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One of Archaeology's Great Mysteries Nearly Solved as Scientists Piece Together 2,000-Year-Old Computer
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One of Archaeology's Great Mysteries Nearly Solved as Scientists Piece Together 2,000-Year-Old Computer

Potentially solving an all-time great mystery, the 2,000 year old clockwork planetarium, the Antikythera Mechanism, has been reproduced.

Science & Tech

Ever since the Antikythera Mechanism was fished out of the Peloponnesian Sea in 1901, it has remained one of the longest unsolved mysteries of archaeology.

Akin to something portrayed in the Da Vinci Code or Dungeons and Dragons, the hand-powered, clockwork brass planetarium has befuddled everyone who has beheld it.

Yet more than a century since its discovery, researchers may have finally cracked the code and believe they understand enough about how all the different gearwheels work to build a functioning replica with modern tools.

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“Many unsuccessful attempts have been made to reconcile the evidence with a display of the ancient Greek Cosmos of Sun, Moon, and all five planets known in antiquity,” reads the study of their findings, published in Nature.

Rehm, Price, Wright, Freeth, Jones, Carmen, Throndike, Evans—the names of scientists whose models and attempts to reproduce what’s described as the world’s first analogue computer stack like corded wood as the authors from University College London explain the history of understanding in the device.

The Antikythera Mechanism is one of the most technologically sophisticated discoveries in the ancient world: a desk-mounted, computational, celestial observatory made of brass, powered by more than 30 individually formed gears mounted on other gears, displaying the movements of the entire Greek cosmos, with all the planets up to Saturn, the phases of the moon, and the timing of eclipses.

Fished up in 82 parts in the ruins of a merchant ship that wrecked off the coast of Antikythera, Greece, the brass pieces are badly corroded. X-ray and CT scans revealed the extent of the numerous inscriptions carved into the brass panels at the back and front—an operator’s manual essentially.

Encased in a wooden box about one foot tall, the device would swing into action with the turn of a hand crank.

The model of the cosmos in the device is consistent with the epicyclic theories of a 3rd-century BCE Greek astronomer called Apollonios of Perga, and another named Parmenides. Taken with Babylonian astronomical calculations, the UCL team used these ancient sources to decipher where each gear would have to have been fit to ensure everything moved in a way consistent with the models of the time.

Their model suggests that the front display of the planetarium would have depicted the cosmos in motion on concentric brass rings.

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