Meet World’s Oldest Computer: The Antikythera Mechanism

Published in

Geek Culture

4 min readJan 4, 2022

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Found in an ancient Greek shipwreck, this 2000+ year old artifact has intrigued archaeologists, classicists, historians, and the public for decades.

What’s in a name?

Antikythera is an island that means “opposite of Kythera,” another large island in Greece. When a ship sank just off the coast of the island in 1st century BCE, it carried a huge number of intriguing artifacts dating back
to as early as 3 centuries. One of them were the fragments of Antikythera Mechanism, which made up just one-third of the whole device.

82 fragments of the mechanism, SourceL GI

Who Made It?

Inventor of Trigonometry and ancient astronomer, Hipparchus. Although, new research shows the handwriting of 2 different people on Antikythera. This means it was likely created in a business or workshop.

What’s Great About It?

As you know, mechanical analog computer is designed along with components such as gears and lever, without using electronic parts, unlike digital computers of today. The Antikythera mechanism has therefore been called the earliest analog computer.

Dated back to 87 BC, it was used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance. It could also track the 4 year cycle of athletic games which was similar to an Olympiad — ancient Olympic Games.

By turning a hand-crank, a person could move forward or backward in time. The crank made the gears rotate a series of dials and rings — which had inscriptions and annotations of Greek zodiac signs and Egyptian calendar days.

The calendar is based on the time from 1 full moon to the next, and a special dial allowed the person to also envision the seasons, which were useful for agriculture. The Greeks also believed that characteristics of an eclipse were related to good and bad omens, so the future could also be predicted with this device.

How Do We Know About This?

Well, initially we had no idea how revolutionary this device was.

In 1959, Princeton science historian Derek J. de Solla Price found that the main gear in moved to represent the calendar year. The smaller gears represent the motions of the planets, sun, and moon. The first publication on the mechanism was made in 1974 by physicist and historian Derek de Solla Price. But his work remained unfinished when he died in 1983.

“It is so entirely different and strange that it is nearly impossible … it is some kind of machine with gear trains, very much like the inside of a modern wind-up alarm clock.” — Richard Feynman, noted physicist

In this decade, a 5 year long program of investigations began in 2014 and ended in 2019, with another one that began in May 2020.

A 2016 survey by classicist Alexander Jones team also gave a new interpretation of the mechanism, based on the extant 3400 Greek characters on the device. It apparently could keep track of at least 42 different calendar events. Moreover, the planetary motion was accurate to within 1° in 500 years.

Built In Instruction Manual

Koine Greek writing at the back of the mechanism suggests that the inventor left either instructions for how to work it or an explanation of what the user was seeing.

What next?

As per Scientific Reports journal, London researchers have recently claimed to recreate the design of the device, from the ancient calculations used to create it.

But the results, published in the journal Scientific Reports, are still highly theoretical. We still need to figure out the technology required to construct it.

Curious experts are working to decipher inscriptions hidden inside the mechanism, in particular to understand the mechanism’s missing pieces, some destroyed, some probably still at the bottom of the sea.

To know more about the ancient wonder, check out this in-depth analysis: