Daily Archives: 17/09/2013

I watched an interesting documentary on the Antikythera mechanism  yesterday. You’ll probably be aware of its existence as a corroded, but obviously complex, artifact retrieved from an ancient shipwreck a century ago. Within my own memory, it was an obscure object that raised the mystery of whether ancient Greeks could really have produced such a sophisticated geared mechanism, or whether it was recent, or alien. Now, through modern technology and some really hard work, its function is now known in some detail, and its inscriptions deciphered.