Archaeological wonder: Could they Mechanism have included information on the ancient Olympics?

Credit: Antikythera Mechanism Research Project

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BladeRunner

Hi-tech imaging of the Mechanism was carried out by an eight-tonne leviathan known as BladeRunner (its usual job is to investigate jet turbine blades to see if they carry any microscopic cracks). It was transported to Athens for the operation, as the delicate relics are housed at the National Archaeological Museum.

BladeRunner found another novelty too – that the dial for the Metonic calendar has names for the Corinthian family of months. Corinth, in central Greece, established colonies in northwestern Greece, Corfu and Sicily, where Archimedes was established.

Archimedes, whose list of exploits included an explanation for the lever, the displacement of water and a screw pump that bears his name today, died there in 212 BC.

The Mechanism was "almost certainly made many decades" after his death though, said Alexander Jones, a professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York City, USA.

If the machine came from Syracuse, the dial could have been made by the school of scientists and instrument-makers Archimedes inspired. Instead of one Olympics as there is today, the ancient Olympiads, called the Panhellenic Games, comprised four games spread over four years.

Ancient tradition

The events comprised the Pythian Games, held every four years at Delphi in honour of the god Apollo; the Isthmian Games, held every two years in Corinth in honour of Poseidon; the Nemean Games, also held every two years, in Nemea in honour of Zeus; and the most important, the Olympic Games, held every four years in Elis, also in honour of Zeus.

Drawing competitors from across the Greek empire, which stretched from Sicily to Asia Minor, the Games were so important that they became the basis for Greek chronology, becoming the term for a four-year period – historians noted "the third year of the eighth Olympiad" and so on.

The first Olympiad, or four-year period, dated back to 776 BC, although the Games are believed to have a far longer history.

The last Games of the ancient world were recorded in 393 AD, but were outlawed by the Roman Empire as pagan. The tradition of counting in Olympiads persisted into the next century, however.