An ancient Greek supercomputer sounds a little unlikely to put it mildly, but a discovery in a 2000-year-old shipwreck off the island of Antikythera in the Aegean Sea is slowly beginning to prove otherwise.
The Antikythera Mechanism has been a source of intense speculation since it was first pulled from 100ft depths at the beginning of the 20th century. Since then, mathematicians, clockmakers, metallurgists, astrophysicists, and underwater archaeologists have all tried to make sense of the fragmented, corroded and maddening amalgamation of gears, pins and dials. The device is almost as famous for its incompleteness as it is for its complexity. It is now housed in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
The remains of the “mechanism” consist of what scientists have calculated is only one third of the original but, even that is spread across 82 fragments of varying sizes. The rest have been lost to the sea. After nearly a century of examination, the discoveries and the controversies surrounding one of the most incredible archaeological finds in human history are only growing.
Over time, salts and minerals in the seawater reacted with the mechanism’s copper elements, corroding the device beyond recognition. Even so, it is incredibly complicated and intricate at a level previously thought impossible coming from the ancient world. Indeed, when Tony Freeth, an honorary professor at University College, London who has worked on the Mechanism for many years, announced “This precision gearing ..is just completely unknown from the ancient world”, it spawned an entire episode of Ancient Aliens on the history channel and featured in an Indiana Jones movie.
When divers first pulled up the unassuming clump of barnacle-encrusted gears, the mechanism’s one-of-a-kind nature wasn’t immediately apparent. In 1902, Spyridon Stais, a politician on the nearby island of Kythera, told his cousin Valerios, then Director of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, about a series of strange gear wheels embedded in one of the recovered objects. For four years, experts theorized that perhaps the object was some sort of astrolabe, an impressive but relatively well-known astronomical device that helped sailors navigate by the position of the stars.
Various people have studied the mechanism over the years, but it was not until the 1950’s that it was x-rayed for the first time. Those x-rays showed a series of gears that could have been used to calculate the mean position of the Moon against the stars. Known as the Metonic Cycle, after the fifth-century Greek astronomer Meton of Athens, this formula explains the 19-year period in which lunar phases repeat on the same date of the solar year.
Further studies in the 1990’s, using updated scanning techniques, allowed researchers to see the different levels of gears instead of just a jumble of them. Those scans revealed that some of the gears were slightly eccentric – not just round – which would have allowed tracking of the Monn and Sun more accurately.
Each round of these studies has revealed more intricacies in the Antikythera Mechansim, which in turn have shown how much more complicated the mechanism is than previously thought. Historical scholars, meantime, have come to the conclusion that Archimedes may well have been involved in the development of the Antikythera Mechanism but that it was developed over time and the example in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens is probably one of many copies – it is almost certainly not an original in any sense.
In 2005, Tony Freeth, organized shipping a new scanning machine to Athens. That machine allowed Freeth to identify somewhere between 220 and 225 scale divisions in the mechanism, which would be seemingly impossible to create in a small mechanical device 2000 years ago, but the Greeks did.
In 2024, further research, against using newer technology put the number of scale divisions at 354, which will turn previous research on its head once again.
In this blog, I have only brushed the surface of all the research and controversies that the Antikythera Mechanism has aroused in the scientific community. It is unlikely that we will ever grasp the extent of the Mechanism’s mechanical wonders, its ancient origins, or its many uses – we only have about one third of it after all. As Tony Freeth says, “It keeps throwing up interesting things, unexpected things. It is a wonderful puzzle”.
As you may have gathered, I found the history of this shipwrecked artifact fascinating, and the fact that it continues to unveil new surprises after over a hundred years of study, even more so.
