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When you're trying to fathom a mangled relic of very
old hi-tech, it helps to have the manufacturer's instructions.
For over a century since its discovery in an ancient shipwreck, the
exact function of the Antikythera Mechanism -- named after the southern
Greek island off which it was found -- was a tantalizing puzzle.
From a few words deciphered on the twisted, corroded fragments of bronze
gears and plates, experts guessed it was an astronomical instrument. But
much more remained hidden out of sight.
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After more than a decade's efforts using cutting-edge scanning
equipment, an international team of scientists has now read about 3,500
characters of explanatory text -- a quarter of the original -- in the
innards of the 2,100-year-old remains.
They say it was a kind of philosopher's guide to the galaxy, and perhaps
the world's oldest mechanical computer.
"Now we have texts that you can actually read as ancient Greek, what we
had before was like something on the radio with a lot of static," said
team member Alexander Jones, a professor of the history of ancient
science at New York University.
"It's a lot of detail for us because it comes from a period from which
we know very little about Greek astronomy and essentially nothing about
the technology, except what we gather from here," he said. "So these
very small texts are a very big thing for us."
The team says the mechanism was a calendar of the sun and the moon that
showed the phases of the moon, the position of the sun and the moon in
the zodiac, the position of the planets, and predicted eclipses. Nothing
of the sort was known to be made for well over 1,000 years.
"It was not a research tool, something that an astronomer would use to
do computations, or even an astrologer to do prognostications, but
something that you would use to teach about the cosmos and our place in
the cosmos," Jones said. "It's like a textbook of astronomy as it was
understood then, which connected the movements of the sky and the
planets with the lives of the ancient Greeks and their environment."
"I would see it as more something that might be a philosopher's
instructional device."
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The letters -- some just 1/20 of an inch tall -- were engraved on the
inside covers and visible front and back sections of the mechanism,
which originally had the rough dimensions of an office box-file, was
encased in wood and operated with a hand-crank.
It wasn't quite a manual, more like a long label you would get on a
museum to describe a display, according to another team member, Mike
Edmunds, who is an emeritus professor of astrophysics at Cardiff
University.
"It's not telling you how to use it, it says 'what you see is such and
such,' rather than 'turn this knob and it shows you something,'" he said
Thursday, during a presentation of the team's findings in Athens.
The mechanism's fragments were raised in 1901 from a mid-1st century
B.C. shipwreck, and at first seemed like a scruffy footnote to a
magnificent body of finds that included bronze and marble statues,
luxury glassware and ceramics.
But the sediment-encrusted, compacted lumps soon attracted scientific
attention, and were studied by successive teams over the next decades.
While hypotheses were made as to the functioning of the gears and the
use of the machine, it was for long impossible to read more than a few
hundred characters of the texts buried on the inside of a multi-layered
mechanism a bit like a big clock.
About 12 years ago, Jones' and Edmunds' team started to use x-ray
scanning and imaging technology to analyze the 82 surviving fragments.
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"The original investigation was intended to see how the mechanism works,
and that was very successful," Edmunds said. "What we hadn't realized
was that the modern techniques that were being used would allow us to
read the texts much better both on the outside of the mechanism and on
the inside than was done before."
It was a painstaking process, as to read each of the tiny letters,
researchers had to look at dozens of scans.
Edmunds said the style of the text -- formal and detailed -- implied
that it was designed to be much more than a rich collector's plaything.
"It takes it to me out of the realm of executive toys -- an executive
wouldn't pay all that money to have all that waffle - it's more serious
than a toy," he said.
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It was probably made in Greece between 200 and 70 B.C., although no
maker's signature has been found.
The team says they have read practically all the text on the surviving
fragments. Their greatest hope is that archaeologists currently
revisiting the shipwreck will uncover pieces overlooked by the sponge
divers who found it a century ago - or even another similar mechanism.
The commercial vessel was a giant of the ancient world -- at least 130
feet long -- and broke into two as it sank, settling on a steep
underwater slope about 164 feet deep.
Most of the inscriptions, and at least 20 gears that worked to display
the planets, are still there.
"Perhaps, at some point, our reading may be fleshed out by sections
retrieved from the sea," said team member Yanis Bitsakis.
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