A Portable Cosmos
Alexander Jones Oxford University Press 2017 Hb, 208pp, ifigs, notes, bib, ind, £22.99, ISBN XXXXX
I came across a Greek company selling museum-grade replicas of archæological objects at a museums conference a while back. Pride of place was given to a working replica of the Antikythera Mechanism, a rectangular box with three dials showing the movements of the Sun and planets, controlled by interlocking gears. The original is so unlike anything else from antiquity that it has been considered proof of alien contact, evidence of time travel, a gift of the gods or a last remnant of lost Atlantis – quite a legacy for a few pieces of corroded metal recovered in 1901 from a Hellenistic shipwreck.
A Portable Cosmos traces the journey from junk to world treasure, and Jones has produced what is likely to be the definitive work on this piece of technology. He tells a gripping tale of the discovery of a few chunks of sea-corroded bronze hauled up by sponge divers off the island of Antikythera. They were mainly interested in the cargo of bronze statuary. The mechanism was unappreciated and ignored except by a few obsessives, who realised that it was the remains of something unique.
Investigation the Antikythera Mechanism was limited to chipping away accretions and trying to discern what was inside and how it might once have fitted together. This was hampered by the fact that only part of the mechanism had been recovered, and that even that had been crushed. It was not until the late 1950s, when X-rays and other technologies allowed non-intrusive investigation, that it was possible to make headway in understanding and reconstructing the device, allowing a more or less complete understanding of its workings to be arrived at by the first few years of this century.
Jones lays out the mechanism step by step, then looks at how the parts come together to create the portable cosmos of the title. He covers the technical detail in a very readable manner, drawing you into the world of the device and sharing his fascination with the machine and its makers.
Jones spreads his net wider, though. He looks at the cultural context within which the mechanism was created, from the workings of ancient calendars to the cultural reasons such things might have been needed, and from possible manufacturers of the equipment to who would want to use such a thing and why. He makes it clear that it is not something miraculous dropped from the heavens; rare, yes, but not alien to its culture – there are references to likely similar equipment in classical literature.
The technologies that come together to make the mechanism are known to have existed elsewhere in the classical world. It is not perfect: the triangular teeth on the cogs are a less than ideal shape for the job, for example. It is likely, though, that only a few workshops were capable of making such tech in the Greek world, and their output was so limited that it is surprising that even this artefact survived.
Isaac Asimov lamented that the innovation behind the Antikythera Mechanism did not spark a technical revolution 2,000 years ago. It proved to be a dead end, and the ideas behind it not were not rediscovered for another 1,000 years. He said: “If the insight of the Greeks had matched their ingenuity…we would not be merely puttering around on the Moon, we would have reached the nearer stars.”