Sponge divers pulled one of the most extraordinary objects in human history off the seafloor near the Greek island of An...

Sponge divers pulled one of the most extraordinary objects in human history off the seafloor near the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900. The shoebox-sized bronze device they found, now called the Antikythera mechanism, could calculate the position of the sun, moon, and stars at any future point in time, and it was built over 2,000 years ago. The hand-cranked gearbox contained around 30 bronze gears and was covered in dials. When archaeologists first recovered it from the shipwreck, it had broken into dozens of pieces. Years of painstaking analysis, including 3D imaging technology, eventually revealed the inscribed text on its surface, which turned out to be a user guide written in ancient Greek. Alexander Jones, a professor of the history of science at New York University, described the breakthrough as transformative. Before the 3D imaging, researchers could only make out scattered words buried in noise and misread letters. After, they could read actual passages and understand what the device was instructing ancient observers to do. In 2014, scientists cracked the eclipse-prediction function. A four-turn spiral on the corroded machine used specific glyphs to mark the exact time and type of each eclipse. Lunar eclipses were marked with the glyph for Σ, short for the moon goddess Selene. Solar eclipses were marked with H, for the sun god Helios. The mechanism did not just flag when eclipses would occur. It calculated the level of obscuration, the angular diameter of the moon, and the moon's exact position during the event. Ancient historian Herodotus recorded that a solar eclipse around 585 BC, predicted by the philosopher Thales, stopped a war between two kingdoms outright. Their kings took the sudden darkness as a divine sign to lay down arms. A 20-minute documentary produced by the Greek Ministry of Culture accompanies the mechanism at various exhibitions and museums around the world. #Antikythera #AncientGreece #GreekHistory