Project Overview
More than a hundred years ago an extraordinary mechanism was found by sponge divers at the bottom of the sea near the island of Antikythera. It astonished the whole international community of experts on the ancient world. Was it an astrolabe? Was it an orrery or an astronomical clock? Or something else?
Second paper on the Antikythera Mechanism published in science journal Nature
A new paper from the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (AMRP) is published in the prestige science journal Nature on July 31st 2008. It reveals surprising results on the back dials of the Antikythera Mechanism - including a dial dedicated to the four-year Olympiad Cycle of athletic games in ancient Greece.
Digital Radiographs
The digital radiographs of all the known remaining fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism that were acquired by X-Tek Systems using their BladeRunner System are available for viewing and download on the website of Shaw Inspection Systems (formerly X-Tek Industrial).
The digital radiographs available include all the Main Fragments (fragments A to G) and the all the Small Fragments (fragments 1 to 75) and were obtained using X-Tek's BladeRunner CT system.
Solid Models
The first model of the Antikythera Mechanism was actually build in the 1930s by Ioannis Theofanides. A model based on Price's work was built in the 1980s by Robert Deroski and donated by Price to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. In Australia, clockmaker Frank Percival made a model based on the research done by Allan Bromley and Michael Wright, who subsequently developed his own model.
With the new results and the latest gearing diagram from the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, new models are being built by other researchers, with some being working models. The results of the AMRP have been integrated into at least three models, made by Michael Wright, Dionysios Kriaris, Massimo Vicentini and Tatjana van Vark, while the Research Group is developing a model based on the ongoing research.
Scientific American Dec. 2009: 50 years after Derek Price, "Decoding an Ancient Computer" by Tony Freeth
"New explorations have revealed how the Antikythera mechanism modeled lunar motion and predicated eclipses, among other sophisticated tricks."
Scientific American’s eight-page feature article by Tony Freeth (Antikythera Mechanism Research Project) describes recent research from the point of view of one member of the scientific team. The article is published 50 years after Derek de Solla Price’s 1959 Scientific American article "An Ancient Greek Computer". It highlights the background to some of the key discoveries of the last few years and shows how far research has progressed from Price’s pioneering work. With nice graphics and a popular style, the article aims to bring the magic and mystery of the Mechanism to a wide readership.
Full resolution PTM
The surfaces of the 82 remaining fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism, imaged by the HP Labs team, are available for download at the HP Labs download page. 82 PTMs are listed, this number being a coincidence, since some small fragments are grouped into a single PTM, and the larger fragments are imaged on more than one PTM per fragment.
You will have to download the PTM viewer (available on the same page) to browse the data on your computer.
Old and new models of the Antikythera Mechanism
The latest model of the Antikythera Mechanism was published in Nature in November 2006. The evolution of models of the Mechanism has followed a long historical struggle to reconcile the evidence from the fragments with a coherent design based on a rational structure and function.
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