Figure 99
That there are seven of them is no error; on the contrary, it is in conformity with the persistent referral in Mesopotamian astronomical texts to Earth as “the seventh” (and its depiction with seven dots when celestial symbols were used—fig. 100). Indeed, it could be considered as another compelling piece of evidence for the Anunnaki and their distant planet Nibiru—for while we think of Earth as the third planet from the Sun, someone coming into our solar system from outside would first encounter Pluto (yes, Pluto!), then Neptune and Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter; Mars would be the sixth to be encountered, and Earth the seventh!
Figure 100
Figure 101
That, the ancient skymap states, is how the god EN.LIL (“Lord of the Command”) had journeyed to come to Earth. The route correction or detour between Jupiter and Mars—where the Asteroid Belt is located—conforms to the cosmogony of the Epic of Creation and confirms the use by the Anunnaki of Mars as a Way Station.
It was not a one way celestial journey. In the eighth segment of this amazing skymap, pointing arrows are accompanied by the word RETURN (fig. 101).
And therein lies the link between the Past and the Future.
11
ANTIKYTHERA: A COMPUTER BEFORE ITS TIME
I have often told my audiences that “the Past is the Future.” If a physical object could be found to illustrate that the Future was in the Past, it is without doubt the “Antikythera mechanism” in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece.
It is, one can say, the OOP to beat all museum OOPs.
The circumstances of its discovery, which help determine its age, are beyond dispute; so, beyond dispute, is its Out Of Place advanced technology. Its place of provenance (though not necessarily of origin) is more or less a good guess. But who possessed the technology that underlies the “mechanism,” and what was its purpose, have remained a subject of debate and conjecture for more than a century. It is my belief that a real breakthrough in solving the enigma will not occur until it is realized that the Antikythera Mechanism is a product of the technologies not of Man, but of the gods.
It was just before Easter in 1900 that two sponge-divers’ boats were sailing in the eastern Mediterranean, off the Greek island of Antikythera. Diving for sponges where in antiquity boats plied the Mediterranean sea route between east and west, the divers discovered on the sea floor, at a depth of 42 meters (about 140 feet), the wreck of an ancient ship. They retrieved from the wreck various artifacts, including marble and bronze statues.
The find was reported to the authorities, and the ship and its contents were subsequently examined by archaeologists and other experts, as more of the cargo’s objects were retrieved. They dated the ship to some time after 200 B.C.; amphorae—clay jars that once contained wine, olive oil, and other foodstuffs—were dated to about 75 B.C. These two dates marked the “not-earlier and not-later than” dates of the shipwreck. By now all experts agree that the ship sank in the first century B.C.—so everything found in it had to be, in A.D. 1900, at least 2,000 years old; but the fact that some of the statues were dated with certainty to the fourth century B.C. naturally suggests that other finds in the shipwreck could also be that old, or even older.
Among the finds brought to the Museum for examination was a lump of hardened mud in which pieces of metal—presumably pieces of a statue that broke up—were embedded. It was in May 1902 that a Museum archaeologist noticed in it a rounded piece of metal that looked like a wheel. As the mud was cleaned away, the hard core of the lump was revealed to be a heavily encrusted and corroded wheeled metal object (plate 33). As its details were studied (fig. 102), and other round and teethed pieces of metal—gear wheels?—were cleaned and placed next to each other, the stunned Museum officials saw a mechanical contraption made of bronze and consisting of several circular parts including gear wheels (fig. 103). They were seeing, they realized, an amazingly complex mechanical contraption that could not possibly belong to antiquity . . .
The Antikythera Mechanism, as it came to be called, was contained in a wooden box measuring 33 by 17 centimeters (about 13 by 6.75 inches), and a mere 9 centimeters (about 3.5 inches) wide. Greek lettering was visible on the metal parts; but whether the letters added up to words, and what they meant, required a lot more delicate cleaning and matching of fragments.
Further examination and studies showed that the small box contained a precision-made mechanism consisting of numerous toothed wheels—gears—of different sizes, interlocked at different planes within a circular frame (fig. 104), which in turn was held in place inside the wooden box.
Figure 102
Figure 103
So what was it, where did it come from, who made it, when, and what for? The first clues that the device’s investigators followed focused on the ship itself. They concluded from the cargo that the ship was sailing from east to west, and assumed that the ship was coming from either Greek colonies in Asia Minor (today’s Turkey), or from the nearby Greek islands Rhodes or Cos in the eastern Mediterranean, its destination being Italy (possibly to Rome).
Did the device originate there? It was pointed out that on the island of Rhodes there had been an academy, founded by the philosopher Posidonios, dedicated to astronomy and mechanical engineering. Was the device, then, a product of that center’s engineering advancements combined with astronomy—was it an astronomical device? Some thought that it was some kind of planetarium, used to show the motions of celestial bodies. Others suggested that it had a practical purpose—that it was some kind of a naval instrument using the stars for navigation.
Figure 104
After several decades of investigation, the prevailing conclusion was that the mechanism was an Astrolabe (literally: “A taker of stars”)—an instrument used to project the motions and determine the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets—“with spherical projections and a set of rings.”
And there, half a century after the discovery, the matter more or less rested.
Reading about the discovery in the course of working on my first book, The 12th Planet, the term astrolabe aroused my interest. In a chapter devoted to astronomical knowledge in antiquity, I reported the sensational lecture given by the Assyriologist Theophilus G. Pinches at the Royal Asiatic Society in London, England, in that very same year—1900—of the Antikythera discovery. His talk was about a Mesopotamian astrolabe from the second millennium B.C. It was circular and also had writing on it, in cuneiform; it was also discovered in fragments (made of clay). Pinches succeeded in putting them together to render the complete astrolabe (here with its writing translated, fig. 105).
Its special significance for The 12th Planet was that the Mesopotamian astrolabe listed the home planet of the Anunnaki, Nibiru, by its Babylonian name Mul Marduk; showed that its design and use were based on spherical astronomy (and thus on a spherical and not flat Earth); and confirmed the Mesopotamian familiarity with the zodiacal constellations. The latter points were part of a wider exploration in my book of the Mesopotamian origins of the astronomical knowledge for which the much later Greeks have been given credit.
Those Greek astronomers/mathematicians included Hipparchus (second century B.C.) who has been credited—wrongly—with discovering the phenomenon of Precession that lies at the core of the division of the heavens into twelve zodiacal constellations. Citing ancient cuneiform texts and pictorial evidence, I showed that the zodiacal constellations were known to the Sumerians and were named and depicted by them in the very manner we still call and depict them to this day (see fig. 56)—knowledge that takes us back to the fourth millennium B.C. The better-known Babylonian astronomical texts, from the second millennium B.C., and Assyrian ones from the first millennium B.C.—which are sometimes acknowledged as the source of the Greek astronomical knowledge—were all based on the earlier Sumerian foundations.
Figure 105
The interesting fact in that chain of knowledge-connections is that both Hipparchus and Eudoxus lived in Asia Minor, in
Greek settlements that formed a geographical and cultural link to the Mesopotamian knowledge; the island of Rhodes, the purported origin of the wrecked ship’s cargo, lies just off that Greek-settled coast of Asia Minor; and both Greek savants—it is now certain—drew their knowledge from Mesopotamia’s Babylon and its precursor, Sumer.
I therefore wondered whether the similarities to the “Pinches” Mesopotamian astrolabe were a clue to the true origin of the Antikythera “astrolabe”—if not its physical origin, then of the knowledge required for its fashioning. Much more was needed to be found out—especially the decipherment of the inscriptions on it—for unlocking the device’s secrets. So I completed the manuscript of The 12th Planet without referring to the Antikythera mechanism, but planned to go and see the device for myself soon after the book was published.
The very next year, 1977, I went to visit Greece with my wife. My particular interest, I must admit, was Delphi, its famed oracle and its “Whispering Stone,” the Omphalos, for reasons explained in my follow-up book, The Stairway to Heaven. But I of course went several times to the archaeological museum in Athens. The mechanism was on display in a back room of the Museum devoted to “Bronzes,” and its explanatory caption was quite modest:
No. 15087.
Mechanism used in astronomy (astrolabus?).
Found in 1900 in the Sea of Antikythera.
System of geared discs and long Greek
inscriptions of 2nd century B.C.
There wasn’t much information there, nor an impetus for further research . . .
But still curious, I wrote to the Museum, asking for a fuller story and for the latest on the deciphering attempts. Surprisingly, I did get a response from the Director, B. Philippaki, that said:
In reply to your letter of 17.10.1978, we inform you the following:
The mechanism inv.no.X-15087 was found in the sea of Antikythera island by sponge divers in 1900. It was part of the cargo of a shipwreck which occurred in the first cent. B.C. The mechanism is considered to be a calendrical Sun and Moon computing machine dated, after the latest evidence, to ca. 80 B.C.
For technical details of the mechanism and for its inscription you should consult the monograph “Gears from the Greeks, The Antikythera Mechanism” by D. De Solla Price (Science History Publications, 1975).
An older article on the subject has been published in “Scientific American,” June 1959.
The letter from Athens reached me too late to follow its suggestions in time for The Stairway to Heaven. But it did open up a Pandora’s box of research, wonderment, and in time totally unexpected insights.
Dr. Derek de Solla Price, it turned out, became interested in the mechanism already in 1951, helping to identify the mechanism’s 30 gears and some 80 other different parts. In 1959, in an article in Scientific American, he suggested that the mechanism was a device for calculating the motions of the planets in relation to star constellations and that it operated as a mechanical computer. Enthused by such technological prowess by the ancient Greeks, he gave them credit for devising a mechanism that was the forerunner, not by centuries but by much more than a millennium, of medieval astronomical clocks.
Joining Greek experts, he spent another two decades studying the device during its careful cleaning and the evaluation of its diverse pieces. As technology advanced, X-rays were used to ascertain what was inside the crushed-together mechanism, and epigraphers made progress in reading the inscriptions. By then a Professor of History of Science at Yale University, de Solla Price offered his new findings and conclusions in a 1976 book with an intriguing title and subtitle:
GEARS FROM THE GREEKS
The Antikythera Mechanism
A Calendar Computer from ca. 80 B.C.
Following the suggestion from Athens, I managed to obtain the book. The cover alone (fig. 106) was highly intriguing; the contents mind-boggling. The “mechanism,” to put it mildly, was a first-class OOP: The professor’s findings were that the Antikythera Mechanism “is the oldest and most complex surviving scientific instrument of antiquity—a computer from the first century B.C.”
Professor de Solla Price concluded that the mechanism’s remains consisted of four major parts. It was housed in a wooden box that could be opened from front and back; the wood, however, disintegrated quickly after the object was taken out of the water in which it had been immersed for two thousand years. The most astounding aspect was the gears; he counted and identified 28 gears of varying sizes, and illustrated how they were assembled in “layers” in two groups, a front group and a back group (fig. 107), thinly arranged and “sandwiched” against each other inside the small and narrow box. He also drew a schematic plan of all the gears, showing how the teeth of one meshed with those of others, so that when the main two gears (one in front, one in the back, inside the box) rotated—probably moved by a hand crank—all the other wheels were put into motion (as partly depicted on the cover).
Figure 106
There were at least ten different kinds of components in the mechanism, each consisting of sub-parts—attachments, levers, axles, and so on. It is impossible to convey the scope of the mechanism’s ingenuity and complexity without following the analysis in page after page of the book. An idea could be given, perhaps, simply by quoting some words and terminology from the book: “Structure of the dial work,” “concentric pair of dials,” “outer perimeter of the main drive,” “central plate surrounded by annuli,” “four complete rings,” “a special bridge with straddles,” “a strip riveted to the central plate,” “dial pointer,” “engraved and inscribed fixed limb,” “graduations across the annuli,” “dial plate overhangs,” “connecting channel-place support,” “a series of tiny holes,” “equilateral teeth,” “rim connected to a circular hub with four spokes,” “gear-train system,” “planetary markers,” and so on and on.
Figure 107
All these diverse components of the mechanism were made from a special bronze, formed into a single flat metal sheet from which all the parts were precisely cut out. Bronze is an alloy of copper with tin, a mixture that gives the soft copper great strength and rigidity. Objects made of bronze are, as a rule, the result of casting in a mold, because the alloy is not malleable. How then was a thin flat sheet—of a thickness of less than 6 millimeters (0.24 inches!)—manufactured, how could the parts be cut out of it with great precision, and how could the gear teeth be cut to provide the exact number of teeth around the given circumference of each (and different) gear? An astounding level of geometry and mathematics was required just for that.
The gear teeth (as later studies showed) were cut with astounding accuracy (fig. 108) at a precise and uniform angle of 60° that assured an ideal fit between gear wheels—a precise and perfect fit that allowed them to rotate each other without either slippage or getting stuck. Another mind-boggling aspect of the tight inner assemblage is the fact that the separations between the various gear levels average a minuscule gap of 1.35 millimeters (0.05 inches)—a fantastic technological achievement at any time! This is almost what Nanotechnology, a miniaturization of mechanical components to microscopic size, is expected to achieve for us in the future!
Figure 108
How was that achieved, and by whom?
Still, what seems to have impressed the History of Science professor most was the fact that the gear wheels were of varied sizes, each with a different number of teeth, which made the whole system one of “differential gearing”—meaning that gears of different sizes meshed to rotate at different speeds—the smaller gears rotated more times (and thus faster) than the larger gears with which their teeth meshed (and vice versa). The different sizes meant a different number of gear “teeth”; and those differences in the number of gear teeth were not haphazard, but carefully designed to attain the overall precision of the mechanism.
“The differential gear does not appear again until it occurs in a complicated global clock made by Eberhart Baldewin at the court of Landgraf Wilhelm IV at Kassel in 1575,
” Prof. Price wrote. The Antikythera device thus remained a unique forerunner of the Future from the Past for at least 1,650 years.
What was the purpose of such a fantastic mechanism? The clues stemmed from three sources: The gearing, the gradational marks, and the writing.
Where the number of teeth in the various gears could be determined, it suggested to Prof. Price that the mechanism was concerned with lunar phenomena during various solar periods. The differential ratios indicated to him the Metonic Cycle of the Moon (by which cycle of so many Moon-months catches up with a solar-year cycle once in 19 years). The numbers also suggested a relationship with the periodic eclipses of the Moon during such a cycle. That some of the Greek writing spelled out the names of months strengthened his conclusions regarding the Moon/ Sun aspects of the mechanism.
But the gradational marks on the circumference of the larger wheels seemed to divide the grand cycle into twelve sections each of 30°—30 degrees, not 30 days—and the writing thereon indicated that the division was not into months but into twelve zodiacal sections. Indeed, the names of zodiacal constellations, such as Libra, Virgo, Gemini, Taurus, etc., are inscribed on the circumference (indicating, I must point out, a progression as in the Sumerian manner—see fig. 55). Some of the longer inscriptions, which include references to equinoxes and solstices, clearly record zodiacal phenomena. All that suggests functions that somehow relate the cycles of the Moon, and not just the Sun, to the Zodiac—an enigma, a mystery, by itself.
Journeys to the Mythical Past Page 13
