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The Antikythera mechanism was discovered off the Greek island of the same name, between Kythera and Crete, in 1900. In 2006, it was dated to about 150–100 BC and thought to have been on board a ship that sank en route from Rhodes to Rome. Now, scientists determined that the Antikythera Mechanism, a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology, was used to not only predict solar eclipses but also to organize the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad.
Professor Michael Edmunds of Cardiff University who led the study of the mechanism said: "This device is just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind. The design is beautiful, the astronomy is exactly right. The way the mechanics are designed just makes your jaw drop. Whoever has done this has done it extremely carefully." He added: "...in terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than the Mona Lisa."
The device is displayed in the Bronze Collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Other reconstructions are on display at the American Computer Museum, in Bozeman, Montana and the Children's Museum of Manhattan, in New York.
The new findings, reported on 30 July 2008 in the journal Nature, also suggested that the mechanism’s concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, in Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with the great Archimedes. Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 B.C., invented a planetarium calculating motions of the Moon and the known planets and wrote a lost manuscript on astronomical mechanisms.
Applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, the experts were able to decipher inscriptions and reconstruct functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument’s back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar.
The team led by the mathematician and filmmaker Tony Freeth of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, in Cardiff, Wales, said the month names “are unexpectedly of Corinthian origin,” which suggested “a heritage going back to Archimedes.”
The mechanism’s connection with the Corinthians was unexpected, the researchers said, because other cargo in the shipwreck appeared to be from the eastern Mediterranean, places like Kos, Rhodes and Pergamon. The months inscribed on the instrument, they wrote, are “practically a complete match” with those on calendars from Illyria and Epirus in northw nmestern Greece and with the island of Corfu. Seven of the months suggest a possible link with Syracuse. Inscriptions also showed that one of the instrument’s dials was used to record the timing of the panhellenic games, a four-year cycle that was “a common framework for chronology” by the Greeks, the researchers said.
Several references to similar instruments appear in classical literature, including Cicero’s description of one made by Archimedes. But this one, hauled out of the sea in 1900, is the sole surviving example. “We believe that this mechanism cannot have been the first such device since it is so sophisticated and complex,” Dr. Freeth said. “And we don’t understand why this extraordinary technology apparently disappeared for several hundred years, later to emerge in the great astronomical clocks of the 14th century onwards.”
