Artifact in kythera7/8/2023 The Antikythera mechanism is currently in 82 pieces, representing about a third of the original structure. But Price’s work was unfinished when he died in 1983, without having figured out how the device actually worked. After an additional two decades of study, the first publication on the Antikythera mechanism was made in 1974 by physicist and historian Derek de Solla Price. Since all the other artifacts were more apparently worthy of conservation, the mechanism was ignored until 1951. The unique bronze-and-wood object was found with a shipload of marble, coins, glassware, and pottery in 1900. Giovanni Dall'Orto, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain This image shows the back of a replica Antikythera mechanism in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The Antikythera mechanism's significance wasn't recognized for 75 years. The ship’s path has been difficult to trace because the Aegean was an important and busy shipping area at this time. More recent research, though, suggests that the ship may have been en route to Rome from Turkey. In the same time period, the famous Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero mentioned a mechanical planetarium called a “sphere of Archimedes” that demonstrated how the sun, moon, and planets moved with respect to the Earth. A related theory is that the ship was carrying booty from the Roman general Sulla’s sack of Athens in 87–86 BCE. Three important Romans may have been involved in the Antikythera mechanism's transport.Īn astrophysicist at Athens University, Xenophon Moussas, theorized in 2006 that the boat on which the mechanism was found may have been headed to Rome as part of a triumphal parade for the emperor Julius Caesar in the 1st century BCE. Although that diver was actually fine, later exploration in the summer of 1901 caused the death of one diver and paralyzed two more from decompression sickness or "the bends.” 3. When the original diver surfaced with reports of artifacts, horses, and corpses, the captain assumed he had “raptures of the deep”-essentially, a drunkenness as a result of the nitrogen in the breathing mix piped into the diving helmet. In 1900, Greek sponge divers found the shipwreck, which was submerged nearly 150 feet, while wearing gear that was standard for the early 20th century-canvas suits and copper helmets. The first exploration of the wreck near Antikythera killed or injured three divers. The ship is assumed to be Roman and, when it sank just off the coast of the island in the middle of the 1st century BCE, it carried a huge number of artifacts dating back to as early as the 4th century BCE. Located in the Aegean Sea between mainland Greece and Crete, Antikythera is an island that literally means “opposite of Kythera,” another, much larger island. The Antikythera mechanism was found in a Roman-era shipwreck and named after a Greek island. Here are 15 facts about the strange object, sometimes called “the world’s first computer.” 1. The mysterious Antikythera mechanism, an unusual artifact found in an ancient Greek shipwreck, has intrigued archaeologists, classicists, historians, and the public for decades.
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