Computer Provides More Questions Than Answers

"If they needed to know when eclipses would occur, and this related to the rising and setting of stars and related them to dates and religious experiences, the mechanism would directly help," said Yanis Bitsakis, a physicist at the University of Athens who co-wrote the Nature paper. "It is a mechanical computer. You turn the handle and you have a date on the front."

Building it would have been expensive and required the interaction of astronomers, engineers, intellectuals and craftspeople.

Charette said the device overturned conventional ideas that the ancient Greeks were primarily ivory tower thinkers who did not deign to muddy their hands with technical stuff. It is a reminder, he said, that while the study of history often focuses on written texts, they can tell us only a fraction of what went on at a particular time.

(Imagine a future historian encountering philosophy texts written in our time -- and an aircraft engine. The books would tell that researcher what a few scholars were thinking today, but the engine would give them a far better window into how technology influenced our everyday lives.) Charette said it was unlikely that the device was used by practitioners of astrology, then still in its infancy. More likely, he said, it was bound for a mantelpiece in some rich Roman's home. Given that astronomers of the time already knew how to calculate the positions of the sun and the moon and to predict eclipses without the device, it would have been the equivalent of a device built for a planetarium today -- something to spur popular interest, or at least claim bragging rights.

Why was the technology that went into the device lost?

"The time this was built, the jackboot of Rome was coming through," Edmunds said. "The Romans were good at town planning and sanitation but were not known for their interest in science."

The fact that the device was so complex, and that it was being shipped with a quantity of other luxury items, tells Edmunds that it is very unlikely to have been the only one ever made.

Its sophistication "is such that it can't have been the only one," Edmunds said. "There must have been a tradition of making them. We're always hopeful a better one will surface."

Indeed, he said, he hopes that his study and the renewed interest in the Antikythera Mechanism will prompt second looks by both amateurs and professionals around the world.

"The archaeological world may look in their cupboards and maybe say, 'That isn't a bit of rusty old metal in the cupboard.' "