On a Clockwork Treasure Hunt

There is a Romantic (capital R) notion that I have had since childhood about discovering some kind of treasure. As a kid, I buried my own treasures, drew my own maps and then "discovered" them.

The treasure I'm writing about today is real. It was found off the coast of Greece, near the tiny island of Antikythera, where there was a shipwreck more than 2000 years ago. Around 65 B.C., Rome ruled the Mediterranean, but this was a Greek merchant going west across the Aegean Sea. It was a large ship for that time - 165 feet long - and it was loaded with luxury items, livestock and travelers who could only travel distances on merchant vessels. They found 36 marble statues of heroes, gods and horses, ceramics and personal belongings such as golden earrings, silver coins and jewelry.

The wreckage was discovered 117 years ago. The attention was first on life-size bronze and marble statues, but there was also a mysterious clockwork device.

National Archaeological Museum, Athens/Antikythera Mechanism Research Project/Kostas Xenikakis

I wrote about the Antikythera mechanism earlier here. Historians have been pondering what the interlocking gears did. The current theory is that it was used to track celestial movements - logical to have onboard a ship - and keep time.

It has been a long time since that ship went down, but beneath the ancient sands we are still detecting artifacts that remain trapped and protected in the sand.

But that clockwork was very sophisticated and the parts fit together with a great precision that was not to be seen again until clock manufacturing in 14th-century Europe were interlocking gears again used in a similar manner. It had front and back faceplates framed by a wooden case, about 60 gears, a circular dial with pointers tracking the movement of the sun, moon and five known planets across the sky during the calendar year.

The back plate had two large dials. One showed a Greek lunar month calendar while the other showed the biennial and quadrennial cycles of athletic competitions, including the Olympics. A crank on a side of the device turned the gears to set the front and back dials in motion.

Surprisingly, most scholars believe that the mechanism was not a marine navigation device, but possibly a device for education and amusement.