and music; Aphrodite, goddess of love; Artemis, goddess of wildlife and the natural world; Hermes, god-messenger and god of music, and Ares, god of war.

In addition to these Olympian gods, there were demi-gods like Herakles and countless lesser divinities all over the land and waters. The Greeks also worshipped the natural world and the Cosmos. The stars were gods. This devotion to the stars also explains the Antikythera Mechanism for an exact knowledge of the eclipses of the Sun god Helios and the Moon. More about the celestial computer bellow.

The Sun god Helios was by far the most important of all gods. He gave light and life to humans, the natural world of the Earth and the Cosmos. Helios married the Nymph Rhodos, daughter of the goddesses Amphitrite or Aphrodite. Helios moved to Rhodes with his wife. The island Rhodes honored Helios. It adopted the name of his wife, Rhodos. It built a colossal metal statue of Helios, which was a marvel of technology and sculpture. It was sculpted by Chares of Lindos, an artist from Rhodes, in the years 294-282 BCE. Chares was student of Lysippos who did portraits of Alexander the Great. The statue took the human form of Helios. Its legs stranded the entrance of the harbor of Rhodes.

The Colossus of Rhodes was a huge statue of Helios, patron god of Rhodes. Painting by Louis de Caullery, 17th century. Louvre. Wikipedia Commons.

Rhodes: Pharos / Lighthouse of science and technology

Rhodes probably benefited for its devotion to the Sun god Helios. It shined in science and technology. Hipparchos, the great Greek astronomer of the second century BCE, set up his astronomy lab in Rhodes. He probably designed and built with his technical team the Antikythera Mechanism, an astronomical computer of genius. This toothed-geared Promethean machine was 2,000 years ahead of its time. It predicted the eclipses of the Sun and the Moon, including the date of the Panhellenic athletic and religious festivals like the Olympics. In an article I wrote in 2025, I add that the Antikythera computer also: “brought the heavens nearer to Earth and into human understanding. It served as an accurate calendar of human events and a calendar of the celestial universe, a moving map of the constellations and a mirror of nature and the heavens.”

Modern scientists have been studying the fragments of the Antikythera computer for some 125 years. They have called its front side the Cosmos. At the very center of that Cosmos we see the golden sphere of the Sun, as well as pointers of the Moon and other planets. The front and back of the device is full of inscriptions explaining the Cosmos.

One of those scientists who studied the fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism is my friend and colleague Xenophon Moussas, former professor of space physics and astronomy at the University of Athens.

Inscriptions in gold yellow citing Sun god Helios. The largest surviving gear A, which includes 27 of the surviving 30 gears. Moussas incorporated fragment A, in blue, on the inscriptions. Courtesy Xenophon Moussas.

The fall of ancient Greece

Despite the privileged position of ancient Hellas / Greece in gorgeous art, architecture, science, technology and civilization, and the unprecedented genius, power and influence of Alexander the Great, Hellas fell victim to its own antagonisms and foreign conquests.

The Romans annexed Greece in 146 BCE. Some 500 years later, in the fourth century of our own era, the Roman emperor Constantine started the Christianization of Hellas and the Roman Empire. This was the equivalent of blasting Hellas and Rome with a nuclear bomb: massive destruction of the temples, schools, stadia, theaters, government buildings. Books and libraries went up in flames.

Christianity was a Jewish heresy centered on one god. Telling the ancient Greeks they had to abandon their beautiful gods and gorgeous temples like the Parthenon for a crucified Jew named Jesus was the signing of their death sentences.

The early Christian emperors and heads of the new “Orthodox” church pushed the ancient Greeks off the cliff. They desolated Hellas. Merely 1 percent of ancient Greek writings survived the Christian holocaust. “Christian” Greeks to this day remain somewhat schizophrenic about the authenticity of their civilization. Is it Hellenic or Christian or a marriage of the two? Some of them and genetic science say they are indeed the children of the ancient and medieval (Byzantine) Greeks, that is, Minoans, Myceneans, classical and medieval Greeks. The Science magazine reported in 2017: “The Greeks really do have near-mythical origins.” This recognition is a huge honor and confirmation of history, especially at times that most of Western “scholars” are saying directly or in diplomatic language that modern Greeks have nothing to do with ancient Greeks. Many of these so-called classical scholars study the ancient Greeks for reasons that justify the looting of Hellenic archaeological treasures by their countries and, possibly, by themselves. World-class museums are full of stolen Greek antiquities: like the British Museum in London, Louvre in Paris, the Getty Museum in California, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other major museums in Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and Russia.

In fact, Nazi Germans became model of looting. They occupied Greece, April 1941-October 1944. They came close to wiping out Greece. They also stole thousands of Hellenic treasures from Greek museums and illegal excavations. German museums have the audacity to exhibit these looted treasures. And because a WWII and post-WWII Greece fought a British and German instigated civil war , 1943-1949, it failed to demand the return of its stolen treasures.

Another factor that keeps Greece weak and pilotless was America’s Cold War that brought Greece and Greece’s eternal enemy, Turkey, in America’s military camp of NATO. That political conflict of the US-NATO and communist Soviet Union / Russia paralyzed Greece, allowing the American-licensed Turkey in 1974 to invade and capture half of the Greek island of Cyprus.

Floating nuclear plant in the Aegean?

This very brief overview of Greek history explains even utterly inconceivable events like the Greek and American nuclear companies scheming with Greek government officials for potentially approving a floating nuclear power plant in the Aegean.

My friend, Dr. Chrystodoulou in Canada, is unhappy about such a prospect. He is concerned that modern Greece has zero experience with extremely complicated and dangerous nuclear power. What are they going to do with the “spent” fuel, he asks. It remains “hot” for thousands of years. In an email, he expressed his worries: “Greece has no experience in any of these [nuclear power plant] problems, and given their abysmal lack of safety in trains, what possible trust can one have in a decision to bring nuclear power to this country? They haven’t even automated the system that is designed to avoid head-on [train] collisions, and which could have prevented the Tempi disaster [in 2023], and one can trust them to operate nuclear power plants that are quite complicated machines [?]…. I think this suggestion [by the Greek and American nuclear company of floating nuclear power plants in Greece]… is not well thought out, and frankly, I can only characterize it as a joke or πυροτέχνημα [fire work].”

Those in the Greek government who contemplate such insane proposal ought to immediately drop it. They should remember this most basic fact: Greece does not need nuclear power plants.

They know, or should know, that Greece for millennia has been a solar country. Rhodes was the home of Helios. Christianity has abolished even the name Sun god Helios but cannot do away with geography and civilization — and the current emergency of climate chaos. Like it or not, solar power is the present and the future, no matter what President Trump and the oil companies and petroleum wars say about climate. To design a floating nuclear power plant in the Aegean is to risk catastrophic poisoning of the Aegean and, second, create a perfect target for the genocidal country of Turkey that persist (1) in its occupation of half of Cyprus and (2) keeping up its aggression against Greece to the point of calling the Aegean its “blue homeland.”

Epilogue

The Greek government must finally get serious and accept the historical fact that it is governing Greeks intimately connected to the giants of Greek science and civilization and military genius: Homer, Thales, Lykourgos, Solon, Kleisthenes, Herakleitos, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Demokritos, Miltiades, Themistokles, Herodotos, Thucydides, Aristarchos of Samos, Aeschylos, Sophokles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Pericles, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Alexander the Great, Hipparchos, Ptolemaios, Plutarch, Galen, Plethon, Rigas Pheraios, Adamantios Koraes, Theodoros Kolokotrones, Dionysios Solomos, Ioannes Kapodistrias, Alexandros Papadiamantis, Andreas Laskaratos, K. P. Kavafis, Odysseas Elytes, Kostis Palamas, George Seferis and Mikis Theodorakis.

The implication of accepting this truth is the reexamination of both domestic and foreign policy of the country. The Greeks who fought and defeated the vast Persian empire (in 490 and 480-479 BCE) were patriots whose virtues treasured freedom above all else. Freedom or death was their flag. The Greeks defeated the Italians in 1940 for the same reason. The Greeks of 2026 can do the same thing — should their genocidal Turkish neighbors dare to enter the Aegean.

The same Hellenic thinking leads to the conclusion that toxic imports like nuclear power plants or giant windmills or biocidal farm chemicals must be rejected because they defile Hellas. The Sun god Helios remains the most reliable and appropriate source for energy for Hellas — in 2026.

Recreate the Colossus of Rhodes. Open another Hipparchos school in Rhodes for advanced studies in astronomy and Antikythera-like computers of genius. Invite China to establish a Helios factory in Rhodes and another in Peloponnesos or Thrace. These factories would manufacture electric cars, buses, trains, trams and solar panels for the complete solar electrification and transportation of the country.

Evaggelos Vallianatos, Ph.D., is a historian and ecological-political theorist. He studied zoology and history, Greek and European, at the University of Illinois and Wisconsin. He did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard. He worked on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency; taught at several universities, and authored hundreds of articles and several books, including Poison Spring (2014), The Antikythera Mechanism (2021), Freedom (2025) and Earth on Fire: Brewing Plagues and Climate Chaos in Our Backyards (World Scientific, 2026).