Ancient Greek Astronomical Mechanism Designed to Record Olympiads, New Study in Nature Reports
Wednesday, Jul 30, 2008
The Antikythera Mechanism, which was used in ancient Greece to make astronomical calculations, has now been discovered to also record the times of the Olympiads. The findings appear in the July 31 edition of the journal Nature. One of the study’s co-authors, Alexander Jones of NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, discusses the Antikythera Mechanism and its newly discovered uses in the below video. “A four-year cycle is a bit of a surprise on the mechanism because it doesn’t really have an astronomical function; it has a cultural function,” Jones explains. “It was the timing for the games that the Greeks cities organized. These were not events of any scientific significance, but they were events of enormous social significance in the Greek world.”
To View the video, please follow this link:
http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/antikythera
Inside out: computer tomography of the Antikythera Mechanism’s main fragment allowed for accurate modelling.
James Devitt
(212) 998-6808
james.devitt@nyu.edu
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