by Decoding the Heavens- Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer (retail) (epub)
Leonardo da Vinci, in particular, was obsessed by Hero’s work and studied everything he could find on it through Arabic translations. He developed clocks equipped with figures for striking the hours, as well as flying birds, and once, for the French King Francis I, he built a lion powered ‘by force of wheels’ that walked along before opening its chest to display a bouquet of flowers.
As well as providing the technology and skills that ultimately helped to trigger the Industrial Revolution, these mechanical devices were important in changing how people thought about the universe. Instead of representing an animate cosmos ruled by a guiding life force, scientists started to think of an inert, mechanistic universe that followed natural physical laws. The Antikythera mechanism was originally meant as a celebration of the heavens. But as clocks developed, the ability to measure minutes, seconds and even shorter time periods finally broke our ties with the sky. We’re free, like no other civilisation has been, from the cycles of the heavens – the first people to be ruled by our watches and not by the Sun.
*
One mild November evening in 2006 – just before the excitement of the conference at which they were to present their solution of the Antikythera mechanism – Yanis Bitsakis and Xenophon Moussas treated me to dinner at a little restaurant a couple of blocks from the Athens National Archeological Museum. Over aubergine and octopus they told me about the strange hold that the Antikythera mechanism exerts over whoever gets close to it and how one day they would like to devote an entire museum to the story of the fragments and those who have studied them. ‘It represents the same way we would do things today; it’s like modern technology,’ said Bitsakis. ‘That’s why it fascinates people.’
He’s right of course. Setting eyes on the fragments is an intoxicating experience, precisely because the secrets they hold are so familiar. They give us an unprecedented glimpse into another time, into people who thought like us, solved problems like us, built machines like us. You can see instantly that there, in those flaky green fragments, are the seeds of our entire modern world.
However, my lasting impression is not of the similarities between our world and theirs, but the differences. We now understand more about the universe than any previous civilisation could have dreamed. We observe and measure the objects in our solar system in exquisite detail, calculate and predict their movements by the nanosecond and send spacecraft to visit them. We have photographed the Earth from space, sent men to the Moon and beamed pictures back from Mars. We have caught stardust from the tail of a comet and probed the atmospheres of planets circling distant suns. We understand better than ever the true extent of our universe, how it began and how it will end, and the nature of our place within it.
Have we also lost something? At the very least, we’re missing out on the best light show on the planet. Living in today’s permanently illuminated towns and cities, most of us have little sense of the rhythms of the sky; the intricate dance of the Earth, Moon and Sun, the wanderings of the planets or the circles of the stars. Finding out who made the Antikythera mechanism and why also turns upside down any notion we might have had about ancient technology being ‘primitive’ and our own being so ‘advanced’. After all, where we see practical machinery that can measure time accurately and do work, the Greeks saw a way to gain knowledge, demonstrate the beauty of the heavens and get closer to the gods.
Epilogue
BACK IN ATHENS, the Antikythera fragments are still hanging in their glass case. They look as corroded and battered as ever, but their story is out at last.
The work to interpret them goes on, however. Alexander Jones is still working on deciphering the inscriptions on the mechanism and he believes there are many more insights to come. John Steele of the University of Durham, an expert in ancient eclipse prediction, has also been working with Tony Freeth to read the inscriptions on the lower back dial. Steele has now identified 18 eclipse glyphs in total and confirmed that they were labelled with alphabetical letters that would have referred to text elsewhere on the mechanism, giving further details about each predicted eclipse. The details were published alongside Jones’ findings in Nature in July 2008.
Steele also found that as well as the letters indicating whether each event was a lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse, the glyphs were labelled with either ‘Η’ or ‘Ν’, to indicate whether the eclipse occurred during the night or during the day. Finally, he has worked out why the spiral of the eclipse dial had four rings. The speed of the Moon as seen from Earth fluctuates in a cycle that lasts 14 months, and the dial was arranged so that each quarter was divided into exactly 14 sections. This ensured that whichever direction the dial’s arm was pointing in, the speed of the Moon (one of the factors determining the duration of an eclipse) was the same across each of the four rings of the spiral.
Roger Hadland’s gamble that the Antikythera project would turn his company around paid off, by the way. After news of the team’s results hit the headlines, X-Tek’s BladeRunner technology received a burst of interest from companies who wanted to use it to check aeroplane and spacecraft parts. Hadland found a buyer he trusted and sold the company in December 2007. He has stayed on as a consultant, meaning that he can now spend his time doing what he loves best – designing new machines – although he’s not sure he can ever beat working on the Antikythera mechanism, which he describes as ‘the crowning glory of my career’.
Meanwhile, Michael Wright has added some new features to his model, including a dial showing the day of the month, and he is working on further publications on the details of the gearwork. He also plans to make a second reconstruction out of bronze, which he hopes to present to the Athens National Museum. He remains convinced that the main purpose of the mechanism was to show the movements of the planets. Fragment D contains the only wheel (or possibly two identical wheels, one above the other) that doesn’t fit anywhere in the latest reconstruction of the mechanism. Wright believes that it may be part of the lost planetary gearing on the front of the device. The wheel has 63 teeth, which would fit within an epicyclic train for calculating the motion of Mercury.
Wright still thinks that the mechanism could have been put together from the pieces from two or three other devices – partly because of the way that the wood in the case is jointed. And he has seen something intriguing, relating to the subsidiary dial on the eclipse spiral. Tony Freeth’s team saw that this dial was divided into three, with the numbers 8 and 16 inscribed in two of the sectors, to show the number of hours that had to be added to the predicted eclipse times depicted on the main spiral. As far as their X-ray images show, the third sector is blank. But Wright, unlike any of the later researchers, was able to examine the Antikythera fragments by eye. He is convinced that – hidden under an overhang of limestone – he saw the edge of a character in the third sector. If he’s right, it would be the first known Greek use of a symbol for zero (that honour currently goes to Ptolemy, in the second century AD).
All of the researchers hope that in the future new pieces of evidence will be discovered. It’s possible that more missing fragments of the Antikythera mechanism might be found at the Athens National Museum, lying unrecognised in the stores since they were brought up from the sunken ship in 1901. The wreck, too, might yet yield more secrets. The hull of the ship and some of its contents still appear to be intact and buried beneath the mud, so modern divers equipped with the right tools could uncover more treasures and – who knows – even another astronomical computer. There’s also the hope that more ancient wrecks will be discovered in the Mediterranean, ideally in deeper water out of the reach of looters, and that as news of the Antikythera mechanism spreads, fragments from geared devices throughout history might even resurface in basements or museum stores as owners recognise their potential significance.
But the richest source of new information may turn out to be old Islamic manuscripts. Work to interpret these is in its infancy and there are thousands of manuscripts that have never been catalogued, let alone read: few p
eople combine the language skills to translate these documents with the technical expertise needed to understand their contents. An Arabic translation of Archimedes’ lost treatise on sphere-making, for instance, might solve the mystery of the origin of this ancient technology once and for all.
Acknowledgements
I WOULD LIKE to thank my agent, Peter Tallack at The Science Factory, whose idea it was that I write this book and without whose enthusiasm and support it probably wouldn’t have happened. Thanks to my editors, Jason Arthur at William Heinemann and Bob Pigeon at Da Capo Press, for invaluable editorial comments and for believing in the book enough to publish it, and to Laurie Ip Fung Chun for helping with pictures, references and a hundred other things. And thanks to Oliver Morton at Nature, where this all started, for first sending me to Athens to write about a strange contraption called the Antikythera mechanism.
I am greatly indebted to Michael Wright, a gentleman who fielded my never-ending questions with honesty and grace, and to his wife Anne. As well as sharing his personal story with me, Michael shared his ideas about how the Antikythera mechanism worked, where it came from and how widespread such devices might have been, including the arguments relating to the size of the mechanism and the statistics of such finds described in chapter 10. He provided some photographs, much of the information used in the diagrams, and many helpful corrections and comments on the manuscript itself.
Thanks to Tony Freeth and his colleagues – Mike Edmunds, Yanis Bitsakis, Xenophon Moussas and Agamemnon Tselikas – who were charming company and of great help when I first researched the Antikythera mechanism. Once I started writing this book, they felt unable to speak to me any further about their work or to be involved in any way. I hope I have done justice to their roles.
I am grateful to Roger Hadland for sharing the story of his company, X-Tek, and its role in the Antikythera project, for his helpful comments on chapter 8, and for providing photographs of BladeRunner’s trip to Athens.
Many others were kind enough to share their knowledge and ideas with me, including Jonathan Adams of the University of Southampton, Phaedon Antonopoulos of the Hellenic Institute of Marine Archaeology, Alexander Apostolides of the London School of Economics, Jane Biers formerly of the University of Missouri, Mary Ellen Bowden of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Paul Cartledge of the University of Cambridge, Alexis Catsambis of Texas A&M University, Francois Charette of the University of Frankfurt, Serafina Cuomo of Imperial College London, JV Field of Birkbeck University, Eugene Garfield of the Institute for Scientific Information, Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Bert Hall of the University of Toronto, Robert Hannah of the University of Otago, David King formerly of the University of Frankfurt, Stephen Johnson of the Museum for the History of Science, Alexander Jones of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Eleni Magkou of the National Archaeological Museum, Stefanie Maison, Tom Malzbender of Hewlett Packard, Basim Musallam of the University of Cambridge, Emmanuel Poulle of the école Nationale des Chartes, Andrew Ramsey of X-Tek, David Sedley of the University of Cambridge, John Steele of the University of Durham, Peter Stewart of the Courthauld Institute of Art, Doron Swade formerly of the Science Museum, Sharon Thibodeau of the US National Archives and Records Administration, Natalie Vogeikoff-Brogan of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Faith Warn, author of Bitter Sea, and Mairi Zafeiropoulou of the National Archaeological Museum. I am especially grateful also for the help of Anthony Michaelis and Arthur C. Clarke; sadly, neither of them lived to see the finished book.
The staff of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the British Library, the V&A Library, the Senate House Library, Sam Fogg’s in London and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago were extremely helpful while I was researching this book. Anne Bromley, Joy Elliott, Brendan Foley of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Iain Macquarrie of www.divingheritage.com, Panos Travlos of Travlos Publishers and Doron Swade all provided photographs for the book or helped in my search. Particular thanks also to Paul Cartledge for making several corrections to the text.
Thanks to my parents, Jim and Diana Marchant, especially for putting up with me writing in their house all through Christmas. Finally thank you to Ian Sample, for everything.
Picture Credits
GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT IS made to the following for permission to reprint photographs:
Captain Dimitrios Kontos and his crew of sponge divers, from ‘Das Athener Nationalmuseum’ by J.N. Svoronos (Athens, 1908)
A Greek sponge diver from the early 20th century, reproduced with permission of www.divingheritage.com
Bronze portrait head from a statue of a philosopher © B. Foley
Bronze statue nicknamed the Antikythera Youth © Jo Marchant
Marble statue of a crouching boy © Jo Marchant
Fragment C of the Antikythera mechanism © Jo Marchant
Fragment B of the Antikythera mechanism © Jo Marchant
Fragment A of the Antikythera mechanism © Jo Marchant
Derek de Solla Price © Malcolm S. Kirk/Artsmarket
The Tower of the Winds © Jo Marchant
Allan Bromley © Steven Siewert/Fairfaxphotos
Michael Wright © Anne Wright
Main frame of Wright’s model © Michael Wright
Part of Wright’s model © Michael Wright
Islamic geared astrolabe reproduced by permission of the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford
The Nastulus Manuscript showing the ‘Box of the Moon’ © Sam Fogg, London
Alan Crawley © Roger Hadland
Pandelis Feleris © Roger Hadland
Dr Eleni Magkou (National Archaeological Museum) and Professor Xenophon Moussas (National University of Athens) © Roger Hadland
Surface of the Antikythera fragments superimposed onto
X-ray © Nature Publishing Group
Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. If notified, the publisher will be pleased to rectify any errors or omissions at the earliest opportunity.
Sources and Further Reading
Chapter 1
Books:
Cousteau, Jacques, The Silent World (Elm Tree Books, 1988)
Homer (translated by Walter Shewring), The Odyssey (Oxford paperbacks, New editions, 1998)
Svoronos, J.N., Das Athener Nationalmuseum (Athens: Beck and Barth, 1908)
Warn, Faith, Bitter Sea: The Real Story of Greek Sponge Diving (Guardian Angel, 2000)
Papers:
Catsambis, Alexis, ‘Before Antikythera: The first underwater archaeological survey in Greece’, in The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 104–7 (2006)
Cornelius Bol, Peter, ‘Die Skulpturen des Schiffsfundes von Antikythera’, in American Journal of Archaeology, vol 77, no. 4, pp. 451–453 (Oct 1973)
Frost, K.T., ‘The statues from Cerigotto,’ in The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 23, pp. 217–236 (1903)
Kabbadias, P., ‘The recent finds off Cythera’, in The Journal of Hellenistic Studies, vol. 21, pp. 205–208 (1901)
Karo, George, ‘Art salvaged from the sea’, in Archaeology, vol. 1, pp. 179–185 (1948)
‘The findings of the wreckage of Antikythera’, in Report of the Archaeological Society of Athens, in Greek (15 Feb 1902)
Chapter 2
Books:
Diels, Hermann, Antike Teknik (Leipzig and Berlin, 1920)
Gunther, Robert, Astrolabes of the World (Oxford, 1932)
Schlachter, Alois, Der Globus, (Leipzig, 1927)
Sovoronos, J.N., Das Athener Nationalmuseum (Athens: Beck and Barth, 1908)
Zinner, Ernst, Geschichte der Sternkunde (Berlin, 1931)
Papers:
Luce, Stephen B., ‘Albert Rehm’, in American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 54, no. 3, p. 254 (Jul–Sep 1950)
Neugebauer, Otto, ‘The early history of the Astrolabe. Studies in ancient Astronomy IX’, in Isis, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 240–256 (Aug 1949)
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br /> Théofanidis, Jean, ‘Sur l’instrument en cuivre dont des fragments se trouvent au Musée Archéologique d’Athènes et qui fut retiré du fond de la mer d’Anticythère en 1902’, in Praktika tes Akademias Athenon, vol. 9, pp. 140–154 (Athens, 1934)
Chapter 3
Books:
Berthold, Richard M., Rhodes in the Hellenistic Age (Cornell University Press, 1984)
Dumas, Frédéric, 30 Centuries Under the Sea (Crown, 1976)
Fox, Robin Lane, The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome (Penguin Books, 2006)
Plutarch, The Parallel Lives (Loeb Classical Library Edition, 1916)
Throckmorton, Peter (ed.), The Sea Remembers: Shipwrecks and Archaeology (Chancellor Press, 1987)
Papers:
Basch, Lucien, ‘Ancient wrecks and the archaeology of ships’, in The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration, vol. 1, pp. 1–58 (1972)
Bass, George F., Peter Throckmorton et al., ‘Cape Gelidonya: A Bronze Age Shipwreck’, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Ser., vol. 57, no. 8, pp. 1–177 (1967)
Davidson Weinberg, Gladys, Virginia R. Grace, G. Roger Edwards, Henry S. Robinson, Peter Throckmorton, Elizabeth K. Ralph, ‘The Antikythera Shipwreck reconsidered’, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Ser., vol. 55, no. 3 (1955)
Ermoupolites, Mr, ‘The amphorae of the Antikythera wreck’, in Naftiki Hellas, in Greek (Aug 1950)
Gibbins, David and Jonathan Adams, ‘Shipwrecks and maritime archaeology’, in World Archaeology, vol. 32, issue 3, pp. 279–291 (2001)
