Posted on 06/10/2016 6:55:53 AM PDT by BenLurkin
A ten-year project to decipher inscriptions on the ancient Greek “Antikythera mechanism” has revealed new functions, including the first hint that the device was used to make astrological predictions. The writings also lend support to the idea that the gadget, often called the world's first computer because of its ability to model complex astronomical cycles, originated from the island of Rhodes.
Until now, scholars have focused on decoding the sophisticated array of gearwheels inside the 2000-year-old artifact.
The new publication tackles instead the lettering squeezed onto every available surface. “It’s like discovering a whole new manuscript,” says Mike Edmunds, emeritus professor of astrophysics at Cardiff University, U.K., who edited the special issue of Almagest in which the results are published.
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The spaces around the dials were filled with engraved text. AMRP researchers have now completed their efforts to read around 3,400 characters on the surviving surfaces.
Lead author Alexander Jones, a classicist at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York, estimates that the original mechanism probably held up to 20,000 characters.
The letters are tiny—some less than a millimeter tall—and often hidden beneath the surface of the corroded fragments. Jones and his colleagues used CT scans to reveal new sections of text and update previous readings. “We’ve made a big jump in terms of the quality of the inscriptions and their intelligibility,” says Jones. He and the AMRP will officially announce their results at the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation in Athens on June 9.
The new readings are “very valuable,” says Michael Wright, a London-based scholar and former curator of mechanical engineering at the London Science Museum who has spent decades studying the Antikythera mechanism independently. “We’ve got the most reliable readings yet of each piece of inscription.”
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
Very impressive technology, on several levels, for so far back in time.
For all we know they had devices that could process,view pictures using some base(pun intended) mechanical gears.
There would have been a pornography industry back then.
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