This image is the necessary complement to the sleek bronze rendition you’ve just seen in the last item. Where that computer rendering revealed what the researchers believe the Antikythera Mechanism once looked like (gleaming, whole, and fully assembled), this photograph depicts what has actually survived: a scatter of pitted, mineralized hulks, few of them even resembling the sophisticated machine they once formed. One object… Smashed into 82 pieces. The object you are looking at in this image is, remarkably, the same as the one seen in the last shot: all 82 corroded pieces that make up the 2,000-year-old Antikythera Mechanism (180mm x 130mm x 36mm).
These pieces are now housed in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
The known mechanism comprises 82 pieces:
Fragment A: The ‘Heart of the Matter ’. The prominent, large, partially intact round disc in the top-left hand part of the photograph is Fragment A, and unquestionably the most important part of the entire finding. The largest and most significant of the pieces, Fragment A, measures approximately 180mm high, 130mm wide, and 36mm thick and contains nearly 30 of the 30 extant gears within it. Nearly every aspect of the complex mechanical functioning of the Mechanism, in other words, survived within this single corroded chunk. This image shows the ‘main portion’ or ‘primary remainder’ Fragment A of the Antikythera device.
On it you can readily see the traces of at least 11 gears on one face and 13 gears on the rear face. With this piece alone, 27 of the remaining 30 wheels were recovered. 78 grams per cubic centimeter. Geologists estimate that 70 to 80 percent of the machine’s mass has been corroded away to form deposits such as atakamite – green crystalline masses composed of hydrous copper chlorides.
A. Georgiades, then director of the National Technical University of Athens, reported after studying the machine shortly after it was brought up. ”Not rock, but altered metal. Today, nearly the entire machine appears like nondescript greenish-grey ‘rocks,’ with just a fraction of the original material remaining for analysis. After 2,000 years under the sea, all bronze fragments had corroded in different degrees and have now been completely replaced with mineral corrosion products and other compounds to the density of rocks.
Some examples can be found of completely oxidized samples where there are only residual signs that originally existed as the bronze of the original machine elements. “There are very few metallic elements in the original parts of the machine because after 2,000 years under water… most of the material has been transformed to mineral products of copper”, say F. Lahanas and K. Daes, of the Greek Institute of Nautical Archaeology.
Even at their most massive section, these pieces have lost all but tiny remnants of their metal contents to form ‘mineral pseudo-morphs’ – or replicas formed from mineral replacement – of their previous, more refined forms. The extracted artifact underwent an extremely quick process of breaking up and deterioration. The drying out of the device after the sudden disappearance of water brought further damage. This shrinkage of volumes caused further stress, which leads to further cracking and breaking up.
Read more at: https://www.discovernewsdaily24.com/taxila-museum-two-thousand-years-in-a-single-garden/
The original configuration is completely unknown. It seems that the pieces just broke up after the submersion and continued degrading for centuries while submerged. Further processing happened during extraction, which further broke up, degraded and distored and shifted from their original orientation the parts. ‘Color’ as a marker. Today, the 82 remnants look more like pieces of rock than like functional machinery.
Yet, under each chip’s often mossy patina the technology inside remains preserved. From emerald green all the way to brownish and blackish hues of the corroding bits of material, the color of each piece hints at how it was used, its position in the mechanism, and the environment in which it settled. The most intriguing feature is that the gears, which have turned countless times over two millennia of operation, look strikingly modern: the tiny triangular teeth are precise and orderly, almost mechanical, but also very delicate. Tiny, yet important. There is in fact, something in the bottom right-hand side of the photograph here.
Just a few, dark and largely indecipherable specks, lined up more or less regimented. Imaging Technology: The Real Saviors. Even looking at the comparison of this photograph of the fractured, corroded original and the computer animation shown in the prior shot will show the enormous gap between that original wreckage and the ‘what if’ reconstruction. Though computer tomography revealed the rearside in 2005, many additional years passed before researchers had even partially ‘uncorroded’ the frontsides using a series of progressively more complex and more effective X-ray, Gamma, and computer imaging techniques before they knew even a fraction of what can be seen in this photograph. Tony Freeth of University College London coordinated much of this project.
”Wreckage versus reconstruction. Here’s what may well be the most remarkable aspect of considering photographs of Antikythera mechanism remnants like the ones in this post. We’ve become used, by the preceding post (The Antikythera mechanism) and this post’s companion article (Antikythera Mechanism Research Media), to seeing what scientists reconstruct that Antikythera looks like. Here, however, as you see here, we look at nothing but its remains. Yet to see these remains, to hold them close, it would not take you many years and decades to discover the many secrets of the Antikythera.
To do this, one would have needed to employ techniques as sophisticated and high-tech as those developed in recent years just to decipher its secrets.
See Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyU4cZor_Gg
