The Mediterranean has been a busy maritime waterway since prehistoric times, but it is often a stormy sea; and, inevitably, an uncounted number of the ancient mariners’ vessels came to grief and finished their voyages many fathoms deep. A darkening of the sky, a sudden storm, and a majestic ship bound for Spain or North Africa or the coast of Asia Minor might capsize in a moment. The Mediterranean is littered with the remains of ships of all ages, going back to the dawn of shipping some four or five thousand years ago.
It was no secret that those vessels were down there, laden with treasure—gold and silver bullion, works of art, cargoes of pottery or weapons. The problem was to reach them, something that was almost impossible before the development of modern diving gear. In recent centuries fishermen would, from time to time, bring up some fragment of a statue, some slime-encrusted vase, to remind modern inhabitants of the region of the sunken ancient treasures in that sea, but such finds were few and far between.
Once diving bells and diving suits came into general use in the nineteenth century, it became more feasible to search the ocean floor for these ancient treasures, and many significant discoveries resulted. One of the most spectacular such finds came in 1900, when two Greek ships bearing divers returning from a sponge-gathering expedition off the coast of Tunisia were compelled by one of those Mediterranean storms to take refuge off the island of Antikythera, at the very tip of the Greek archipelago not far from Crete. While waiting for the storm to blow itself out the thrifty captain decided to look for marketable sponges right there, and sent a diver named Elias Stadiatis, equipped with a helmet and weighted boots, down 150 feet to the bottom. There Stadiatis found himself wandering in a confused tangle of statuary—a marble goddess, huge stone horses, and much more, dozens of statues, marking the site of some ancient shipwreck.
It was plainly a major archaeological find. The sponge-divers reported it to the Greek government, which, in November 1900, sent a Navy vessel equipped with the most modern diving equipment of the day to explore the site. Nine months of difficult and dangerous work produced a life-sized bronze head, two large marble statues, and many smaller pieces. Archaeologists determined that the ship bearing these treasures had gone to the bottom somewhere around the dawn of the Christian era on a voyage from Athens to Rome. The bronze statues could be dated, from their style, to the era of Socrates and Plato, about four hundred years before the time of the shipwreck. The marble ones were newer—first-century copies of much older Greek work. The leaden bases of many of the statues were bent and torn, as though the statues had been ripped up violently, and that led archaeologists to speculate that they might have been the booty of Roman marauders who looted the temples of Greece in 86 bc, under the dictator Sulla.
The statues were magnificent ones. But the most important single find of the Antikythera expedition was a battered and badly corroded lump of bronze that the archaeologists originally tossed aside as worthless. In 1902, Valerios Statis of the National Museum in Athens took a close second look and was startled to see that it had dials, gear-wheels, and inscribed plates. It was, in fact, a complex machine, which was—and still is—the only mechanical object that has come down to us from ancient Greece. Modern study has shown that it is nothing less than a highly complicated device for performing astronomical computations.
Discovering exactly what the mechanism’s purpose had been took many years. First, certain associated bits and pieces had to be inserted in the main body of the instrument. Then the rust and calcification had to be cleared away. The dials and inscriptions thus revealed left little doubt that it was some sort of astronomical device. For a long time archaeologists thought it was a navigational instrument, perhaps an astrolabe, an instrument used for fixing a ship’s position by the stars.
The task of cleaning the mysterious mechanism took more than half a century. In 1955, the Yale historian Derek J. de Solla Price, working in association with George Stamires, a specialist in ancient Greek inscriptions, finally succeeded in properly fitting the various fragments of the machine together, and realized that the instrument, whatever it was, was basically intact. Originally, they said, it must have looked rather like an old clock: a wooden box with hinged doors, containing the gears and dials. The wooden parts had vanished over the twenty centuries of submersion. But the rest of the device appeared to be complete.
Stamires was able to show that the lettering on the inscribed plates was in a style known to be no older than 100 bc and to have gone out of use around the time of Christ. And the words of the inscription supported this observation. They included some astronomical data similar to that compiled by a Greek named Geminos about 77 B.C. The mechanism provided a clear and indisputable way of dating the wreck.
Price and Stamires’s theory of what the thing had been used for became more controversial. One of the dials bore the signs of the zodiac, another the names of the months. As the gears turned, they said, the instrument would provide information about the risings and settings of the important constellations throughout the year. Other dials gave much more complicated astronomical data. Price and Stamires concluded that the machine was indeed some type of navigational instrument. But if it was an astrolabe, it was one that was far more complex in conception than any previously known astrolabe of the era.
Other scientists doubted that the first-century Greeks could have been capable of constructing what was essentially a mechanical computing machine, as Price and Stamires suggested it was, and their hypothesis was brushed aside. A couple of years ago, though, a team of British, Greek, and American researchers headed by the astronomer Mike Edmunds of the University of Cardiff, Wales, and the mathematician and filmmaker Tony Freeth, took a new look at the Antikythera gadget, making use of three-dimensional X-ray tomography and high-resolution imaging systems, and provided a startling confirmation of the device’s technological significance and a better understanding of its function.
Previously unseen inscriptions came into view, which appeared to relate to lunar and planetary movements. At least thirty bronze gear-wheels were identified, and there may have been as many as thirty-seven. A pin-and-slot mechanism linking two of the wheels produced a representation of the Moon’s elliptical journey around the Earth that was in accordance with the calculations of the Greek astronomer Hipparchos, who flourished in the second century bc and was the first to arrive at an understanding of the motions of heavenly bodies that approximates our modern ideas.
The new Antikythera findings suggest that the instrument—which was probably built between 150 and 100 bc, and might even have been the work of Hipparchos himself—does not seem to have been a navigational device, as most twentieth-century students of it had speculated, but could have been used to calculate calendars for planting and harvesting, or to set the dates of religious festivals according to the positions of the planets. We may never know its exact purpose. But what is not in doubt is that it demonstrates, as the recent researchers noted, “an unexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period,” far exceeding in complexity any similar instruments of the next thousand years. Not until the heyday of Arabic science around 900 ad did any such geared calendrical devices reappear. It would not be improper, really, to call the Antikythera mechanism the oldest known computer.
What it tells us is that the ancients may well have been far more advanced technologically than we ever suspected, and that the lucky survival of the Antikythera mechanism hints at the existence of a great range of Greco-Roman calculating devices, employed not only for calendrical work or astronomical studies but in their remarkable engineering accomplishments. The Greeks and the Romans, not having access to electricity, semiconductors, and wi-fi linkages, did not, of course, have computers of the sort that every six-year-old child uses today. But they may well have had—and it is a thought that should take today’s technological whizzes down a peg—all manner of intricate computational instruments, about which we know nothing, simply because they did not happen to come down to us in the archaeological record, and at the close of their great age much of what they knew was simply lost, not to be rediscovered for many centuries. How far their technological reach extended is still largely a matter for conjecture. We know a great deal about those great ancient civilizations, yes, but our knowledge very likely is just the merest sliver of the total story. As Derek de Solla Price put it, close to half a century ago, in the article that first revealed the Antikythera instrument to the scientific world:
The Antikythera mechanism was no flash in the pan, but was part of an important current in Hellenistic civilization. History has contrived to keep that current dark to us, and only the accidental underwater preservation of fragments that would otherwise have crumbled to dust has now brought it to light. It is a bit frightening to know that just before the fall of their great civilization the ancient Greeks had come so close to our age, not only in their thought, but in their scientific technology.
