A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World by Alexander Jones

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World by Alexander Jones Courtney Roby Alexander Jones. A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 288. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-19-973934-9. The astronomical computer known as the Antikythera Mechanism is of course no stranger to the attentions of both scholarly and popular authors. However, the Mechanism has not been explored at book length by any author with genuine expertise in the Mechanism and the astronomical systems it represents since Derek de Solla Price’s groundbreaking Gears from the Greeks: The Antikythera Mechanism—a Calendar Computer from ca. 80 B.C. (New York 1975). The popular-science writer Jo Marchant’s freewheeling Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-old Computer and the Century Long Search to Discover Its Secrets (London 2008) sacrifices technical and historical accuracy in service of a fast-paced adventure story (interested readers can find a long list of corrective “comments” on the website of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project). Meanwhile, Jian-Liang Lin and Hong-Sen Yan’s Decoding the Mechanisms of Antikythera Astronomical Device (sic, Heidelberg 2009) is but another in Springer’s rapidly inflating series of unreliable studies in ancient science and technology written by non-specialists. A Portable Cosmos represents a most satisfying effort to bridge the gap between the broad popular interest that the Mechanism commands and the [End Page 728] technical details of its mechanical and astronomical background. Jones begins with the recent history of the artifact itself: the account of the Antikythera shipwreck’s discovery (including useful context on the other artifacts retrieved from the wreck) and the subsequent waves of reconstruction and imaging that strove to render its fragments intelligible. The remainder of the text is devoted to detailed explanations of the Mechanism and the astronomical phenomena it modeled, breaking down the device’s complexities into individual chapters on the sun and moon, eclipses, the planets, and so forth. A final chapter opens the “black box” of the mechanism to explore the structures and materials of its internal gear systems, while an afterword on “The Meaning of the Mechanism” argues that the Mechanism’s purpose was fundamentally didactic (as opposed to a shipboard navigation system or an astrologer’s calculating tool), situating it alongside other astronomical models like the Archimedean sphaera Cicero describes. The result is a remarkably lucid transformation of the technical details of the Mechanism discovered by Jones and others into a cohesive, robust account of the artifact and its cultural context. Jones’s account is compelling and engaging, inviting the reader to “imagine examining [the Mechanism] for ourselves” (47), describing a sample lesson on calendrical calculations complete with instructions for manipulating the parts of the machine involved in the calculation, and so on. The resulting narrative will thus maintain the reader’s attention even though it is unsparing with technical details. Even readers with minimal prior study of ancient astronomy will want to follow Jones’s explanations of the calculations the Mechanism performed, simply because he makes their cultural stakes so clear. His account of the device’s calendar mechanisms, for example, is firmly rooted in the varied systems of games and festivals that demarcated the year in different parts of the Greek world. Jones draws on textual, material, and epigraphic evidence to populate not just the Mechanism’s cosmos, but also its oikoumenē, with dynamical systems whose movements really mattered to astronomers and laymen alike. Over the past few decades, as new imaging techniques have revealed more of the Mechanism, analyses and reconstructions of its systems have involved their fair share of controversy. Jones deftly weaves these controversies into his account, even in cases where his own views have changed over time, such as the question of what the names of the months inscribed on the calendar suggest about the Mechanism’s provenance. The resulting narrative fights popular assumptions that the process of deciphering the Mechanism has been a matter of proceeding from one truth revealed by new and better imaging techniques to the next, bringing the people and institutions involved in that process...