The Wreck Of The Antikythera,

was discovered in 1900 and divers worked on it till 1901,

in October 1900, a team of sponge divers led by Captain Dimitrios Kondos decided to wait out a severe storm hampering their return from Africa at the Greek island of Antikythera, diving into waters 45 meters deep they recovered a number of artifacts, amongst them were three flat, misshapen pieces of bronze now housed at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, but what were they? crammed inside, obscured by corrosion, are traces of technology that appear utterly modern: gears with neat triangular teeth (just like the inside of a clock) and a ring divided into degrees (like the protractor you used in school), nothing else like this has ever been discovered from antiquity, nothing as sophisticated, or even close, appears again for more than a thousand years,

scholars were unable to make sense of them, X-ray imaging in the 1970s and 1990s revealed that the device must have replicated the motions of the heavens, holding it in your hands, you could track the paths of the Sun, Moon and planets with impressive accuracy, one investigator dubbed it 'an ancient Greek computer', experts have been working to decipher inscriptions hidden inside the mechanism, in particular to understand the mechanism’s missing pieces, some destroyed, some probably still at the bottom of the sea, though the pointers on the front face don’t survive, Alexander Jones, a historian at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York, says an inscription reveals that they carried coloured balls: fiery red for Mars, gold for the Sun, also missing are the parts that drove the planetary pointers, leading to debate about exactly how they moved, because planets orbit the Sun, when viewed from Earth they appear to wander back and forth in the sky, the Greeks explained this motion with “epicycles”: small circles superimposed on a larger orbit, according to Michael Wright, a former curator at London’s Science Museum who has studied the mechanism longer than anyone, it modelled epicycles with trains of small gears riding around larger ones,

other inscriptions hint at where the mechanism was made, Paul Iversen, a classicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, reports that the calendar includes month names used in Corinth and its colonies in northwest Greece, a dial that displayed the timing of major athletic festivals, including the Olympics, lists Naa, a festival held in northwest Greece and Halieia, held to the south on the island of Rhodes, perhaps the mechanism hailed from Rhodes and was being shipped north, the ancient philosopher Posidonius had a workshop in Rhodes that could have been the source; according to Cicero, Posidonius made a similar model of the heavens in the first century B.C. but where ever the mechanism was manufactured, what a fantastic insight to the mechanics and knowledge of the natural world the people of that time must have had, for a greater look at the project and models made from it have a look here.