Understanding the Antikythera mechanism

Abstract

In 1900, a party of sponge divers chanced on the wreck of a Roman merchant vessel between Crete and mainland Greece. It was found to contain numerous ancient Greek treasures, among them a mysterious lump of clay that split open to reveal ‘mathematical gears’ as it dried out. Constructed in roughly 150 B.C.E., this object is now known as the Antikythera Mechanism, one of the most enlightening artifacts in terms of revealing the advanced nature of ancient Greek science and technology. In 2005 we travelled to the National Archeological Museum in Athens to apply our Reflectance Imaging methods to the mechanism in the hopes of revealing ancient writing on the device. We were successful, and along with the results of Microfocus CT imaging, we are able to decipher 3000 characters compared with the original 800 known. This lead to an understanding that the device was a mechanical, astronomical computer capable of predicting solar and lunar eclipses along with other celestial events. This talk will overview both the imaging methods as well as what they reveal about the Antikythera Mechanism.