The Antikythera Mechanism and the Public Face of Greek Science PoS(Antikythera & SKA)038 Alexander Jones1 Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University 15 East 84th Street, New York, NY 10028, USA E-mail:
[email protected] From the outset two questions have dominated the study of the Antikythera Mechanism: what did it do? and what was it for? The first question, essentially the problem of reconstructing the Mechanism as the integral, functioning object that it was when it was manufactured, has largely been solved. The second question remains open to dispute. I attempt in the present paper to show how our present knowledge of the Mechanism's functions and the texts that were inscribed on its exterior point to its having been constructed primarily as a didactic device through which the complexity and unity of Hellenistic astronomy and cosmology could be made comprehensible to a lay audience. From Antikythera to the Square Kilometre Array: Lessons from the Ancients, Kerastari, Greece 12-15 June 2012 1 Speaker Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence. http://pos.sissa.it The Antikythera Mechanism and the Public Face of Greek Science Alexander Jones 1. Introduction. The remnants of the Hellenistic device known as the Antikythera Mechanism were salvaged in 1900-1901 from the site of a shipwreck dated to approximately 70-50 BC, near the coast of the island of Antikythera.1 They lay unnoticed in the National Archeological Museum in Athens among miscellaneous bronze fragments of statuary recovered from the wreck site until May 1902, when Spyridon Stais, the former Minister of Education who had commissioned the salvage operations on the part of the Greek government, visited the museum and chanced to PoS(Antikythera & SKA)038 observe fragments of corroded metal bearing gears and inscribed texts on some of their surfaces.