Workings of Ancient ‘Computer’ Deciphered

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Workings of Ancient ‘Computer’ Deciphered



Wow... this this thing looks like something out of Tomb Raider...

Ah yes, the Antikythera Device. Saw a long programme concerning ancient inventions, and it was prominently featured. Seems the ancients were quite a bit smarter than we give them credit. They weren't primitive, but easily as smart as are today. I would say that the Antikythera Device is easily comparable to the Norden Bombsight.

What is that thing exactly?

It's a machine to predict moon phase, and date. Supposed to be around 2,500 years old, and has very intricate toothed gears that when the front dial is turned, show the details of the time chosen. Sounds odd, but it was quite valuable to ship's captains who used the moon and stars to navigate.

Who had the technology to make this thing in 500 B.C.?

Either the Alterans or maybe a Gould System Lord.

Yeah, no joke.

This device looks post-industrial to me, the kind of machine built by other machines. Maybe it's an object found in the past but orginating from our future, like Data's head in that TNG epp called Time's Arrow. Or maybe it's hard evidence of interdimensional travel, like those Flying Rod things.



Or maybe it's a hoax. A clever hoax, but a hoax nonetheless. Peraonally I dislike this scenario.

This is certainly a striking device, but the ancients could be clever.

It reminds me of the Difference Engine, the Gilded Age quasi-computer invented by Babbage that was never built because the technology to build it did not exist. For anybody into cyberpunk novels, Bruce Sterling wrote a novel where the Difference Engine is actually built, creating a very different Information Age around 1900. There are several other examples of mechanical calculation devices from the 18th and 19th centuries, including Hollerith's tabulating device invented to speed up the tabulating of the US Census around 1890. That device was actually electromechanical, with census data recorded on punchcards of the type popular in early electronic computing, then fed into the machine which used electric current to "read" then and move dials. The company that manufactured the machines evolved into IBM, and in the 1930s a number of the devices were sold to the Nazis for computing the resources necessary to carry out the Final Solution.

Also, it's apparent that the Greeks had a far more advanced civilization than they are typically given credit for. They invented a form of fire that burned while wet, so it could be floated towards an enemy's wood ships. The descriptions of Greek Fire sound an awful lot like napalm, which officially wasn't invented until the 1930s. Napalm was intended to be an antipersonnel weapon, since it stuck to the skin and burned it, disabling the target. In the early 1990s, after the collapse of communism, the Russian napalm stockpiles were used to make matches. The matches had disturbing qualities-they couldn't be put out, they burned so hot that they burned through glass and steel-so they failed to sell. But the napalm match sounds an awful lot like Greek Fire.

Greek advances in mathematics hint at a very advanced civilization-the Muslims built on Greek texts to invent algebra. Ancient Greece invented democracy, too. In many ways the Roman Empire was a post-Hellenic civilization, a degraded form of Greek culture that relied on military conquest and domestic suppression to keep things together. The Greeks seem to have been much less militaristic than the Romans, except maybe for Sparta.

Even weirder, there were two distinct Greek civilizations-the era hinted at in the Iliad and a few other sagas, followed by a mysterious gap in the records during which writing was either lost or records were not kept due to chaos, then suddenly the city-state appears about seven centuries after the Iliad era. Classic Greece apparently declined because of plagues, then the Romans took over, who spread their empire by military force and who copied classical Greek ideas. When stuff like this is found, it calls into question consensus history. The solution is not necessarily that aliens or time travelers gave it to them, but that the civilization was far more advanced than we thought.

Obviously there have been highly advanced civilizations before the start of Sumer 6,000 years ago. There's Stonehenge, a solar cycle computer built 4,000 years ago by an unknown civilization, and whose stones require a crane to lift. There are the Great Pyramids, which even we can't reproduce. Then there's the Coso Geode, which for all the world resembles a spark plug. Clay jars that apparently served as batteries have been discovered in Egypt. Maps exist that show a land bridge in the Bering Strait and Antarctica without ice, apparently copied from much older maps that are now lost.

There's Harappan writing, which we can't decipher. There's vitrified stone, which indicates heat so intense that the only way to achieve it today is via nuclear technology. Then there's sagas from India that talk of flaming arrows that sound like nuclear missiles. All this indicates that the standard version of history-hunter gatherer tribes until 10,000 years ago, then small agricultural villages until 6,000 years ago-is flat out wrong.

Greek fire wasn't even Greek in the sense that this artifact is; it dates from the Byzantine Empire some 1000 years later.