Celestial computers of ancient Greece

Geminos was another astronomer who influenced the development of the Antikythera Mechanism. Geminos flourished in Rhodes in the first century BCE. His book, Introduction to the Phenomena, includes ideas that resemble the inscriptions in the Antikythera Mechanism on the names of the months; which years had 13 months, which month would be repeated in those years, and which months had 30 and which had 29 days. The scientists who studied the Antikythera Mechanism, reading its inscriptions, saw the hand of Geminos in the Antikythera device.

Geminos worked from a legacy of astronomical and scientific thought that mirrored the Greeks’ knowledge of the heavens.

The Greeks also developed mathematical astronomy from their observations of the sky. This and the clear insight of trigonometry in its applications to the problems of the heavens established the data for measuring the phenomena of the stars. Hipparchos in Rhodes and other scientists in different centres of scientific studies set up the infrastructure for building and using Antikythera Mechanism-like machines.

The Korinthos/Syracuse case for this development has the advantage of evidence etched right on the back of the Antikythera Mechanism. The names of the months inscribed in the computer are names of months one finds in the calendar of Korinthos and its colonies, including Syracuse, home of Archimedes. Seven of those names are identical to the names of the months in the calendar of Tauromenion in Sicily founded by Greeks from Syracuse in the fourth century BCE.

All the cycles in heavens, especially those of the sun and the moon, were captured in the Antikythera Mechanism. The Greeks used their mathematics, especially geometry, to simulate astronomical phenomena, creating an accurate universe with gears.

Could it be that Hipparchos who explained why the moon changes speed while zooming around the earth, created the first astronomical computer, something like the Antikythera Mechanism? It’s quite possible he did, but Archimedes is a more reliable candidate because he built a planetarium and, more than that, he, like Aristoteles, was crucial in the making of the Greek golden age of science. He measured curved surfaces and applied mathematics for the study and understanding of nature. He deciphered the book of the cosmos and became the model for Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.

If Archimedes did not build the prototype astronomical computer, its designer was clearly indebted to him.

The Greek physicist Antonis Pinotsis studied the coins of Rhodes and he noticed an interesting evolution in the ray-crowned head of the god Sun/Helios on the Rhodian coins that harmonised with the advances in the astronomical knowledge in the island. That is a great insight. However, even if that observation is accurate, and in all likelihood it is, science and advanced technology in the Alexandrian era became Panhellenic, spreading fast from polis to polis, possibly from Syracuse to Rhodes or from Rhodes to Korinthos.

Thus, the Antikythera computer predicted lunar and solar eclipses and tracked down the movement of the moon and the sun and the other planets. In addition, it was a calendar for the most important agricultural and religious events in the Greek world. That calendar, for example, helped the Greeks to offer the same sacrifices to the gods at the same times of the year.

The scientists who studied the computer concluded that it was “a microcosm illustrating the temporal harmonisation of human and divine order”.

The roots of the Antikythera Mechanism are deep in Greek culture.

Platon, one of the fountainheads of Greek thought, loved more than theory. He admired the mathematical nature of craftsmanship. Indeed, he was a mathematician. Without counting, measuring and weighing, Platon said, arts and crafts would be pretty much worthless. Men would have to resort to conjecture and guesses in dealing with each other and in doing things.