Dept. of Archeology: Fragmentary Knowledge: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
Other artifacts included bronze fittings for wooden furniture, pottery, an oil lamp, and item 15087—a shoebox-size lump of bronze, which appeared to have a wooden exterior. Inside were what seemed to be fused metal pieces, but the bronze was so encrusted with barnacles and calcium that it was difficult to tell what it was. With so much early excitement focussed on the sculptures, the artifact didn’t receive much attention at first. But one day in May, 1902, a Greek archeologist named Spyridon Staïs noticed that the wooden exterior had split open, probably as a result of exposure to the air, and that the artifact inside had fallen into several pieces. Looking closely, Staïs saw some inscriptions, in ancient Greek, about two millimetres high, engraved on what looked like a bronze dial. Researchers also noticed precisely cut triangular gear teeth of different sizes. The thing looked like some sort of mechanical clock. But this was impossible, because scientifically precise gearing wasn’t believed to have been widely used until the fourteenth century—fourteen hundred years after the ship went down.
Wow. I'd heard of the Mechanism back when it was getting some notoriety for being cited by Erich von Daniken as evidence of ancient astronauts.
But this amazes me – using high resolution X-Ray tomography, the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project has been able to decipher many of the inscriptions on the mechanism, almost as if the device's user manual was deliberately engraved on the brass plates and fittings that make it up. It's pretty clearly an astronomical calculation device that can predict solar eclipses and show the position of the sun, moon, and 5 planets at any almost date in the past or future.
And they have been able to estimate what it might have looked like:
It's amazing and sobering to think that ancient technology was as advanced as this before the long fall; it would be another thousand years or more before Western civilization was capable of producing anything similar to this.
There are still thousands of inscriptions on the fragmentary Mechanism to be deciphered, but it's possible that this is the very device mentioned by the Roman philosopher Cicero after a visit to a Greek school of astronomy.
