New findings on Antikythera Mechanism

reply to post by Maegnas


There are probably more of them out there, somewhere, but not many. They would have required precision work and those highly skilled slaves didn't come cheap. They would have been extremely "high tech," and only wealthy eccentrics like the Plinys would have them. It might be worthwhile going through as the unclassified bronze rubbish in the museums of the world to see if there are scattered bits and pieces of other such devices misidentified as: "Sword Hilt?" "Bridle Finial?" "Oil Lamp Base?" Just a thought.

Originally posted by Maegnas
Thanks for bringing this back to "life", Harte!

Maegnas,

I didn't bring it back to life. I started the thread but someone else necroposted.

I have considered going back to the few threads I've started here and "bumping" them. It seems like when I start one, it's not "fringey" enough to go more than a page or so.

I have a thread here about precisely dating the eruption of Thera. I though it was fantastic. I had maybe 3 other people post in it.

That idiotic "documentary" "Exodus Decoded" came out right after that. The guy that made it had to be angry, his timeline (which he'd already monkeyed with to make it fit) was much further off than what he claimed on his show.

I thought it telling that the show was released with no disclaimer whatsoever when the entire premise was invalidated by this olive branch they found in the old ash on Santorini!

Originally posted by MaegnasMaybe it was a project that was never too widespread because of Roman "interference"?

I've very often thought the same thing.

Originally posted by Maegnas Or, as someone else said above, maybe it was too damned expensive to make more of them (surely, navigators would love to have one but could they afford one?).

No question it was expensive, but I don't think it would be much use as a navigational aid, unless there's something I don't know about it. It wasn't a timepiece but it was sort of a calendar.

As an aside, the Tower of the Winds in the Roman Forum in Athens is thought (by some) to have possibly housed a mechanism on par with the Antikythera device. The tower is thought to have been built in 50 BC, which is well after the Roman conquest but some researchers think it might predate that by a hundred years or so, putting it in a period where it would have been built by the Greeks (and coincidentally in the same timeframe as the Antikythera mechanism.)

There's no remains of any such mechanism there now and I can't remember why some people think this, but I do remember reading about it somewhere.

Wiki has a listing of technologies developed by the Greeks (pre-Roman) that'll knock your socks off. Click here.

Harte

[edit on 8/5/2010 by Harte]

Most of them I knew about (being Greek helps! ). There is one, could be just a rumor though, that was not on that list.

I had read, can't remember where, about the automatic doors. They were mostly used in temples, as a sign that the god that was worshiped there accepted the visitor. What I read is that, in some temples, there were also statues that, if offered money (or some burnt offering, not sure which was it), sprung olive oil or some other kind of oil (perhaps scented, maybe an ethereal kind of oil?) from their palms. Have you ever heard of anything like that?

Originally posted by Maegnas
Most of them I knew about (being Greek helps!

). There is one, could be just a rumor though, that was not on that list.

I had read, can't remember where, about the automatic doors. They were mostly used in temples, as a sign that the god that was worshiped there accepted the visitor. What I read is that, in some temples, there were also statues that, if offered money (or some burnt offering, not sure which was it), sprung olive oil or some other kind of oil (perhaps scented, maybe an ethereal kind of oil?) from their palms. Have you ever heard of anything like that?

Yeah, I remember seeing something about it on the Discovery Channel once.

Harte

reply to post by Mad Simian


What I find the most interesting in that article is that the mechanism supports a belief I have placed faith in the last couple years when I started to really study calendars and time and seasons/cycles. It says that the first day of a new year is observed when the first new moon cycle starts after Spring Equinox.

Today some religions have confused what our ancestors considered a 'new moon' from what astronomy now determines as 'new moon'.

Our ancestors considered a 'new moon' the first sign of the silver thin crescent in the night sky after the day or two of 'dark moon' phase which is the same as 'no moon'. Every month we have a day or two that we can not observe the moon in the sky and this follows with a sighting of a thin crescent low in the western night sky. Today, there are still those in Jeresalum that do it this way and they wait for the new moon sighting to start each month and to observe their first day of a new year.

But some are confused and use the 'new moon' definition that astronomers have defined which to astronomers 'new moon' is when the moon and sun are in alignment or conjunction (which to our ancestors would of been the time of 'no moon' or dark moon). Many calendars that SAY OR THINK they are using the true old system of the moon to determine the start of months and the start of a year are not following the true definition of new moon.

For the last 2 years, I have observed the spring equinox with a prior 2 weeks at least of fasting from meats (no Im not religious) and then have awaited the first sighting of a new moon for the start of a seasonal year. This observance in my opinion, helps a person get in sync with nature and its cycles and orders, as well as can help one know to plant early or late.

So I was glad, in short, to see this observed on this mechanism

Originally posted by Harte

Originally posted by Maegnas
Most of them I knew about (being Greek helps!

). There is one, could be just a rumor though, that was not on that list.

I had read, can't remember where, about the automatic doors. They were mostly used in temples, as a sign that the god that was worshiped there accepted the visitor. What I read is that, in some temples, there were also statues that, if offered money (or some burnt offering, not sure which was it), sprung olive oil or some other kind of oil (perhaps scented, maybe an ethereal kind of oil?) from their palms. Have you ever heard of anything like that?

Yeah, I remember seeing something about it on the Discovery Channel once.

Harte

I know they discussed these particular things on Ancient Discoveries, which is the same show that they have the Antikythera Mechanism being hoisted out of the water by a hand underneath as a start to the show.

The series has had many interesting things in it and I often wondered if the embellish much on that show or stick to facts. The show is presented in such a way that it seems like facts, but have never been sure for certain.

The automatic doors they talked about on the show were an interesting design, and according to the show may have been set at specific intervals to allow the worshipers into and out of the temples, and if I remember it correctly it was through the use of ropes and pulleys and counterweights.

The dispensers (vending machines is the first thought that came to my mind when watching the show) were operated when an offering was made, some it was when food was put into the hands of the statues, the weight of the food in the hands would cause the activation of the machine, the food was dropped from the hands into the basket and a pre-measured amount of liquid was dispensed (I don’t remember what the liquid was, but it may have been different for each temple that had this type of setup. If I remember right there was description of one of these that accepted coins as an offering through a slot, but that may have been just a suggestion by the writers of the program.

Again, I do not know if the show used just facts or if they embellished a bit, but these were indeed interesting things.

[edit on 8/9/2010 by AlienCarnage]

I'm bumping this one because it is so interesting, and was left hanging. Does anyone have any more information, or updated threads on both the translation of the writing and the device itself? Thanks.

Originally posted by triplescorpio
okay i am totally hooked whaty the hell did they find we all know its amazing contraption athousand years ahead of whta we presume but the library of aleaxandria is gone and with it two tousand years of knowledge that s from jesusu till now as comparison think of it we are in outer space . think where we would be with the library of knowledge??????????????????

I wouldn't worry too much about it. Yeah, a lot of stuff was destroyed, but you can bet that a lot of stuff got out -- the best stuff -- and was squirreled away and as a result we have a lot more than we probably lost. And more of it will probably turn up in the future. Sure, it would be nice to have some Greek plays that were lost, but when was the last time you read a Greek play?

Time goes on.

Originally posted by Blue Shift

Originally posted by triplescorpio
okay i am totally hooked whaty the hell did they find we all know its amazing contraption athousand years ahead of whta we presume but the library of aleaxandria is gone and with it two tousand years of knowledge that s from jesusu till now as comparison think of it we are in outer space . think where we would be with the library of knowledge??????????????????

I wouldn't worry too much about it. Yeah, a lot of stuff was destroyed, but you can bet that a lot of stuff got out -- the best stuff -- and was squirreled away and as a result we have a lot more than we probably lost. And more of it will probably turn up in the future. Sure, it would be nice to have some Greek plays that were lost, but when was the last time you read a Greek play?

Time goes on.

Triplescorpio got a little overexcited there. The Library only existed (intact) for around 300 years.

It contained works from around the time period of its existence, primarily. It is unlikely in the extreme that it contained any works whatsoever pertaining to Ancient Egypt (except, of course, we call the time period of the library itself "ancient" now, and it was in Egypt, although it was a Greek library.)

Harte

reply to post by Harte


Hey Harte

Our friend can look up the Pinakes

The material held by the LA were:

Rhetoric, law, epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, medicine, mathematics, natural science and miscellanea. See below was a more detailed list

It was studied and looked at for centuries and many writers commented on the items and scrolls found within it (which is why we know what was there in some cases), the Roman's in particular liked weird things and a lot of the crazy geographical and 'peoples' stuff in the later Roman works may have come from sources within that library. (see Pliny's works)

This site below has a bit more information in it. A lot of work on what was in the library was done in the 19th century and is in French and German language publications from that period

Link to the Pinakes

There was an Egyptian part of the Lib too - however it is unclear as to how much was actually there.

Egyptian documents in the LA

The following comes from

Link

I had difficulties getting this into the ex-text box without crushing it so I'll beg for mod consideration and post it straight in

A. Greek :

I Poetry : Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Anakreon, Simonides, Pindar, Bacchylides, Callymachus, Apollonius, Theocritus, Aratos.

II Drama Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Menander, Straton (com.).

III Criticism Zenodotus, Aristophanes (of Byz.), Aristarchus (of Samothr.), Aristonicus.

IV Philosophy Pre-Socratics (e.g. Anaxmander, Parmenides, Xenophanes, Heraclitus), Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Zeno, Epicurus, Pyrrhon, Panaetius, Philon (Alex.), Apollonius (of Tyana), Plotinus.

V History Hecataeus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Ephorus, Hecataeus (Abdera)…

VI Science Original exploration reports, Eudoxus (Cnid.), Euclid, Aristarchus (Samos), Straton (Lampsacus), Eratosthenes, Megasthenes, Patroclus, Archimedes, Apollonius (Perga), Hipparchus (Nicaea), Cl. Ptolemy, Theon, Hypatia.

VII Medicine Corpus of Hippocrates, Herophilus (anatomy), Erasistratus (veins), Callimachus (med.), Sarapion, Heracleides (Tarentus), Rufus, Apollonius Mys, Galen.

B. Non-Greek :

Egyptian sacred records, Manethon, Egyptian manuals on astronomy, instruments, medicine; Berossos (Babylonia), Persian religion, Hebraic scriptures, Buddhist writings….

I had bumped this thread to see if the OP or anyone has any updated data on the translations of the Antikythera Mechanism or further information on the mechanism itself. This is one that should be taught in schools.

Originally posted by Aleister
I had bumped this thread to see if the OP or anyone has any updated data on the translations of the Antikythera Mechanism or further information on the mechanism itself. This is one that should be taught in schools.

Did you see the recent documentary on PBS? It was on a couple weeks ago it was just kind of a recap of what they learned but it was really exciting... fascinating device and smoking gun evidence of secret societies and occult knowledge!

Here's a sneak peak of it hopefully someone will put it up on Youtube soon.

www.youtube.com...

reply to post by Hanslune


Thanks for the link, which I remember you providing before.

Berossus and Manetho were contemporay to the Library (more or less.) This is what I meant when I said no "Ancient Egyptian" writings or records. It wasn't ancient to them.

Harte

Originally posted by Harte
reply to post by Hanslune

 

Thanks for the link, which I remember you providing before.

Berossus and Manetho were contemporay to the Library (more or less.) This is what I meant when I said no "Ancient Egyptian" writings or records. It wasn't ancient to them.

Harte

True

Yep the Greek-E period would have had people conversant in both langauges - an aside I wonder how well an E of the LA period could read the writings of the earliest dynasties?

reply to post by TheKeyMaster

No, I hadn't heard of the documentary, thanks for the info. The youtube preview indicates some of the words on the mechanism are "moon" or lunar, and that it predicted eclipses.

Originally posted by AlienCarnage
I have heard this referred to as an ancient computer; I myself have occasionally called it this. I personally think that this is an improper description of the object, it is more like a mechanical calendar.

Since we have only found one such device, thus meaning it was more than likely a one off device, the question however is this, why was it a one off device? Did the device not work properly, and the creator of the device never got around to improving upon his design? Was this a prototype and something happened to keep the creator of the device from making more of such devices? Did the creator of the device build it for a specific purpose and had need for only one of this device? Or is it just simply this was just an interesting experiment and nothing more?

Perhaps it was too expensive in man hours to make anymore? each cog tooth cut by hand?

reply to post by Aleister


Here's another commercial for it..

www.youtube.com...

Edit:

Just found the full show here

www.pbs.org...