The ongoing search of the seabed around the Antikythera Shipwreck will likely yield more missing parts of the famous Antikythera Mechanism, Athens University Professor of Space Physics Xenophon Mousas said in an interview with the Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA) published on Tuesday. The interview was taken ahead of the opening of an exhibition on the Antikythera Mechanism that will open in Moscow on Thursday, at the Moscow State Museum of architecture near the Kremlin.
“I believe that the archaeologists that are back there at this moment will find more sections of the Mechanism, as they did a short while ago. The fact that they recently found a spear nearly on the surface of the seabed means the shipwreck has not been looted and this is very important,” Prof. Mousas said.
Mousas, who helped set up and organise the exhibition of what has been described as the “world’s oldest analog computer”, said the exhibition in Moscow will include two replicas of the Mechanism, one life size and a second that is four times larger, showing details of the clockwork interior. The exhibition will also show copies of ancient astronomical instruments and a room with seven computers with interactive models, one of which was also availabe as an app on Android.
Mousas said the parts of the mechanism relating to the movement of the sun and moon had been almost fully recreated but there was currently only one gear for the movement of the planets.
“I consider that it is that for Jupiter. In reality it is two gears, one ‘female’ and an ordinary one, the ‘gearbox’ for Jupiter in other words, which showed its positions. We present this very well in Moscow,” he said.
Copper manual
In addition to finding more gears, Mousas said that more than 70 pct of the instrument’s copper manual might also be found on the seabed. He noted that this was written on pages of copper in small and very finely wrought letters that had helped archaeologists date the artifact to between 150 and 100 B.C. The ship that carried it had probably sunk between 80 and 62 B.C. he added.
He speculated that the remaining gears would track the movements of the rest of the planets known at that time – including Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Venus and Mars – based on the sections of the manual already found.
The latest discoveries relating to the inner workings of the mechanism pointed to the ancient Greeks having a quite sophisticated understanding of the laws of physics and scientific theory, as well as quite accurate theories concerning the periodicity of the planets, he said.
The exhibition in Moscow will be inaugurated by Culture and Sports Minister Aristidis Baltas and is held as part of Greece-Russia Year 2016, under the auspices of President of the Hellenic Republic Prokopis Pavlopoulos. It will run until November 6.
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