Mariners’ tool certified as world’s oldest
A relic of Vasco da Gama’s journeys enters the record books.
An astrolabe recovered from a sunken Portuguese armada ship has been verified – twice – as the oldest of its type ever discovered.
Astrolabes were widely used by astronomers and navigators from the classical period through to the late Middle Ages as a useful way to calculate position in relation to the sun, other stars, and the horizon.
So useful, in fact, that Loiuse Devoy, curator of England’s Royal Observatory in Greenwich, has described them as the medieval equivalent of a smartphone.
The astrolabe in question was recovered from the wreckage of the Esmerelda, which was discovered in waters off the coast of Oman in 2016.
The instrument, known as a solid disk astrolabe, represents an intermediate technology, with a design that sits between “planispheric” models that were used during antiquity and “open-wheel” types that were introduced around 1507.
Its function and provenance were established by a team comprising UK salvage expert David Mearns, and Jason Warnett and Mark Williams from theUniversity of Warwick, who reported their findings in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
Using a portable 7-axis Nikon laser scanner, they established beyond doubt that the disk was a mariner’s astrolabe and were able to confidently place it in its correct chronological position and
propose it to be an “important transitional instrument”.
And just to be doubly sure, researchers
contracted by Guinness World Records have verified the findings. Vasco da Gama’s astrolabe will duly appear in the publishers’ famous annual book.