Not everyone realises it, but the sponges you use to wash your bum are so called and are that odd yellowish colour because real sponges - dried sea creatures - were once used for bathing. The sponges were collected by divers and as sponges in shallow parts became scarcer, diving for them became more and more dangerous. At the turn of the twentieth century, people started wearing copper helmets and using rubber pipes to dive to increasing depths – but without any notion of decompression sickness.
In late 1900, a group of these sponge divers chanced upon a wreck in the vicinity of the Greek island of Antikythera. They discovered a few bronzes and brought them and pile of coins, glass ware and other bits and pieces to the national archaeological museum in Athens, which dated the boat and its contents to about one century A.D.
About a year later, one of the archaeologists there noticed a gear among those odds and ends. Some research was done into it, but very little was published.
Sixty years or so passed and nothing much happened, until American historian of science Derek de Solla Price popped the gear into an X-ray unit. Since then, as increasingly powerful scanners and smart image processing techniques have become available, more information has been revealed. The object proved to be a complex mechanism consisting of dozens of gears – or rather: had been. It is now in 82 pieces and a few of the gears are missing. Scientists have spent a long time trying to figure out how it must have looked when it was complete. A majority of those scientists are coming to the Lorentz Center in Leiden this month for a conference on the Antikythera mechanism.
But what is it? It is an analog computer, or a mechanical calendar. The hands on the outside point to the positions of the planets and predict the times of solar and lunar eclipses. In 2008, it emerged that one of the rings contained the dates of the Pan-Hellenic Games, of which the Olympics were part. "So it was not a purely astronomical device; it had a social purpose too", explains organiser Niels Bos, who hopes to be awarded his doctorate for his work on the mechanism at Groningen.
What is exactly its social use? That is one of the questions to be discussed at the conference. Bos continues: "What is it? What exactly did it do? Where does it come from? What did it cost? Was it just a toy to show how rich or clever you were, or did the astronomers of the era use it for astronomical matters?"
And there’s another question: where are its relatives? Mike Edmunds, another of the Leiden conference’s organisers, told The Guardian in 2006 that "in terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than the Mona Lisa."We do not know of any other Greek object that comes close to the mechanism, but you don’t simply produce an analogue computer out of thin air. Just as organisms have an evolutionary background, technology must have one too. You have to learn how to manufacture gears, and what you can do with them. But if any techno-evolutionary predecessors of the Antikythera mechanism were ever made, archaeologists have yet to find them. Historians have never found any references to schools where someone could have learnt to make an object like that.
"Other mechanisms with gears and gear trains are only found in clocks in fourteenth-century Europe. It’s so far ahead of its time, it’s as if we have discovered a steam locomotive from the twelfth century", exclaims Bos. "And it is so complex and so detailed: there are no manufacturing faults in it. There must have been an awful lot of trial and error before it was right, so why can’t we find any evidence of that?
"The most important issue is what it tells us about our view of the ancient world. History books claim that the Ancient Greeks were the thinkers and philosophers and that the Romans were the engineers - they invented cement, built roads and aqueducts and united the world. The Antikythera mechanism reveals that the Greeks also had technology. We want to know what it can teach us about innovation in Ancient Greece, and that’s why we deliberately didn’t just invite Antikythera people: experts in ancient languages and in the history of Greece and modern clockmakers are coming too."
Writers of fiction have not been invited. A two-thousand year-old, anachronistic mechanism with mysterious functions could easily be the centre of a Da Vinci Code-like plot. There have been a few attempts, but without much success.
"There have been several Hollywood C films and a few episodes of television series about it. In one, the mechanism turned out to be the key to a pyramid in America which opened a bridge to another world – that sort of thing", Bos grins.
Swiss writer Erich von Däniken, famous for claiming that early man had contact with aliens, mentioned the mechanism in his bestseller Chariots of the Gods. Bos adds: "That might explain why no research was done on the mechanism for so long: people wouldn’t touch it for fear of harming their reputation."