The Antikythera Mechanism: Personal Encounters with the ‘First Computer’
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. — William Blake
The Antikythera Mechanism, discovered by a sponge diver in a shipwreck in 1900, is often called the first computer. (A New Yorker article on the device notes, “In size, [the reconstruction] is startlingly similar to a laptop computer, though a bit thicker.”) While the term ‘computer’ has been contested on the grounds that the device can calculate but cannot be programmed, this intriguing artifact, probably created sometime between 200 and 100 BCE and made up of over 30 bronze gears in a wooden box, is impressively complex and accurate. Nothing of its nature would be created again until the astronomical clocks of the Renaissance period, some 1500 years later.
For decades, it confused scholars. Many guessed at its use or theorized its engineering, agreeing that its purpose probably had something to do with astronomy. But the most significant progress in its study didn’t happen until the last ten years, with the application of advanced X-ray technology. Building on a century of scholarship, a multidisciplinary team of researchers at the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project has worked to obtain vastly more comprehensive data than was previously available, to decipher the many inscriptions visible on the surface of the mechanism and on its gears and to understand how it worked.
Thanks to them, we now have a fairly complete idea of how the mechanism functioned and what it did. Inside the box was a complex assemblage of gears that worked together to calculate a variety of astronomical information. The outside of the box displayed this information on several dials, two on the front and five on the back. These dials represented five different ways of measuring time (Metonic cycles, Saros cycles, Callipic Cycles, eclipses, and Olympiads), while the front dials were marked with the 365-day Egyptian calendar and the Greek twelve-month Zodiac.
Pointers with “little spheres” representing the Sun, Moon, and five visible planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) indicated the positions of these celestial bodies as well as the phases of the moon. Additional markings indicated the rising and falling of certain constellations. The gear train for the moon is especially impressive; it uses a pin-and-slot device to represent the moon’s elliptical orbit. Two face-to-face gears with different centers of rotation were connected by a pin that slid back and forth in a slot, modeling variations in the speed of the moon’s orbit. Users could turn a crank on the side of the box in order to select a date. The dials would then display all of these various kinds of astronomical information for that date.
We don’t know where the mechanism came from or who made it. The ship that carried it was filled with a variety of luxury goods, including bronze statuary and glass from all over the Mediterranean. The evidence is inconclusive: the device’s inscriptions use month names from Corinth, and the names of local games on the Olympiad wheel suggest that it could have come from either northern Greece or Rhodes. Similar-sounding devices are reported by Cicero as inventions of Poseidonius of Rhodes and Archimedes of Syracuse (a city in Sicily).
While it is the only machine of its kind to survive, researchers are also fairly confident that it was not the first one made, mainly because it appears to have been produced with no mistakes. Others like it were probably scavenged for bronze; this lucky mechanism was saved from being melted down and reused by being conveniently lost at the bottom of the ocean.
So, with some limitations, we know how the device worked and what it did. But what was it for, and what does it mean? These questions remain unanswered, even by those working on the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. It could have been a “political tool… bound by military or political secrecy,” a navigational aid, or a teaching tool.
Dr. Tony Freeth is a founding member of the AMRP with a background in mathematics who has worked extensively on the gathering and analysis of these new X-ray images of the mechanism. When presenting his work recently at Stanford University, he listed additional possible interpretations of its purpose and context: “A rich person’s toy? An astrologer’s tool? A mechanical cosmos?” In the question-and-answer session following his presentation, Freeth asserted that the mechanism was technologically not far behind the proto-computers of the nineteenth century, but what was missing was the conceptual leap to apply this technology to mathematics rather than astronomy. He denied, however, that the mechanism could have been intended for astrology, insisting on its purely scientific nature.
Better yet, in a paper coauthored by Freeth and Alexander Jones explaining the probable gearing of the planetary pointers, it is stated:
While the modeling of astronomical phenomena provided an obvious motivation for the development of such contrivances, it is interesting to speculate about other possible applications they might have had in antiquity, for example in purely mathematical calculating machines and in automata.
That’s right — even the mechanism’s leading experts are willing to suggest that it’s related to robots! And fascinatingly, although they are easily dismissed, two of the frequently asked questions included on the AMRP website are “Is its existence evidence of time travel?” and “Was it left by aliens?”
What interests me is this imaginary, speculative side of the mechanism. We don’t know, and may never know, what precisely the mechanism was used for, where it came from, who made it, or what other kinds of devices like it existed. But we do have analogs, both ancient and modern, that can give us some clue of what devices like this became in people’s imaginations.
The Antikythera Mechanism and its brethren keep popping up in my own life, at times unexpectedly and serendipitously. I first became aware of ancient miniature universes while reading the Dionysiaca of Nonnus (a poem and a poet that is nearly always underestimated, but that’s a topic for another time). This bizarre poem, written in the 5th century CE, describes the life of Dionysus (the Greek god of wine), his military campaign to India, and his eventual ascent to Olympus, but it also holds many tangentially related myths in its forty-eight books. In the sixth, Demeter (the goddess of grain) worries about her daughter, Persephone, who is on the verge of sexual maturity and has caught the lecherous eye of almost every Olympian God. Demeter consults Astraios, the god of astrology, hoping for some helpful piece of advice to safeguard her daughter’s future.
Astraios, assisted by the four seasons, reads Persephone’s future based on the date of her birth, using a strange device:
He lifted a round revolving sphere, the shape of the sky, the image of the universe, and laid it upon the lid of a chest. Here the ancient got to work. He turned it upon its pivot, and directed his gaze round the circle of the Zodiac, scanning in this place and that planets and fixed stars. He rolled the pole about with a push, and the counterfeit sky went rapidly round and round in mobile course with a perpetual movement, carrying the artificial stars about the axle set through the middle.
(Dionysiaca 6.64–73, trans. W. H. D. Rouse)
Unfortunately, he discovers through the device that Persephone’s rape is inevitable. The most common version of the myth is that she was abducted and raped by her uncle, Hades, but Nonnus follows an alternate version of the myth where the rapist is her father, Zeus, in the form of a dragon.
But what on earth, I wondered, was this device? And since when is there a god of astrology? Why would a god need to consult a psychic, and why would a divine psychic need a mechanical device to tell the future? H. J. Rose, who wrote the notes for the Loeb edition of Nonnus, dismisses the passage, scoffing that “to understand [Astraios’] activities it is necessary to have some smattering of his pseudo-science; Nonnos himself had little more.” Astraios appears in Hesiod as the father of the winds, but his role as psychic-god-for-consultation is, as far as I can tell, Nonnus’ own invention.
Months later, on a trip to Greece, I was turned away from the vase section of the National Archaeological Museum. It turned out the vase section closed at 3:00, while the rest of the museum stayed open much later. Budget cuts — you know how it goes. I was frustrated, because if they had posted that information at the entrance, I could have gone straight there instead of wandering around the sculpture floor for an hour and a half.
I came back downstairs, disappointed and directionless. To my left was a special exhibition about something called the Antikythera Mechanism. I approached grumpily. At first glance, it didn’t look like much: a corroded green cluster of gears, something you might see washed up on a beach near a garbage dump. But after reading a few of the information placards, it dawned on me that what I was looking at was exactly the device I had imagined in the hands of Astraios — that shape of the sky, that image of the universe. I forgot all about the vases.
Unfortunately, Mike Edmunds, another researcher with the AMRP, rejects Nonnus’ anecdote as a possible way of gaining insight into the nature of the mechanism on the grounds that
only the latest reference, the lamentable Egyptian-Greek poet Nonnus, mentions use of such a machine for astrology, although one suspects that his account is based on hearsay rather than first-hand encounter.
Edmunds may well be right about Nonnus’ second-hand knowledge, although his position seems based on a belief in a division between astronomy and astrology — science and superstition — that I doubt meant nearly as much in the ancient world as it does now. However, Nonnus was indeed writing centuries after the creation of the Antikythera Mechanism, and it is indeed unlikely that he had ever seen or used one himself.
But to reject Nonnus’ account is to miss the point. When speculating about devices about which we know so little, why wouldn’t we use all information we can to try and ascertain what people thought? From that angle, Nonnus can actually tell us quite a bit: that devices like the Antikythera Mechanism were at least suggestive of divination and clairvoyance, and that they were seen as powerful enough to be fit for operation by the gods. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise us — if, due to some natural disaster or other catastrophic event, contemporary society lost access to its most advanced technologies, it is easy to imagine the aura of reverence and magic that would develop around computers and smart phones.
Much to my surprise, I encountered the mechanism again a few days later at the port of Piraeus. It was here, in a location where eras and places collide — at the site of the ancient Athenian harbor, now one of the largest passenger and commercial ports in the world — that my favorite old computer found me again.
Stressed, hungry, and running short on time, I hustled through the port, marveling that my dock could be so far away, cursing my uncomfortable, nearly-defunct duffel bag. For some reason, I looked up. And there it was: an exquisite graffito juxtaposed it with Nike of Samothrace, the iconic headless statue of winged victory (also discovered in a shipwreck). In that image, the stars and the planets, the phases of the moon, once vast, made small and manipulable in an amazing feat of human ingenuity, were now large again, covering the side of a tall building.
I saw the graffito only a few months ago, in mid-June. Things were looking bleak for Greece, and the painting’s subtext came through loud and clear: this country is the birthplace of Western art and science, so how could Europe abandon us in our time of crisis? Or perhaps a more hopeful message: even when ships sink, even after the worst of storms, amazing things can be discovered. After all, it is unlikely that the Antikythera mechanism ever would have survived into our era if the ship transporting it had not sunk.
A while later, I encountered and clicked on (uncharacteristically, as far as you’re concerned) a clickbait article with a headline boasting “Wearing This Watch Is Like Wearing The Entire Galaxy On Your Wrist.” How could I resist?
The astronomically expensive (ha, ha — but seriously, it costs $245,000 to $333,000 depending on how diamond-encrusted you want it) watch made by Van Cleef & Arpels “consists of 396 tiny pieces and features a miniature replica of our solar system: Sun, shooting star and six bejeweled planets.” These are visually similar to reconstructions of the “little spheres” that graced the front panel of the Antikythera Mechanism.
The watch’s delightfully grandiose name is the Midnight Planétarium Poetic Complication. The article emphasizes both the technical impressiveness of the watch, which took Dutch watchmaker Christiaan van der Klaauw three years to develop and accurately represents the orbits of the planets, as well as its beauty and luxurious appearance. It even includes an opportunity for personalization: the wearer can set a special date upon which “the stone representing Earth will align right under a star that’s engraved on the sapphire crystal.”
It was just as Dr. Freeth said: a rich person’s toy, an astrologer’s tool, and a mechanical cosmos. The article sets up the Midnight Planétarium in opposition to smart watches, which it calls “nifty little creations that harness the power of modern technology and also look kind of sleek on your wrist,” as being “a different kind of cool.” Though somewhat vapid, this comparison accidentally touches on an important point that can elucidate the mysterious meaning of the Antikythera Mechanism. The Midnight Planétarium Poetic Complication and the smart watch are both, in different ways, miniature universes: tiny devices that represent and give access to the immeasurable. Infinity in the palm of your hand.
Imagine the Dutch watchmaker, alone in his workshop, meticulously crafting the 396 pieces of his “entire galaxy.” Is he not like Hephaestus in his forge — Hephaestus, god of fire, craft, and technology, who appears in Book 18 of the Iliad as the creator of both miniature worlds and amazing automata, if not both at once? At the request of Thetis, an ocean nymph and the mother of Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior in the Trojan War, Hephaestus makes a new shield that is at once a reliable defense and a fantastic work of art. It is covered in beautifully ordered pictures of the many aspects of human life, down to humble harvesters and joyful dancers and up to the earth, the sea, the sun, the moon, and the constellations; the shield has been noted as resembling a miniature version of the world. He is assisted in his labor by animate metal women of his own making, the earliest known representation of automata.
And are both the Dutch watchmaker and Hephaestus not unlike Archimedes, Poseidonius, or whichever unnamed genius it was who fitted together the more that thirty gears making up the Antikythera Mechanism? Or like the presumably divine creator of Astraios’ planetoscope? Or even like the Athenian artist, the man or woman who carefully sketched a recognizable Antikythera Mechanism on the wall, an accurate rendition of that oh-so-accurate model of the cosmos?
All this talk of computers and miniaturization makes me think of a joke I keep hearing. In response to the question of what about modern life would be hardest to explain to a person from the 1950s, someone posted on Reddit, “I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.” It’s all there: vastness, tininess, and, if you are inclined to make the connection, Freeth’s idea of powerful technology used for relatively trivial purposes.
We are now accustomed to holding infinities in the palms of our hands and filling every hour with eternities of activity, information, and efficiency. We are Hephaestus in the workshop, building smaller and more finely crafted worlds with each passing day. Whether we wish to understand the stars and their movements, to harness their predictive powers, to unlock their secrets, or to capture their beauty, we want to possess them — not only to see them, but to grasp them ourselves.
Marissa Henry is a graduate student in Classics at UC Berkeley who works on Greek poetry.
