The maker or workshop is unknown; scholars have suggested links to astronomical traditions but these are unproven
Plate 023
c. 200–100 BCE
Greek world; found off the island of Antikythera
No photograph is shown for this exhibition. The museum displays an image only where it can show the object honestly.
About this date
The device was recovered from a shipwreck in 1901. Its date of manufacture is estimated from style, inscriptions and the wreck’s cargo.
About credit
No maker is recorded, and no similar device survives from antiquity. Suggestions about who built it remain educated guesses.
Chapter II
The world before
Life before the Antikythera Mechanism
Astronomers predicted the heavens with calculation and tables. Instruments such as the astrolabe and sundial showed positions but did not compute them.
II
The human achievement
How it came about
Using X-ray imaging, researchers have found more than thirty surviving gears and inscriptions describing dials for the Moon’s phase, the zodiac and a calendar. A pin-and-slot arrangement reproduces the Moon’s changing speed.
III
Understanding the invention
How it works
The Antikythera Mechanism, explained in two steps.
01
Step 01 of 02
Gears as calculators
Meshing gear trains with set ratios turn one turn of the crank into proportional motions of the pointers.
Gears as calculators
A model of the sky
IV
The transformation
What changed for humanity
Understanding the past
It overturned assumptions about what ancient engineering could do.
Astronomy
It shows that models of the sky were built as machines, not only drawn on paper.
It shows that ancient Greek craftspeople could build precise geared machines about a thousand years before the next known mechanical clockwork in Europe.
V
Before and after
Life before and after The Antikythera Mechanism
Before
Working through tables by hand.
After
Turning a crank and reading a dial.
On larger screens, drag the divider (or use the arrow keys) to give more room to the world before or after.
