![]() (Image credit: Nikos Giannoulakis/Hellenistic Ministry of Culture and Sports/Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece) This massive marble head found by the latest excavations at the Antikythera wreck site is thought to represent the Greek demigod Heracles. The user winds the mechanism forwards to the desired date, as shown on one of its calendars," Tony Freeth, a researcher with the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, wrote in a paper published in 2014 in the journal PLOS One (opens in new tab). "Suppose a user of the Antikythera Mechanism wants to check eclipse predictions for a particular month some years ahead. The back of the mechanism had dials showing the Metonic cycle (a 19-year cycle after which the phases of the moon occur on the same days of the year), the Callippic cycle (a period of 76 years, equal to four Metonic cycles), the Olympiad cycle (when the Olympics were held every four years), the Saros cycle (a period of more than 18 years between lunar eclipses) and the exeligmos (a period of more than 54 years, or three Saros cycles).īetween the front and back of the mechanism were a vast array of gears, designed in such a way that all the dials would depict the correct timing of all the cycles. The authors of the Scientific Reports article found that someone viewing the front of the mechanism would have seen dials that showed the movements of the moon, sun, lunar nodes (points where the moon's orbit crosses the ecliptic, the path the sun appears to take through the constellations), Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the Zodiac calendar. (Image credit: LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP via Getty Images) More pieces of the Antikythera Mechanism at the Archaeological Museum in Athens. What did the Antikythera mechanism look like? The mechanism represents "a level of technology exceeding anything else of the kind for which we have either physical remains or detailed descriptions from antiquity," Alexander Jones, a professor of the history of the exact sciences in antiquity at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, wrote in his book " A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World (opens in new tab)" (Oxford University Press, 2017). The mechanism used "cycles from Babylonian astronomy, mathematics from Plato's Academy and ancient Greek astronomical theories," the researchers wrote. This has enabled them to learn more about how the mechanism worked.ĬT scans "revealed inscriptions describing the motions of the sun, moon and all five planets known in antiquity and how they were displayed at the front as an ancient Greek cosmos," the researchers wrote in the Scientific Reports article. ![]() The recovered fragments of the mechanism contained writing and inscriptions, and over the past two decades, scientists have been able to read more of these Greek inscriptions using high-tech imaging methods, such as 3D X-ray scanning. (Image credit: mikroman6 via Getty Images) when the Romans captured Syracuse, Sicily. An engraving illustration of the last hour of Archimedes, the mathematician who died in 212 B.C.
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