Ancient Greek Computer’s Secrets Unraveled

Sponge divers in Greece brought up a corroded lump of bronze in 1900 from a wrecked Roman ship. Last week, scientists announced that the lump was, in fact, a two-thousand-year-old calculating machine. As Mike Edmunds, professor of astronomy at Cardiff University and leader of the project team asked, “If the ancient Greeks made this, what else could they do?”

The “Antikythera Mechanism,” so named as it was found off the smallish island of Antikythera, was on a ship that sank around 140 to 100 BC. Some 82 fragments have survived, and they contain more than thirty quite precise gears. Professor Edmunds explained, “It was a calendar of the moon and sun, it predicted the possibility of eclipses, it showed the position of the sun and moon in the zodiac, the phase of the moon, and we believe also it may have shown the position of some of the planets, possibly just Venus and Mercury.”

Of course, the Greeks and other ancient peoples were pretty comfortable with astronomy. Until electric light, the objects in the night sky were readily visible from all over. Without “Dancing with the Stars,” “Monday Night Football,” and any of the “CSI” franchise, the ancients spent a great deal of time looking up at night. Thus, the Aztec calendar, Stonehenge, and the Antikythera Mechanism.

However, the latter device is a more technologically advanced device than the others. In order to build it, a craftsman had to be able to cast the gears and shape them to an incredible degree of precision. The good professor said, “The design of the mechanism is very wonderful, making us realize how highly technological the ancient Greek civilization was. Much more so perhaps than we thought.”

And herein lies a cautionary tale for the first part of the 21st century. Contemporary technology is truly astonishing, but it all rests on previous invention. In societies where writing was unknown, people were not less intelligent than modern day folks, merely incapable of putting their ideas down on paper or clay or vellum. “Primitive” and “unsophisticated” aren’t the same as “stupid.” Too often, moderns presume their own uniqueness in the absence of evidence. The homo sapiens who built the Antikythera Mechanism were every bit as clever as those who coded Microsoft’s Vista Operating System – indeed, they may have been more clever because they didn’t. The mechanism looks like a Linux-based device, smallish, effective, enduring, and under-estimated.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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