Tag: Archaeology

The world’s oldest computer is still revealing its secrets

Item 15087 wasn’t much to look at, particularly compared to other wonders uncovered from the shipwreck at Antikythera, Greece, in 1901. The underwater excavation revealed gorgeous bronze sculptures, ropes of decadent jewelry and a treasure trove of antique coins.

Amid all that splendor, who could have guessed that a shoebox-size mangled bronze machine, its inscriptions barely legible, its gears calcified and corroded, would be the discovery that could captivate scientists for more than a century?

“In this very small volume of messed-up corroded metal you have packed in there enough knowledge to fill several books telling us about ancient technology, ancient science and the way these interacted with the broader culture of the time,” said Alexander Jones, a historian of ancient science at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. “It would be hard to dispute that this is the single most information-rich object that has been uncovered by archaeologists from ancient times.”

Jones is part of an international team of archaeologists, astronomers and historians who have labored for the past 10 years to decipher the mechanism’s many mysteries. The results of their research, including the text of a long explanatory “label” revealed through X-ray analysis, were just published in a special issue of the journal Almagest, which examines the history and philosophy of science.

The findings substantially improve our understanding of the instrument’s origins and purpose, Jones said, offering hints at where and by whom the mechanism was made, and how it might have been used. It looks increasingly like a “philosopher’s guide to the galaxy,” as the Associated Press put it — functioning as a teaching tool, a status symbol and an elaborate celebration of the wonders of ancient science and technology.

[The key to these ancient riddles may lie in a father’s love for his dead son]

In its prime, about 2,100 years ago, the Antikythera (an-ti-KEE-thur-a) Mechanism was a complex, whirling, clockwork instrument comprising at least 30 bronze gears bearing thousands of interlocking tiny teeth. Powered by a single hand crank, the machine modeled the passage of time and the movements of celestial bodies with astonishing precision. It had dials that counted the days according to at least three different calendars, and another that could be used to calculate the timing of the Olympics. Pointers representing the stars and planets revolved around its front face, indicating their position in relation to Earth. A tiny, painted model of the moon rotated on a spindly axis, flashing black and white to mimic the real moon’s waxing and waning.

The sum of all these moving parts was far and away the most sophisticated piece of machinery found from ancient Greece. Nothing like it would appear again until the 14th century, when the earliest geared clocks began to be built in Europe. For the first half century after its discovery, researchers believed that the Antikythera Mechanism had to be something simpler than it seemed, like an astrolabe. How could the Greeks have developed the technology needed to create something so precise, so perfect — only to have it vanish for 1,400 years?

But then Derek de Solla Price, a polymath physicist and science historian at Yale University, traveled to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens to take a look at the enigmatic piece of machinery. In a 1959 paper in Scientific American, he posited that the Antikythera Mechanism was actually the world’s first known “computer,” capable of calculating astronomical events and illustrating the workings of the universe. Over the next two and a half decades, he described in meticulous detail how the mechanism’s diverse functions could be elucidated from the relationships among its intricately interlocked gears.

“Nothing like this instrument is preserved elsewhere. Nothing comparable to it is known from any ancient scientific text or literary allusion,” he wrote.

That wasn’t completely accurate — Cicero wrote of a instrument made by the first century BCE scholar Posidonius of Rhodes that “at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the Sun, the Moon and the five planets that take place in the heavens every day and night.” But it was true that the existence of the Antikythera Mechanism challenged all of scientists’ assumptions about what the ancient Greeks were capable of.

“It is a bit frightening to know that just before the fall of their great civilization the ancient Greeks had come so close to our age, not only in their thought, but also in their scientific technology,” Price said.

Still, the degree of damage to the ancient plates and gears meant that many key questions about the the instrument couldn’t be answered with the technology of Price’s day. Many of the internal workings were clogged or corroded, and the inscriptions were faded or covered up by plates that had been crushed together.

[Broken pottery reveals the sheer devastation caused by the Black Death]

Enter X-ray scanning and imaging technology, which have finally become powerful enough to allow researchers to peer beneath the machine’s calcified surfaces. A decade ago, a diverse group of scientists teamed up to form the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (AMRP), which would take advantage of that new capability. Their initial results, which illuminated some of the complex inner workings of the machine, were exciting enough to persuade Jones to jump on board.

Fluent in Ancient Greek, he was able to translate the hundreds of new characters revealed in the advanced imaging process.

“Before, we had scraps of the text that was hiding inside these fragments, but there was still a lot of noise,” he said. By combining X-ray images with the impressions left on material that had stuck to the original bronze, “it was like a double jigsaw puzzle that we were able to use for a much clearer reading.”

The main discovery was a more than 3,500-word explanatory text on the main plate of the instrument. It’s not quite an instruction manual — speaking to reporters, Jones’s colleague Mike Edmunds compared it to the long label beside an item in a museum display, according to the AP.

“It’s not telling you how to use it. It says, ‘What you see is such and such,’ rather than, ‘Turn this knob and it shows you something,’ ” he explained.

Other newly translated excerpts included descriptions of a calendar unique to the northern Greek city of Corinth and tiny orbs — now believed lost to the sandy sea bottom — that once moved across the instrument’s face in perfect simulation of the true motion of the five known planets, as well as a mark on the dial that gave the dates of various athletic events, including a relatively minor competition that was held in the city of Rhodes.

That indicates that the mechanism may have been built in Rhodes — a theory boosted by the fact that much of the pottery uncovered by the shipwreck was characteristic of that city. The craftsmanship of the instrument, and the two distinct sets of handwriting evident in the inscriptions, makes Jones believe that it was a team effort from a small workshop that may have produced similar items. True, no other Antikythera Mechanisms have been found, but that doesn’t mean they never existed. Plenty of ancient bronze artifacts were melted down for scrap (indeed, the mechanism itself may have included material from other objects).

It’s likely that this particular mechanism and the associated Antikythera treasures were en route to a Roman port, where they’d be sold to wealthy nobles who collected rare antiques and intellectual curiosities to adorn their homes.

The elegant complexity of the mechanism – and the use its makers designed it for – are emblematic of the values of the ancient world: For example, a dial that predicts the occurrence of eclipses to the precision of a day also purports to forecast what the color of the moon and weather in the region will be that day. To modern scientists, the three phenomena are entirely distinct from one another — eclipses depend on the predictable movements of the sun, moon and planets, the color of the moon on the scattering of light in Earth’s atmosphere, and the weather on difficult-to-track local conditions. Astronomers may be able to forecast an eclipse years in advance, but there’s no scientific way to know the weather that far out (just ask our friends at the Capital Weather Gang).

But to an ancient Greek, the three concerns were inextricably linked. It was believed that an eclipse could portend a famine, an uprising, a nation’s fate in war.

“Things like eclipses were regarded as having ominous significance,” Jones said. It would have made perfect sense to tie together “these things that are purely astronomical with things that are more cultural, like the Olympic games, and calendars, which is astronomy in service of religion and society, with astrology, which is pure religion.”

That may go some way toward explaining the strange realization Price made more than 50 years ago: The ancient Greeks came dazzlingly close to inventing clockwork centuries sooner than really happened. That they chose to utilize the technology not to mark the minutes, but to plot out their place in the universe, shows just how deeply they regarded the significance of celestial events in their lives.

In a single instrument, Jones said, “they were trying to gather a whole range of things that were part of the Greek experience of the cosmos.”

(www.washingtonpost.com)

June 27, 2016
Great philosopher Aristotle’s tomb found

Greek archaeologists announced they have discovered the tomb of ancient Greek philosopher, and one the greatest in the world, Aristotle. After years of meticulous excavations at the ancient site of Stagira, located in central Macedonia, near the eastern coast of the Chalkidiki peninsula, archaeologists said that the domed building and altar unearthed in 1996 belong to the great philosopher.

The discovery of the tomb of Aristotle was announced by archaeologist Kostas Sismanidis, according to whom the findings from the excavation of 1996 in the region point to the conclusion that the tomb belongs to Aristotle.

‘I have no hard proof, but strong indications lead me to almost certainty’, said archaeologist Kostas Sismanidis. He claimed all the indications, from the location of the tomb, the period it was erected, its public character are conclusive that the edifice is indeed Aristotle’s tomb.

(en.protothema.gr)

May 30, 2016
The story of cities: how Alexandria laid foundations for the modern world

The secret to Alexandria, if classical historians are to be believed, lies in a golden casket. Studded with jewels and small enough to hold in one’s hands, the casket was a war trophy found in the lodgings of vanquished Persian king Darius III more than 2,300 years ago. The man who defeated Darius, Alexander the Great, locked his most treasured possession – the works of Homer – inside it.

Soon after conquering Egypt, Alexander had a dream in which Homer visited him and spoke lines from The Odyssey. Among them was a reference to the Egyptian island of Pharos in the Mediterranean, and so the next morning Alexander travelled to Pharos and stood upon its rocks, clutching the golden casket and staring out at a scrappy, forgotten stretch of coastline. After a long silence, he nodded. From these shores, the most remarkable city the ancient world had ever seen was about to rise.

Today, the original Alexandria lies buried beneath two millennia of urban evolution; the building blocks of its oldest temples and monuments have been carried as far afield as Cairo, London and New York, or else shattered by earthquakes and military invasions, or submerged under the sea. To understand the ancient city, archaeologists have had to peel back the modern one – along with deep and often contradictory layers of myth and folklore. Few metropolises are as steeped in legend as Alexandria, not least because few metropolises have ever attempted to gather together the world’s stories in one place as Alexandria once did, writing a new chapter of urban history in the process.

“Alexandria was the greatest mental crucible the world has ever known,” claim Justin Pollard and Howard Reid, authors of a book on the city’s origins. “In these halls the true foundations of the modern world were laid – not in stone, but in ideas.”

Although it is ancient Alexandria’s individual showstoppers – the lighthouse, library and museum – that are best remembered and celebrated in our own time, the city’s influence on contemporary life truly begins with its overall design. Alexander’s chief architect, Dinocrates, envisaged an epic gridiron that would knit together public space and private, spectacle and function, as well as land and sea. EM Forster, who became one of Alexandria’s most famous chroniclers in the 1920s, called it “all that was best in Hellenism”. Yet Dinocrates’ masterpiece very nearly sank without a trace before the first slab had ever been placed within the sand.

In the absence of chalk to mark out the shape of the new city’s future roads, houses and water channels, Dinocrates used barley flour instead. But as quick as his surveyors could calculate the relevant angles and his labourers could scatter the requisite lines of grain, flocks of sea birds swooped down and snaffled this life-size blueprint for themselves. Many on the ground considered it a terrible omen for the settlement which was to bear Alexander’s name, but the general’s personal soothsayer took a different view: the birds’ feeding frenzy, he explained, was a sign that Alexandria would one day provide sustenance for the whole planet.

And so work continued, and before long those sea birds were gazing down at a frenzy of construction. Sites were allocated for Alexander’s royal palace, temples for both Greek and Egyptian gods, a traditional agora – both a commercial marketplace and a centre for communal gathering – as well as residential dwellings and fortification walls. Canals were cut from the Nile, with rivulets diverted under the main streets to supply the homes of the rich with a steady provision of fresh water.

On one level, Dinocrates’ plan for Alexandria was a cut and paste job, following the typical pattern of many of the Greek cities he was familiar with. Dinocrates was a student of Hippodamus, the man responsible for building the great Athenian harbour at Piraeus and often referred to as the father of urban planning. According to Aristotle, Hippodamus was the man who “contrived the art of laying out towns”, though the compliments ended there; the old philosopher went on to accuse Hippodamus of living in ‘a very affected manner’, and cited his ‘flowing locks’ and ‘expensive ornaments’ with disdain.

Hippodamus and his school believed that designing cities meant more than just sketching out the boundaries of the relevant site; planners had to think about how the town was going to function, not only logistically but politically and culturally as well. In the eyes of Hippodamus, streets were not just by-products of houses and shops but centre-points in their own right: a showpiece of efficient urban governance. But whereas Hippodamus was largely confined to piecemeal projects, transforming small sections of older cities from within, at Alexandria Dinocrates was offered a blank canvas – and a chance to put his master’s innovations into practice on an unprecedented scale.

Dinocrates’ genius was to extend the lines of his gridiron right out over the water, building a 600ft wide land bridge – known as the heptastadion, because it was seven times the length of a Greek stadium – out from the mainland to the island of Pharos and creating two immense harbours either side of the causeway. The level of integration between all the city’s various elements was profound. “You have the heptastadion forming the harbours, the harbours protected by the lighthouse, and the line to the lighthouse running back into the city’s main grid-plan on the same orientation,” says Dr Judith McKenzie, of Oxford University’s School of Archaeology and author of The Architecture of Alexandria. “It was a package deal, and it worked.”

Vitally, Alexandria’s success lay not only in its Grecian roots but also in its Egyptian influences. The tale of Alexander’s golden casket has been passed down the generations, but in reality the selection of the city’s location must have relied on local knowledge and expertise just as much as it did Homer. Not only did the new city form a perfect nexus between the relatively insular Egyptian pharaonic kingdom inland and the maritime trade empire of Greece and the Mediterranean beyond, but its roads were angled to maximise circulation of the sea’s cooling winds, and its buildings soon melded the best in western and eastern architecture. The famous octagonal walls of the ancient lighthouse are replicated today on countless minarets throughout the rest of Egypt, and on many of Christopher Wren’s church spires in Britain.

In whose image was the city created?

In the years to come, as Alexandria’s riches and reputation spiralled, its most famous institutions took shape: a musaeum (literally, a ‘temple of the muses’) which brought together the leading scholars in every academic discipline, and within it a library, believed to be largest on earth and sustained by the royally mandated appropriation of any books found on ships which came into the city’s port.

But Alexander himself would never live to see these marvels, or indeed the city which he founded. Soon after Dinocrates began laying out his lines of barley flour, the general travelled on to consult the oracle at Siwa, deep within Egypt’s western desert, and then headed east to new colonial campaigns in Persia and India. Within a decade, he had died in Babylon; his successor in Egypt, Ptolemy I, orchestrated an audacious kidnap of the body as it was en route to burial in Alexander’s native Macedon (modern-day northern Greece) and brought it instead to Alexandria where it was ensconced in a colossal tomb.

The fate of Alexander’s corpse is a window on to a darker side of Alexandria, one that was less about intellectual endeavour and urban modernism, and more focused on harnessing the city as a vehicle for autocratic power and the entrenchment of divine rule. Ptolemy wanted Alexander in death because it helped legitimise his own authority in life. Whereas the original Hellenistic town was intended as a polis in which autonomous citizens enjoyed an equal say in decision-making (unless, of course, they were female, foreign or enslaved), Alexandria became a template of urban absolutism – its regimented layout and carefully-demarcated quarters a display of control from above, not democracy from below.

“What was left of the old urban drama was a mere spectacle,” argues urban historian Lewis Mumford in his seminal The City in History. “In the old polisevery citizen had an active part to play: in the new municipality, the citizen took orders and did what he was told.” In Mumford’s eyes, the formal order and beauty so perfectly embodied by Alexandria on the outside reflected the disintegration of the real, messy freedom once promised by cities deep within.

That tension, over whether the design of our cities best serves its residents or its rulers, has persisted down the centuries and continues to colour Alexandria today. Now home to nearly 5 million people, and the second largest metropolitan area in a country racked by mass rebellion and urban revolt in recent years, Alexandria remains on the frontline of competing visions of what thoughtful urban planning should really look like.

Last year a scheme was unveiled to rebuild the long-lost ancient lighthouse in its original location – part of a grand redevelopment project involving major new shopping malls and a high-end hotel. Critics insisted that the proposals failed to take into account the modern city’s complex informal economy and fragile architectural history, and pointed out that the decision was being taken without the input or agreement of residents. “The reality is not about amplifying Alexandria’s rich cultural history,” argued Amro Ali, an analyst of urban politics in Egypt, “as much as it is about which aspects of its history can be vulgarly commercialised at the expense of the public good.”

As Ali has noted, Alexandria’s contemporary power-brokers would be wise to read up on the details of the ancient lighthouse, which was finally completed a few decades after Alexander first stood on the shores of Pharos and decided his great metropolis would be built here. As was customary, the lighthouse’s architect, Sostratus, officially dedicated its construction to Egypt’s royal family on a plaster plaque near the entranceway.

But underneath the plaque, Sostratus secretly carved a second inscription into the stone: on behalf of “all those who sailed the seas”. The question of whose interests our urban spaces are really planned for has remained a live one ever since.

(www.theguardian.com)

March 26, 2016
National Archaeological Museum celebrates 150 years of its foundation

The National Archaeological Museum is celebrating 150 years of its foundation. The anniversary is on 3 October 2016 but various and interesting exhibitions will be held, however, throughout the year, as stated by the director, Maria Lagogiannis during the presentations of the impressive 2016 panorama.

Among the news that stood out was the proclamation, on 18 May (International Museum Day), as the honored museum for 2016 from the Greek section of ICOMOS (International Council of Museums), an honour that is due to its contribution to culture, and the nationwide character of its collections, representing universal values.

The new year is marked by old and new exhibitions that evolve, such as the “unseen Museum”, that today launched another exciting exhibit, which will remain in the Hall of the Altar for two months, it is the Attic red-figure calyx krater, an eminently banquet vase, dating between 390 and 385 b.C. and depicts Dionysus besides Victory, an unusual presence that probably symbolizes the happy life and the victory over death.

From the new exhibitions scheduled we singled out the “Open Museum”, which is centered on openness and dialogue with society, and the involvement of the Museum with the social partners.

“In response to the guests’ request, the museum opens its doors in the spaces behind the stage, in the maintenance workshops and archaeological research areas, where our staff is preparing all the exhibits you watch in brilliant exhibition halls,” said Maria Lagogiannis.

Also, special thematic presentations by archeologists and specially designed familiarization workshops by maintainers will be offered at regular dates throughout the course of 2016, enriching the museum experience and deepening the relationship with the guests.

Meanwhile, from January and throughout the year the museum will feature innovative actions in collaborations with educational institutions, art organizations, unions and social organizations such as the Association of Sculptors, School of Antiquities Conservation and Athens School of Art, Museum of Herakleidon, the Athens State Orchestra, the National Tokyo Western Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Theatre, the School of Architecture of the NTUA, the National Gallery, the Library of the Hellenic Parliament and National Television.

The final action will join the festive atmosphere of the anniversary exhibition entitled “Odysseys”, which through the unique collections of the museum, that start from the Neolithic period and end in late antiquity will highlight the timeless struggle of human survival, development, acquisition of knowledge and happiness.

At the same time, great modern poets, Cavafy, Seferis, Elytis and Ritsos will hold the thread that will bridge the multiple symbolisms of Homer’s Odyssey and nowadays.

As reported by the Director, the museum in 2015 erved 103 research projects, Greek and international, innovative maintenance methods were applied, such as the analysis of the composition of the metal alloy of the Adolescent of Antikythera by spectroscopy X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) and physicochemical investigation of the sculptures of the Antikythera shipwreck with GPR.

(www.ellines.com)

January 12, 2016