Posted on 12/22/2010 2:50:38 PM PST by blam
It was designed to be portable.
It's no more complex than clocks of the 14th or 15th century.
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What you fail to comprehend is that the "Olympic calendar" explanation is simply a theory, based on little more than various scholars' suppositions.
There is no empirical evidence or written records that this device was ever used for that purpose. There are just as many scholars who believe that it must have been used for oceanic navigation.
That, again, is only a theory. No one knows for certain what it was used for, or who built it.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BASQUE AND AINU
And why not? It would have been the most valuable item on any seagoing vessel, and would have been well protected by the crew.
It's just a "clock" where the time of day is not the important element, but rather the seasons and days.
In that case, it could have been used to precisely figure the times for planting crops, which is a lot more critical an activity than figuring the next start date of the Olympics.
There's no doubt that whatever its purpose, the Antikythera mechanism was a device a thousand years ahead of its time. Whoever produced it had an understanding of mechanics and metering that were far, far advanced for the time. Even the ability to precisely machine the gearing and other internal parts was itself a level of sophistication unheard of in the ancient world.
I can't help but imagine that the device was produced for some extremely important use, given what it took to build it in that day. Crop seeding and oceanic navigation are about the only things I can think of that rise to that level of importance for an ancient people.
Also, within the framework of the Mediterranean, navigation is easily undertaken by looking at the Constellations. There's literally a sky map that tells you where all the major oracle sites are throughout the whole region.
What people didn't have was a precision instrument that told them the dates for religious obligations ~ that is, the Olympics.
This is not like the one on CBS or ABC. The real deal way back when involved worshiping the Greek gods.
The device computes a lot of other stuff as well.
Regarding cutting gears, the Greeks had been doing that for a good long while. They could make wire as well. They even had a coin operated holy water vending machine! They are thought to have invented the first useful high torque windmills to grind grain.
What happened to the Greeks is simple ~ Rome conquered them. Took away the best farmers to work in Italy and Libya. Then, taxed the heck out of them so they could not progress on to the Age of Industrialization. It took the Dark Ages to cure them of that problem, and then lately they got back into the high tax problem.
They'll never amount to much now.
That's the thing that really fascinates me about that mechanism - it had to have had precursors, but we know nothing about them. It's like this highly-advanced piece of machinery just appeared from nowhere.
Which is why I said, "oceangoing". I'm well aware that the ancients navigated the Mediterranean without the aid of compass and clock.
There's a lot of speculation these days that the ancients may have ventured much further to sea than is commonly assumed. To cross an ocean, you need a clock to plot your longitudinal position. The Antikythera mechanism might be such a device.
What people didn't have was a precision instrument that told them the dates for religious obligations ~ that is, the Olympics.
I just don't buy that. Tracking the days and months of the year were well understood long before the ancient Greek civilization arose. In addition to that, the ancients had portable mediums of information storage.
They simply did not need a device of this sophistication to know what month or day it was at any given time.
If this device was essential for tracking the days of the year in ancient Greece, there would have been hundreds, perhaps thousands of such devices in use at the time. Certainly depictions of them, mentions of them, and even some devices would have survived in the archaeological record. However, that's not the case. To date, only one example of this device has ever been discovered, and there are no depictions or mentions of them anywhere among ancient artifacts.
"That the Olympics were held every four years is well known, but some evidence for that assertion is not out of place. Ancient writers all refer to the Olympics as a 5-year period (in Greek, pentaeterikoi, Latin quinquennales). This might seem strange, but Greeks and Romans most commonly counted inclusively; that is to say:
------1-----------2-------3------4----------5
Olympiad------^-------^------^-----Olympiad
which we would call a four-year interval. NB: our way of counting implies a zero start, a concept both Greeks and Romans lacked. Since the Greek calendars all differed slightly, you might wonder how everyone managed to get to the games on time. The Pindar scholiast claims that for the early Olympiads, the festival was held alternately after 49 or 50 months, which is essentially equivalent to four years in a lunisolar calendar. This scheme makes perfect sense, because no matter what specific intercalary months the various cities did or did not decide to include, they could all simply count forward to 49 or 50. It also implies, by the way, that a rule of 8 years = 99 months was being used to determine this interval (although not that every Greek city used this formula for their own intercalations).
Since the Olympiad was a summer festival, it was eventually correlated to the Attic (Athenian) calendar, so as to begin on Hekatombion 1, which might imply a certain agreement about when intercalations should be added, or simply indicate Athenian cultural dominance.
Ancient historians date by Olympiad by giving both the number of the Olympiad and the year within the cycle, 1-4 (the Olympiad itself was held on year 1). Additionally, lists of Olympic winners were maintained, and the 3rd c. BCE writer Timaios compiled a synchronic list comparing Olympic winners, Athenian archons, Spartan kings, and the priests of Hera from Argos.
Olympiad 1,1 correlates to 776 BCE. We do not actually need to believe an actual festival was held on this date, but when Greek historians are writing in later times, they date their own events using this as the epoch. We can establish a precise correlation to the common era from a variety of different sources, but the most definitive comes from a passage in Diodorus, where he dates the year of a total solar eclipse to the reign of the Athenian archon Hieromnemon, which he also gives as Ol. 117,3. The only astronomically possible date for this event is August 15, 310 BCE, which fixes our epoch."
I think that's the same response that most people have to this discovery. It seems completely out of place for the time period from which it came, yet there it is.
Regarding precursors, did you see muawiyah's post #87? According to him, the ancient Greeks had a bit of expertise in this area:
Regarding cutting gears, the Greeks had been doing that for a good long while. They could make wire as well. They even had a coin operated holy water vending machine! They are thought to have invented the first useful high torque windmills to grind grain.
I did see his post - the holy water vending machine he mentioned was created by Heron of Alexandria, I think. Heron also created a device that could have been used to generate steam power with a few tweaks; but Heron came along a good 100-150 years after the estimated age of the Antikythera device. Just a tiny fraction of what the ancients knew has passed on to us.
They have been documented and dated to the second century AD. The father of modern pictoarcheology was called in to investigate them by our scout troop. After three years he rendered an opinion supporting Irish monks in pre pre-Columbian America.
Ainu were the remains of the ones who built the flying machines in ancient China I believe.
I completely agree, which is one reason I feel that it's time for the archaeological community to loosen up and begin acknowledging more of the unusual artifacts that are being found.
Many of the finds that the academic community rejects out of hand could go a long way to filling in the blanks in our knowledge of the ancient world.
It's time they let the artifacts tell humanity's story, and adjust their theories accordingly. Not the other way around.
It might have been something rare but there was enough knowledge around in 100 BC in one place to build something like that? I realize the Romans built all sorts of things but that would take the cake, especially so early.
Apparently, someone in that time had the knowledge and skill to build it. It was recovered from the debris of a shipwreck that was positively dated to the ancient Greek era.
It's one of the most enigmatic discoveries in history, and has baffled the scientific community for a long time now. Obviously, there's much we still don't know about the ancients and the extent of their technology.
Well we know that knowledge can be lost, see how long after the fall of the Roman empire it took for concrete to be rediscovered?
or just take a look at television for how far we’ve fallen.
>> Obviously, there’s much we still don’t know about the ancients and the extent of their technology.
Some overzealous ‘god-riddance’ managed to take much of that away.
I understand that it was the Arabs that ironically managed to document much of what they learned from the Greeks. The Christians later civilized the Barbarians and somehow managed to resurrect the techno movement the came back to life around the 17th century relying on the foundations abstracted by the Greeks. The monks of Ireland allegedly played a role in this but I forget how.
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