What Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny gets right (and very wrong) about the historical Antikythera Mechanism
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is based around the Antikythera Mechanism: an actual ancient Greek object that tracked the cycles of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets against the stars.
- Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is based around the Antikythera Mechanism: an actual ancient Greek object that tracked the cycles of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets against the stars.
- The Antikythera mechanism and its bronze gearwheels totally reconfigured the study of ancient technology.
- It was among a bunch of other antiquities pulled out of a shipwreck by sponge divers in 1901.
- As a scholar of ancient Greek technology, seeing a blockbuster based around the Antikythera Mechanism is deeply satisfying.
Archimedes and Nazis
- The sell for the film’s audience and for the Führer is Archimedes himself.
- He is associated with inventions such as the Archimedes screw used to draw-up water in Assyria and Egypt.
- Trying to hike up the price, Helena explains it was built by Archimedes himself.
- It’s one thing to attribute the design of the mechanism to Archimedes (some academic papers in fact toy with the same idea).
So what IS the Antikythera mechanism?
- The Antikythera mechanism would not have been a disc as in the film, but rather a box covered in circles.
- On the back you could see two large spirals and three smaller dials which tracked the passing of time according to different calendars.
- These pointers landed in different rings to indicate the phases of the Moon, the phases of the planets, the signs of the zodiac.
- These allowed a user to put the Antikythera mechanism into motion by carefully rotating a knob.
The Antikythera mechanism, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley
- Though this is the first time the mechanism has featured in a Hollywood blockbuster, the Antikythera has not been camera shy.
- From as early as the 1950s, the Antikythera mechanism was called a “computer” by scholars working on the device.
- The common thread is that in looking at the Antikythera mechanism, you are looking at the “world’s first computer”.