The Antikythera Mechanism: An Ancient Greek computer, designed to see into the future

Ever notice how many of these articles sound like clickbait?

“That’s no computer,” Tammy from Nebraska will tell me in a harshly-worded email, despite the fact that she didn’t bother reading past the headline. “Those old people didn’t have computers! I have a computer, and there’s no gears in there! And those old people were dumb! Just like YOU are dumb! You’re the dumbest!”

Don’t be like Tammy. Read the article, and tell me I’m wrong here. There is a device called the Antikythera Mechanism, it is a computer, and it was definitely designed to see into the future.

I Get a Little Bit Terrified

The year was 1900. Right around Easter Sunday.

A group of Greek fishermen loaded into a boat, planning a trip to Tunisia. They stop near an island, waiting for the wind to turn their way. They weren’t looking for fish — which I guess means we shouldn’t call them fishermen at all. Don’t blame me, I didn’t come up with that.

They were hunting for sponges. Yes, real sponges. Back before you could buy mass-produced synthetic sponges, people would bop around on the ocean floor, looking for actual sponges to sell.

These guys would throw on their old-school diving equipment and plunge in. You know, like real Bioshock-looking gear. 

Some people call them “sponge fishermen,” even though sponges aren’t fish.

While waiting for their trip to Tunisia, these guys figured what the hell, might as well jump on in and look around. Never know, might be some awesome sponges around here too. Nothing’s better than some sponges.

A diver named Elias Stadiatis is strolling around on the bottom, and freaks out. He signals to be pulled up immediately, and he’s ranting about seeing a bunch of naked corpses on the bottom. Everyone thinks this dude has lost his mind, probably crazed thanks to decompression sickness we call “the bends.”

I can’t say I blame them. There’s wacky Elias, at it again.

The captain throws on the suit, and goes down to take a look for himself. When he emerges, he’s carrying an arm made of bronze. Turns out Elias wasn’t crazy at all — he’d discovered a massive, 170-foot Roman shipwreck, chock full of ancient statues and all other sorts of goodies.

The island they were sitting by is called Antikythera, and their discovery is known as the Antikythera shipwreck.

Turn Around

Now, if you’re a sponge…hunter…and just came across this enormous pile of loot, what are you going to do? Surely, these guys were doing Greek dances and dreaming of how many gyros they were going to eat, right?

No. They packed up their stuff and headed to Tunisia. Because, sponges and all. Gotta get those sponges. Sponges are life.

Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. There’s been speculation that they actually pulled up a lot of booty and sold it in Alexandria, but that seems unlikely. After all, no artifacts have surfaced on the market in the years since, and recent expeditions have found a bunch of lead in the shipwreck, which would’ve been valuable to the guys because they used them as weights.

So we have to conclude that the spongebobs just decided “Well, this ancient treasure is cool and all, but what about our SPONGES?”

They came back a few months later, notified authorities, and salvage efforts began. 

They found a ton of stuff. Among the most famous discoveries were bronze statues, especially notable because so few of them remain from antiquity. After all, bronze was valuable. If they were left laying around, odds are someone’s gonna melt it and make some cash.

The only thing worth more than bronze? Sponges.

Now, there’s a number of conflicting stories floating around, mainly centering on whether or not the spongies had gone hunting before or after the discovery, whether or not there was a storm, and so on. But one thing seems to be clear: There was a significant amount of time between the discovery and the salvage operation.

There’s a few theories on what the wrecked ship’s purpose was. Keep in mind, this was a really big ship, and it was absolutely jam-packed with stuff. Some think it may have been loaded with treasures for a triumphal parade for Julius Caesar. Others think it was commissioned by a super wealthy Roman guy, which was fairly common at the time.

What better way to impress your neighbors than to have a bunch of super classy knick-knacks floated over to your house?

Among the statues and jewelry and glass bowls and all the other glorious goods they pulled up were little pieces of corroded metal.

Every Now and Then I Fall Apart

No one paid much attention to these deteriorating bits of metal. After all, there were far more visually impressive pieces getting pulled to the surface. If you’ve got a giant, nearly intact statue of a Greek god, what are you going to pay more attention to?

It’s like saying you’d be more interested in a bowl of sponges than a bag of gold.

The pieces sat there for two years, until an archaeologist started looking a little more closely. He noticed there were gears embedded in it. Still, it wasn’t much of a priority.

It wasn’t until the 1950’s that a British professor from Yale named Derek Price started studying it. He spent well over a decade considering, cataloguing, and contemplating what it could be and what its purpose was.

We’ve since learned a lot more, but Price’s original assessment was right: It was a computer, designed to see into the future.

Now, don’t start complaining because it doesn’t meet your definition of a computer, Tammy. It couldn’t be reprogrammed, but it absolutely reaches the necessary standards, and is fascinating in its complexity.

Here’s how Price described the discovery:

“…as spectacular as if the opening of Tutankamun’s tomb had revealed the decayed but recognizable parts of an internal combustion engine.”

Okay, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But we are in the same ballpark here.

The Antikythera Mechanism: Total Eclipse of the Heart

Turns out, we actually have references to something similar to the Antikythera Mechanism in ancient writing. We don’t have any further to look than Cicero, the famed Roman statesman.

Cicero spent quite a bit of time studying, including at Rhodes: A Greek island near the coast of modern Turkey. If you think you’ve heard of it before, you have. Rhodes was the site of the Colossus of Rhodes, a giant statue that was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

It was this massive thing with two giant legs that may have spanned…you know what? Don’t get me off track here. You know how this ends up.

Rhodes was also home to copious amounts of Ancient Smart Dudes, who sat around studying and teaching and doing lots of Ancient Smart Dude things.

Among them was a man named Posidonus, who studied…well, everything. Among the everything he studied was astronomy, trying to answer riddles of the distance of the Sun and the effects of the Moon on the tides.

Rhodes had also been the home of the ancient astronomer Hipparchus, who’s considered the founder of trigonometry. He used math to calculate the movements of the Sun and the Moon…and even to predict eclipses.

Why can’t we have cool names like these? Aren’t “Posidonus” and “Hipparchus” more interesting than “Joe” or “Dave”?

Anyway, part of the knowledge these men possessed came from the Ancient Babylonians, who were impressive astronomers in their own right. They placed a lot of emphasis on eclipses, both solar and lunar, keeping precise notes on when they’d occur.

No word on whether or not the Babylonians studied sponges.

As you can imagine, eclipses were often the cause of some major freakouts to ancient peoples. I mean, I’ve seen a total solar eclipse, and it’s downright terrifying. Even when you know exactly what’s happening, something just short circuits in your brain when there’s a giant hole in the sky. 

So when certain types of eclipses were going to take place — like a lunar eclipse with Jupiter nearby, for example — the Babylonians would pick out a “substitute king.” The real king would hide somewhere, and the temporary one would sit on the throne and get massages or whatever it is kings get.

The fake king would absorb all the bad stuff from the eclipse, and after it had passed, he’d be killed. Not sure if the massages would be worth that or not. I guess it would depend on the type of massages, if you know what I mean. No, not like that, you pervert. I meant massages with sponges.

So the Ancient Greeks built upon the insight of the Babylonians, and Cicero learned from them at Rhodes.

It was while visiting that island of knowledge that Cicero wrote this brief and tantalizing snippet:

“Suppose a traveler to carry into Scythia or Britain the orrery recently constructed by our friend Posidonus, which at each revolution reproduces the same movements of the sun, the moon and the five planets…”

Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight

As the Greeks built upon the work of the Babylonians, so too did others build upon the initial studies of Derek Price.

Now, the Antikythera Mechanism, as it’s come to be called, is enormously complex. It’s not easy to understand, nor is it simple to explain.

Yes, it was an ancient computer. And yes, it was designed to see into the future: As Cicero explained, it would predict the movements of the main objects in the sky, as well as eclipses.

It’s a series of interlocking gears, which would have been inside a wooden box. On the front were a series of dials. It also would have had hands, like on a clock, except the hands had little spheres of different colors, representing the sun, moon, and the five known planets at the time: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

These hands would point towards different spots on dials, indicating things like what part of the sky they’d appear in.

The back of the device likely would have shown the phases of the moon, and predicted eclipses. There was also a dial showing the schedules of various games, like the Olympics.

There would have been a crank on the side — you’d turn it, set a date, and boom: Information.

It’s believed there were 37 gears in the Antikythera Mechanism, although not all of them have survived. It’s likely some are still on the ocean floor. This has resulted in numerous studies and attempts to estimate and reconstruct what these missing gears would have looked like, and how they would have interacted.

Now, just in case you might think this doesn’t sound too complicated, keep in mind that the movement of an object like the moon isn’t regular. It revolves around the Earth in an ellipse, moving faster at some points, and slower at others.

How do you account for this? Well, it means you build gears with slots and pins, so they will change speeds at certain points in their rotation. Yes, Ancient Smart Dudes were really smart.

We’re Living in a Powderkeg

There’s writing on the Antikythera Mechanism, and it’s written by more than one person. So, we can assume that this certainly wasn’t the only one. Presumably it came from a workshop.

So where was it made? We don’t know for sure, but there’s some likely candidates. The Ancient Greek city of Syracuse is one possibility. So is Alexandria.

But there’s one location a lot of the information points to.

There’s other items from the shipwreck that point to a certain spot. And there’s the fact that in addition to the major games of the Ancient Greeks, a couple of minor ones are listed on the Antikythera Mechanism — one of which lines up with one of the candidate cities. There’s also the matter of an inscription being written in one particular dialect.

And the lists of astronomical events on the mechanism point to a spot between 33.3 and 37 degrees latitude, which excludes a lot of places.

Can you guess where this is leading? That’s right: Omaha, Nebraska. Or Rhodes. Okay, it was probably Rhodes, one of those spots where ancient knowledge truly flourished and exploded.

So the Roman ship, whatever its purpose, either set sail from Rhodes or stopped there on its journey to pick up some goodies. One of those was the Antikythera Mechanism, which would’ve been a pretty pricey piece for someone’s mantle.

We can guess that while passing the island of Antikythera, a storm hit. We know that even today, the area is prone to high winds and rough seas. And based on the placement of bodies, it likely happened at night, while some of the crew was below deck.

Crashing waves, a broken hull, a sunken ship. Around 2,000 years later, some spongeheads find it, leave it, then come back later. Because what’s an Antikythera Mechanism from Rhodes, compared to the glory of sponges?

Together We Can Take It to the End of the Line

A lot of this information has only resurfaced in recent years. Remember, the remnants of the Antikythera Mechanism are all corroded and smashed together. CT scans and other forms of modern technology has enabled researchers to study the internal structure in detail, and read some of the previously illegible writing.

Will there be more discoveries? Although we have a really good idea of what the Antikythera Mechanism looked like and understand its purpose…yes, I’m sure there will be.

Recent work has used a robot to create a 3D map of the ocean floor, and hopefully new treasures will be found. A project called Return to Antikythera conducts expeditions fairly regularly. It’s likely the missing pieces of the mechanism are still down there, buried.

As for the question of why the Ancient Greeks built this, there’s no clear answer. It’s assumed that part of the reason was to help reconcile the differences between the solar and lunar calendars. And it’s also possible it would’ve been of interest to those who wanted to see what the skies would show on a certain date in the future.

But I think part of the reason was…just because they could. What better way to show off your knowledge than to build a device such as this?

Some of this knowledge went on to the Byzantines and Arab astronomers, but it would be over a thousand years before anything even approaching this level of complexity would be built again.

I have this need to try to fit stories into some sort of mold, where we have a takeaway. If there’s one here, I’d say it’s this: We’re no more or less intelligent than those who came before. Humans are still humans.

It’s easy to think “We have cars and electricity and cellphones and giant space telescopes, therefore we’re better than the Ancient Greeks.” And in the case of some like the Ancient Egyptians or the Mesoamericans, there’s the idea of “Oh, they couldn’t have done this on their own, there must have been aliens involved.”

I’ll leave the question of inadvertent racism just hanging out there.

But the point is, people are people. Could you smelt your own cellphone? Probably not. The Ancient Greek astronomers built on the work of the Babylonians, and bounced ideas off of one another to end up with the Antikythera Mechanism. The only difference today is we have more to build off of.

If part of their goal was to show off, then count me impressed. They didn’t just build a computer, they built a portable computer — a laptop. Not entirely like the one Tammy has, but part of the same family.