In today’s UK Telegraph, the article titled Ancient Greek computer reveals its secrets, describes the story of the mechanical device salvaged from a Roman shipwreck 100 years ago, and how a collaboration of scientists with special modern scanning and imaging equipment have finally deciphered what the device was for and how it worked.
Did you know the ancient Greeks built computers? This one is mechanical, driven by an intricate set of bronze gears, and was used to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and predict the movements of the sun and moon, and to predict eclipses.
From the article:
In the wake of a study of its workings published today in the journal
Nature, the “Antikythera Mechanism” will transform the way we think
about the technological capabilities of the ancient world.
…
The new study vindicates pioneering work carried out
from the late 1950s to the early 1970s by late British historian of
science, Prof Derek De Solla Price. After studying the mechanism with X
rays, he wrote in his book Gears from the Greeks that it had been used
as an astronomical calendar.
But because his
analysis demanded a complete rethink of the capabilities of ancient
Greek technology, it came under attack from academics who put
alternative ideas forward.
Today, although details of his work are clearly wrong, Price's overall thesis is vindicated.
My question is, why did the professor’s thesis come under attack from academics? Because the ancients weren’t supposed to be advanced enough to build computers. And why weren’t they supposed to be advanced enough to build computers? Because they were supposed to be much closer in time to their apemen and cavemen ancestors than we are today.
In fact, ancient Greece records that a much more advanced society than themselves used to exist, in the Atlantis legend, found in Critias by Plato. According to the legend, a society once flourished who were very advanced in wisdom, science, and the arts, living in luxury. But because of the people’s great wickedness, the gods determined to destroy them, and Atlantis was overwhelmed by the sea.
This legend is just the Greeks’ remembrance of the world that perished, the pre-Flood world inhabited by Adam and his descendants, where the lifespan of man was 900+ years. Plato even mentions five pairs of males as kings of the land, or ten; the exact number of patriarchs who ruled before the Flood, according to Genesis. Of course, many details of the legend are pure invention, but some of them are true, come from the common history of both the Egyptians — where Solon first got the legend — and the Greeks.
The world that was indeed perished by being overwhelmed by the sea, for the Flood waters rose until the tops of the mountains were covered. It is no wonder that in just a few generations following Noah’s descent from Mount Ararat, that the descendants of Noah were building pyramids in Egypt, Stonehenge in Britain, and apparently, computers in Greece.