Academic Reading — Test 22

Reading passage

In the spring of 1900, a group of sponge divers from the Greek island of Symi were sheltering from a storm near the small island of Antikythera, which lies between Crete and the mainland of Greece. When the weather cleared, they descended to the seabed and discovered the wreck of an ancient cargo ship resting at a depth of roughly forty-five metres. Among the bronze and marble statues scattered across the site, one of the divers reported seeing what looked like a heap of corroded metal. The objects were brought to the surface and transported to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, where they were initially given little attention. Months later, a curator noticed that one lump of bronze had split apart to reveal the unmistakable outline of a toothed wheel. This modest fragment was the first sign that the divers had recovered something extraordinary. The device, which became known as the Antikythera mechanism, has been dated by most scholars to the second century BC. It consisted originally of dozens of interlocking bronze gears housed within a wooden case roughly the size of a large book. By turning a handle on the side, an operator could drive the gears and move a series of pointers across dials on the front and back faces. These pointers tracked the movements of the Sun and Moon, predicted the dates of eclipses, and displayed the cycle of the Greek calendar. Some researchers believe the mechanism also modelled the positions of the five planets known in antiquity, although the evidence for this remains incomplete because so many components are missing or damaged. For most of the twentieth century, progress in understanding the object was slow. The bronze had fused into hard, unrecognisable masses during nearly two thousand years underwater, and early investigators could see only a fraction of the internal structure. A major advance came in the 1970s, when the scientist Derek de Solla Price used early X-ray techniques to look inside the fragments. His studies revealed a far more sophisticated arrangement of gears than anyone had expected, and he argued that the device was essentially a mechanical calculator for astronomical events. Even so, many of his conclusions were tentative, and the precise function of several gear trains continued to puzzle experts. The most decisive breakthrough occurred in the early twenty-first century. An international team applied high-resolution computed tomography, a method that produces detailed three-dimensional images of the interior of an object without damaging it. This imaging allowed researchers to count the teeth on hidden gears and to read thousands of tiny Greek letters inscribed on the surfaces, which functioned as a kind of instruction manual. The inscriptions confirmed that the mechanism was designed to display astronomical and calendrical information, and they helped scholars reconstruct how the gears worked together. One dial was found to track the four-year cycle of athletic festivals, including the ancient Olympic Games, which suggests that the instrument had a cultural as well as a scientific purpose. What makes the Antikythera mechanism so remarkable is the level of engineering it represents. Nothing of comparable complexity is known to survive from the ancient world, and no similar geared device appears in the historical record for more than a thousand years afterwards. Clockwork of this kind would not be seen again until the astronomical instruments built in medieval Europe and the Islamic world. The mechanism therefore overturns a long-held assumption that the Greeks, for all their achievements in mathematics and astronomy, lacked the practical skill to translate their theories into precise machinery. It demonstrates that at least some ancient craftsmen possessed an understanding of gearing that was once thought to belong only to a much later age. Many questions about the device remain unanswered. Nobody knows who designed it, where it was made, or how many such instruments once existed. Some specialists have linked it to the island of Rhodes, which was a centre of astronomical study, while others point to the Greek cities of Sicily. Because only a single example has ever been found, it is impossible to say whether the mechanism was a unique masterpiece or one of many comparable objects that have since been lost. Underwater surveys of the Antikythera wreck have continued in recent years, and archaeologists hope that further excavation may eventually recover additional fragments and shed light on these enduring mysteries.