Posted on 03/14/2021 11:25:42 AM PDT by tbw2
The first anti-Kythera mechanism was in 480 B.C. The exiled Spartan Damaratos advised Xerxes to take 300 ships and seize the island of Kythera. That would cause the Spartans to rush home to defend their territory and Xerxes would easily beat the rest of the Greeks. Xerxes rejected the advice. So says Herodotus.
I’ve always wondered why there was only ONE ever found.
Unless the inventor/engineer perished in the shipwreck....................
My wild guess is, the craft was loaded with junk to be recycled, melted down, reused, etc, and by that time the mechanism was no longer keeping time, with the inventor long gone and unable to refabricate it or make the adjustments. They had no mass production for stuff like this.
Kings and emperors always wanted to know the future, so they had court astrologers. Maybe it was a government project. Sorta like the Manhattan Project of its time...................
It could easily have been a sort of subversive project to undermine the then-current superstitions about planetary associations with deities.
So, it had to be destroyed to keep the populace ignorant sheep?.................
No, it just stopped working, because the calculations used to build it turned out to be accurate for a limited window of time. Also, there's never a time when the populace are not ignorant sheep, that's part of their charm.
“Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Fascinating video at the site.........This is an amazing thing
Good point, you need a woman to do the cooking......
Unless the inventor/engineer perished in the shipwreck....................
Several likely reasons for this:
It was very expensive to make, a very high end luxury item. So,likely very few were made.
The most likely place of manufacture was Rhodes, in Asia Minor.
In the video by Dr. Jo Marchant it shows simpler devices, based on the same idea, were being referenced until about 570 AD. So the knowledge was not completely lost.
Then, we have the huge destruction of classic civilization by the Islamics. They destroyed almost all the classic, large cities in the area on the South side of the Mediterranean. That area included Rhodes.
The population was devastated as classic agriculture was destroyed. It dropped to 10% of what existed when the device was likely made, about 65 B.C.
Literacy across the classic world dropped as the Islamists turned the Mediterreanian into a pirate lake, and stopped production and export of pappyrus, the mainstay of Classic literacy.
The ability to write things down became very expensive, far beyond the price range of nearly everyone.
Excellent presentation, thanks for posting it!
Virtual Reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism (by M. Wright & M. Vicentini)
602,347 views
Aug 26, 2009
heritagekeymedia
21.2K subscribers
Virtual model of the (still) mysterious Antikythera Mechanism by Mogi Vicentini based on the theoretical and mechanical model by Michael Wright.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqhuAnySPZ0
Antikythera mechanism working model.mov
692,162 views
Nov 26, 2008
Jo Marchant
329 subscribers
Curator Michael Wright shows off his model of the Antikythera mechanism. The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek clockwork machine found in a shipwreck, that has taken more than a century to decipher. Wright’s handmade reconstruction is the first to include all the known features of this complex device. For more information see www.decodingtheheavens.com.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eUibFQKJqI
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