The Antikythera Mechanism

The Story Behind the Genius of the Greek Computer and its Demise

Evaggelos G. Vallianatos

• Publisher: Universal Publishers
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781627343596
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte der griechischen Antike

In Antikythera Mechanism: The Story Behind the Genius of the Greek Computer and Its Demise, Evaggelos G. Vallianatos, historian and ecopolitical theorist, shows that after the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BCE

Chapter 1

Myths and the Beginnings of Craftsmanship

The Greeks called a skilled workman or handicraftsman demiourgos, one who works for people. Homer says that a man who is a master of his craft benefits everyone. Men like that are welcomed everywhere in the world. Among these craftsmen, he includes seers, medical healers, master builders, and singers of tales giving pleasure with their songs and stories.40

The Fire of Knowledge

If you enter the large lecture room of the Academy of Athens, you are dazzled by a series of murals on the ceiling and walls. One of those beautiful murals shows Athena and Prometheus creating man.

Creating humans was not enough. Prometheus could see things were not going as he had hoped. He put to use his “fire”—knowledge for the benefit of humanity. This Titan, god of forethought, found the Greeks and other humans living like ants in sunless caves.

Aeschylus, 525–456 BCE, an Athenian tragic poet who reports on Prometheus, says nothing about the time Prometheus took pity on humanity. He did not know. Such time must be counted in hundreds of thousands of years or millennia before Homer.

Aeschylus says that those first Greeks did not know how to build homes facing the Sun or to work with wood. They grew no food and did not recognize the seasons. Prometheus saved them from extinction, giving them the use of their wits, making them masters of their minds. Prometheus showed them the risings and the settings of the stars, teaching them how to count and write; how to take drugs for fighting diseases; how to interpret dreams; and how to yoke and harness animals for hard work or for riding horses, “the crowning pride of the rich man’s luxury.” Prometheus also instructed the Greeks in the worship of the gods and in setting oracles throughout the land. He showed them how to craft and sail ships and, in general, taught them mining and all the mechanical and other arts and crafts.41

Plato also reports that gods came to the assistance of the early Greeks: the fire of knowledge and crafts from Prometheus, more crafts from the god Hephaistos, and seeds and plants from other gods. This vital divine aid enabled the Greeks to stand on their own feet.42

Metis, Athena, and Hephaistos: Gods of Science and Technology

The Greeks also had an additional god of technology. This was Athena, daughter of Zeus, who had assisted Prometheus in bringing men into being. She was goddess of war, wisdom, and the arts and crafts of civilization. Her mother was the water goddess Metis, which, in ancient Greek, means counsel, advising, wisdom, cunning, and craft. Metis helped Zeus overcome his father, Kronos. Zeus married her, though he had difficulty in embracing her. She was like water, instantly changing form. Nevertheless, Zeus got her pregnant with Athena. However, his grandparents Ouranos (Sky, Heavens) and Gaia (Earth) warned him that Metis was destined to also have a son who would dethrone him. Zeus immediately swallowed pregnant Metis. That way he safeguarded his supreme position among gods and humans while he had at his disposal the extraordinary intelligence of Metis.

Athena became like her mother, a mighty goddess of intelligence. Like Prometheus, she spurred men in the development of science and technology, especially technical skills and handicrafts for meeting their own needs and improving their welfare. She invented the bridle for the domestication of the horse, cattle, donkeys, and mules. This invention enabled humans to feed themselves and create civilization.

Athena also fostered the cultivation of the olive tree, and the teaching and practice of carpentry, metalworking, and pottery while she taught women spinning and weaving.43

Writing in the first century BCE, the Greek historian Diodoros of Sicily (Siculus) reported that the Greeks honored Athena and Hephaistos. He explained that the Greeks were grateful to Athena because she helped them domesticate and cultivate the olive tree. This included her instruction on the preparation of the olive fruit.

Diodoros said that before the birth of Athena, the olive tree was wild. Athena taught the Greeks how to cultivate and care for the olive tree. She also taught them to make clothes, work with wood, build homes, as well as master other useful arts and crafts. In addition, she was the inventor of music pipes. In short, Athena invented many sophisticated and cunning devices useful to life.

During the thirteenth day of Pyanopsion, October–November, the Athenians honored Athena and Hephaistos. In this instance, Athena was Athena Ergane, the Worker, patron of artisans and craftsmen. Hephaistos was the patron of smiths. Bronze workers, Chalkeis, and craftsmen celebrated these two gods in a festival known as Chalkeia. The participating craftsmen, engineers, and smiths put their best creations to a competition. Those that won offered their creations to Athena Ergane.

During the Alexandrian Age, the workers who worshipped Dionysos—comic poets and artists in literature, music, dance, and theater—had their own guild. They, too, called themselves craftsmen (technitai) but technitai for Dionysos. They performed at religious festivals, traveling from city to city where they enjoyed a good living and protection.44

Diodoros said Hephaistos was the inventor of metallurgy, teaching human beings the uses of fire for working iron, copper, gold, silver, and everything else requiring fire. He also invented the remaining uses of fire for the benefit of all people, especially those working in the crafts like pottery. As a result, Diodoros says, “The workers who are skilled in these crafts offer prayers and sacrifices to Hephaistos before all other gods.” Workers and all humankind preserve the memory of this god forever and honor him by calling fire “Hephaistos.”45

As we already explained, intelligence, the foundation of science, was a gift of two goddesses, Metis and her daughter, Athena. Because the word “metis” comes from Metis, goddess of intelligence, it means skill in counsel or device, astuteness, shrewdness, contrivance or scheming, as well as what one plans to do and what one has in mind to do. Thus, metis is deliberation and weighing in the mind, necessary steps in doing science.

Keld Zeruneith, member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, explained the role of metis in Greek culture:

“Metis lies in the individual’s ability to consider and choose lucidly in a critical situation. In this sense, metis is a power of thought and a form of intelligence based on rapidity, acuteness, the ability to change one’s mind, to find new paths, to be directed, precise, pensive, strategic, cunning and wise,” he wrote.

“It is crucial,” he continued, “that [goddess] Metis derives fundamentally from water. This explains why she can change her nature and transform herself like the waves. Since these metamorphoses contain all possible life forms, it provides her with insight into life’s vicissitudes, an understanding of the beginning and cohesion in past, present, and future. This is her true wisdom.”46

Athena’s brother, Hephaistos, was older than Athena. He was fire and technology. Homer sings about the modern-like engineering works of Hephaistos, especially the golden women robots serving him at his workshop on Olympus and the extraordinary shield he designed and built for Achilles.47

Hephaistos married Kabeiro, daughter of the sea god Proteus. Hephaistos and Kabeiro had the twin sons known to us by their mother’s name: Kabeiroi. Like their father, Hephaistos, these gods thrived in works of metallurgy and craftsmanship. They were primarily known in the Aegean islands of Lemnos, Syros, Delos, Chios, Paros, and Samothrace as well as in the coastal regions of Thrace, Macedonia, and Thebes in Central Greece. Their works were so beneficial, Greeks celebrated and worshipped them with mysteries, only second in national importance to the mysteries and worship of the goddess Demeter in Eleusis.

Demeter exerted her influence in the religion of the Kabeiroi, who, in addition to their promotion of craftsmanship, were gods of the natural world.

Handsome silver coin of the mid-second century BCE from the Cycladic Aegean island of Syros shows the Kabeiroi gods. Courtesy Numismatic Collection. Alpha Bank, Athens.

The Great Craftsman and Artist Daidalos

The next great technological innovator in Greek culture was Daidalos (cunning worker). Plato considers him a great craftsman and artist.48 Aristotle does not deny he existed.49 In the third chapter, I will return to Plato, who discusses the connection between Daidalos and Socrates. Now, however, I rely on the ancient historian Diodoros of Sicily. Diodoros did not dispute that Daidalos lived more than a millennium before his time. His only reservation was the story about the “flying” of Daidalos out of Crete. He did not reject the story but explained this was part of what he had heard and read about Daidalos. Diodoros reported the following about Daidalos:

Daidalos was an Athenian who flourished during the second millennium BCE, long before the Trojan War. He was related to the Athenian royal house of Erechtheus. He was so outstanding in everything he did, especially in architecture and sculpture, that his works were masterpieces of art and technology. His statues looked like humans made of stone or marble. However, Daidalos killed Talos, a child inventor, out of jealousy. Talos was his nephew. He invented the potter’s wheel, the iron saw, and a kind of lathe for the carpenter to draw circles. These great tools and other “cunningly contrived devices” prom...