12.11. The Antikythera Mechanism
By Murray Maloney, 2 March 2014.
Overview. In 1900, a strange looking mechanical device was recovered from a shipwreck off of the island of Antikythera, Greece. Only in the 1970s was it determined that the device was an ancient mechanical computer that performed astronomical calculations; it had a manual crank control with a rate of one turn per day, forward or backward in time; its user interface presented calendrical, solar, lunar, and planetary positions.1
The Antikythera Mechanism persists through time as a collection of artifacts and a model of intellectual achievement. Thought to have been constructed by Archimedes at Syracuse or by Posidonius at Rhodes, the mechanism was recovered from a ship wreck near the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900-1. The significance of the find only began to become apparent in the 1970s when researchers applied modern scanning technology.2
What is being organized? The Antikythera Mechanism was an arrangement of resource descriptions that represented a classical Alexandrian sol-lunar calendar, complete with an almanac of the positions of the sun, moon, known planets, and specific stars over time. The resource descriptions are represented simply by the measurements ...
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