Ancient Greek computer reveals its secrets

A bronze calculating machine salvaged from a shipwreck a century ago is finally yielding up its secrets, revealing a Greek computer of remarkable sophistication for a device constructed long before the birth of Christ.

Scholars have been baffled by the 80-plus fragments of the ancient mechanism found in 1901 by sponge divers in a Roman shipwreck near the island of Antikythera, midway between the Peloponnese and Crete.

Around the size of a discus, the device was so badly corroded that it had the consistency of flaky pastry and was encrusted with deposits. Yet it seemed to be the earliest-known machine involving an arrangement of gear-wheels, built centuries before such technology became commonplace.

Was it a rich man's toy? Or was it an orrery or an astronomical clock? Or something else that reflected an ancient interest in astrology?

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Ancient Moon 'computer' revisited

The delicate workings at the heart of a 2,000-year-old analogue computer have been revealed by scientists.

The Antikythera Mechanism, discovered more than 100 years ago in a Roman shipwreck, was used by ancient Greeks to display astronomical cycles.

Using advanced imaging techniques, an Anglo-Greek team probed the remaining fragments of the complex geared device.

The results, published in the journal Nature, show it could have been used to predict solar and lunar eclipses.

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Mysteries of computer from 65BC are solved

A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of how the sophisticated device works.

The machine was lost among cargo in 65BC when the ship carrying it sank in 42m of water off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. By chance, in 1900, a sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck and recovered statues and other artifacts from the site.

The machine first came to light when an archaeologist working on the recovered objects noticed that a lump of rock had a gear wheel embedded in it. Closer inspection of material brought up from the stricken ship subsequently revealed 80 pieces of gear wheels, dials, clock-like hands and a wooden and bronze casing bearing ancient Greek inscriptions.

Since its discovery, scientists have been trying to reconstruct the device, which is now known to be an astronomical calendar capable of tracking with remarkable precision the position of the sun, several heavenly bodies and the phases of the moon. Experts believe it to be the earliest-known device to use gear wheels and by far the most sophisticated object to be found from the ancient and medieval periods.

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Skeleton find

THE remains of skeletons dating back hundreds of years have been unearthed at a Weston church.

Diggers moved into the grounds of St John the Baptist Church in Lower Church Road last week to start work on a £460,000 church centre.

But during the excavations workmen disturbed the resting places of some former Weston residents. Shards of a late iron age jar have also been found at the site.

Reverend Richard Taylor said: "We always knew it was likely there would be a former burial ground there. We had an initial exploratory dig on the site seven months ago which concluded we were likely to find remains.

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Man held for 'pharaoh relic' sale

A man has been arrested in France after advertising what he said was a lock of hair from Egypt's Pharaoh Ramses II for sale on the internet.

The man said he had obtained the relic when his father worked on the pharaoh's mummy in France in the 1970s.

Police seized small plastic sachets and boxes from the home of the man in the French Alpine town of Grenoble.

The items have to be tested, but some experts said it was possible that the unnamed man's claims were true.

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Skeletons preserved to aid study of forensic science

A UNIQUE Scottish collection of the skeletal remains of babies and young children is to be preserved to help forensic anthropologists.

The collection will help research into unsolved crimes and the identification of children killed in natural disasters.

The Scheuer Collection is believed to be the world's only active repository for juvenile skeletal remains and includes the bones of 100 individuals. Some of the bones, collected from archaeological and historical anatomical sources, are hundreds of years old.

Named after Louise Scheuer, the eminent anthropologist who gathered the bones for study 14 years ago, the collection is still held at Dundee University's unit of human anatomy and forensic anthropology, headed by Professor Sue Black, who was the lead anthropologist in the British forensic team deployed to war-torn Kosovo in 1999.

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Stolen Dacian bracelet to be brought back to Romania

The golden Dacian bracelet found in September at one of the Grand Palais Biennial Exhibition stands in Paris will be brought back to Romania by December 15, and exhibited at the National History Museum of Romania (MNIR) in Bucharest.

“By December 15, the Dacian gold bracelet found in Paris will be brought to the National History Museum. The item will continue to act as evidence in the pending lawsuit,” says Virgil Nitulescu, adviser to the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs (MCC).

According to the official, several Romanian experts will be sent to Paris to analyse the bracelet. Romanian and French authorities believe the item to have been stolen from the Sarmisegetuza Regia archaeology site in Orastiei Mountains. The item is put at EUR 1.5 M.

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Hungarian archaeologist discovers tablet mentioning Masada's destroyer

In 73 CE, the Roman governor of Judea, Flavius Silva, laid siege to Masada with Legion X Fretensis. When the walls were broken down by a battering ram, the Romans found the fortress' defenders had set fire to all the structures and preferred mass suicide to captivity or defeat. Masada has since become part of Jewish mythology, as has the name Silva, who Josephus Flavius mentions in his writings. It is therefore no great surprise that Hungarian archaeologist Dr. Tibor Grull, studying in Israel three years ago, was excited to discover a stone tablet during a visit to the Temple Mount with a Latin inscription of the name of Masada's destroyer.

Grull asked officials of the Waqf, the Muslim trust for the Temple Mount, where the tablet came from, and they explained it had been found in the large hole dug in the mount in 1999 when the entrance to Solomon's Stables was opened. The Hungarian archaeologist received rare permission to photograph and document the finding. In October 2005, Grull published the discovery in the journal of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research.

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Volunteers peel back Pan’s past

For the past 9 weeks, enthusiastic amateur archaeologists and metal detectorists have gathered at Pan, Newport to join in the investigation of two large fields on either side of Pan Lane. Each Saturday groups of between 10 and 25 volunteers have lent a hand, searching the fields for clues to Pan’s past. And there were plenty! Hundreds of objects have been washed, marked and sorted to see what they can tell us about the area.

It is clear that people have lived here for thousands of years. On the very first session sharp-eyed volunteer Dawn Russell picked up a flint tool which is at least 4,000 years’ old! Jane Roberts of Wessex Archaeology said “It’s difficult to spot a small piece of worked flint in the mud, amongst lots of other stones. The volunteers were really keen and we had to persuade them to take a beak!”

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Ancient Egyptian Drama on TAC

TRIAL OF A MUMMY
Location: Egypt Length: 23 min.

This is the fictional story of Khonso-Imhep, Head Musician of the Pharaoh's court during the 18th Dynasty, as he passes from life into the afterworld, complete with a trial that determines his fate. Through re-enactments and imagery on wall paintings, this film depicts the ancient Egyptian mummification process and the religious rituals involved in preparing a dead body. This story displays the unique funeral ceremonies surrounding the preparation of a mummy and portrays the religious beliefs involved, as well as the mummy's discovery by archaeologists.

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Roman Amphitheatres & spectacula - a 21st Century Perspective

16th - 18th February 2007, The Grosvenor Museum, Chester

This unique conference will range across all aspects of study of the Roman Amphitheatre and the spectacula that took place there. The event offers specialists and non-specialists alike an unrivalled opportunity to access the very latest research and thinking from many different perspectives.

The conference will discuss the discovery of new amphitheatre sites, and recent excavation and survey work, aspects of the architecture and planning of the buildings, amphitheatres both at the frontier periphery and at the centre of the Empire; from Northern Europe through Spain, the east, and North Africa. It will examine functional, religious and social aspects of the buildings and the spectacles, aspects of the organisation of the spectacles, and gladiatorial death and burial. The problems encountered in the preservation and display of amphitheatres as monuments in the modern urban environment will be touched upon. The Conference will feature speakers from the USA, Canada, Brazil, Austria, Germany, Spain and the UK, and will start with a keynote public lecture given by Professor Kathleen Coleman of Harvard University – ‘The Arena of conflict: facts, myths and speculation about gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome.’

Full programme...

Broken leg may have killed Tutankhamun

A medical scan of King Tutankhamun's mummified corpse may have finally nailed the cause of the Egyptian pharaoh's premature death. It was not a blow to the head, as some had speculated, but gangrene caused by a badly broken leg.

A team of radiologists used a sophisticated 3D X-ray of Tutankhamun's body to identify what may have happened to the boy king before he died 3,300 years ago at about the age of 19.

Computed tomography (CT) scans of the pharaoh's mummy, presented yesterday to the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of America in Chicago, confirmed a possible fracture in the boy's femur, or thigh bone, which probably occurred just before he died. Ashraf Selim, a radiologist at the Kasr Eleini Teaching Hospital at Cairo University, said there was no evidence of a skull fracture caused by a blow to the head - a suggestion made after previous X-rays taken in 1968 - but the broken leg may have been serious enough to kill the pharaoh.

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A Layered Look Reveals Ancient Greek Texts

An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of Hyperides, an important Athenian orator and politician from the fourth century B.C. What is slowly coming to light, scholars say, represents the most significant discovery of Hyperides text since 1891, illuminating some fascinating, time-shrouded insights into Athenian law and social history.

“This helps to fill in critical moments in ancient classical Greece,” said William Noel, the curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum here and the director of the Archimedes Palimpsest project. Hyperides “is one of the great foundational figures of Greek democracy and the golden age of Athenian democracy, the foundational democracy of all democracy.”

The Archimedes Palimpsest, sold at auction at Christie’s for $2 million in 1998, is best known for containing some of the oldest copies of work by the great Greek mathematician who gives the manuscript its name. But there is more to the palimpsest than Archimedes’ work, including 10 pages of Hyperides, offering tantalizing and fresh insights into the critical battle of Salamis in 480 B.C., in which the Greeks defeated the Persians, and the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C., which spelled the beginning of the end of Greek democracy.

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Brushing up on Neanderthal tooth fossils

Skulls and teeth are so important to fossil scholars that they regularly label every other kind of bone they dig up as "post-cranial." Post-cranial as in leg bones, arm bones, ribs — the body's whole kit and caboodle, sans the stuff north of the chin. A new study of Neanderthal teeth serves up an example of why the cranial bones are so often the most important ones to researchers struggling to understand ancient creatures.

Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis, were a species of archaic humans who lived in Europe and the Middle East hundreds of thousands of years ago. They disappear from the fossil record most recently around 30,000 years ago, about the time that early modern humans, Homo sapiens, started to spread across the continent. A long-raging disagreement among paleoanthropologists has concerned whether early humans straight-out replaced Neanderthals, the majority view, or else interbred with them.

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CyArk: Digital Heritage Archaeology

The CyArk project is an ambitious plan to place digital images--maps, plans, three-dimensional views--of world heritage sites in one place. Funded primarily by the Kacyra Family Foundation, CyArk currently has images on some of the better known sites from around the world, including Salvador da Bahia (Brazil), Ankgor (Cambodia), Thebes (Egypt), the Cathedral of Beauvais (France), Tikal (Guatemala), Pompeii (Italy), Chavin de Huantar and Tambo Colorado (Peru) and Deadwood and Mesa Verde (the United States). Each archaeological site studied has a short film introduction, clickable thumbnail photographs of rooms at the site and a site plan; many have three-dimensional images of site details such as rooms and profiles and a few have computer-generated reconstructions.

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Stonehenge was a site for sore eyes in 2300BC

Stonehenge was the Lourdes of its day, to which diseased and injured ancient Britons flocked seeking cures for their ailments, according to a new theory.

For most of the 20th century archaeologists have debated what motivated primitive humans to go to the immense effort of transporting giant stones 240 miles from south Wales to erect Britain's most significant prehistoric monument.

Stonehenge was built in different stages between 3000BC and 1600BC and theories about their meaning and purpose have ranged from the serious to the wacky. The most widely accepted view is that it was to honour their ancestors.

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IRON AGE SCOTS FUR FARM CLUE

IRON Age man reared foxes to make fur-trimmed clothes, archaeologists believe.

Experts say the pelts were used to make sought-after fur-trimmed coats, loin cloths and blankets.

Researchers at York University found that foxes flourished on Orkney during the late Iron Age.

But there were none on the Outer Hebrides or Shetland, suggesting they were introduced to Orkney.

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New clues about Ptolemaic past

AN inscription has been found by archeologists conducting excavations in the Lower City of Amathus that provides new information about Cypriot society in the Ptolemaic period, a statement from the Antiquities Department said yesterday.

The inscription was found on the floor of the interior doorway connecting two rooms and is as old as 3rd century BC. Although it is quite worn, it consists of 12 verses and is one of the longest texts from the Hellenistic period discovered in Cyprus. This inscription with arithmetic in Greek may refer to land portions given by the Ptolemaic General. It appears that it was laid in the floor in secondary use. Once the inscription is studied further, it is expected to provide more information about that period.

Another noteworthy find was a large gold cross that must have belonged to a high ranking official of the early Byzantine period (7th century AD). It was discovered in the complex of rooms with few fragments of paintings on the walls, and a lot of coins were found on the floor in the same room with the cross. The official may have resided in the room or in the entire complex.

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Ancient settlements discovered in Anatolia

Researchers working on the Archaeological Settlements in Turkey (TAY) project have discovered 120 previously unknown ancient settlement areas in various locations in eastern Anatolia, the project's manager said. Assistant Professor Alparslan Ceylan, a lecturer at Erzurum's Atatürk University and the project's leader, said that the 120 settlement areas, thought to belong to the Iron Age, included a temple and several fortresses. Ceylan said inventories for 480 ancient settlements in the region - including the newly discovered sites- were also prepared as part of the project, which has been under way for the last one-and-a-half years.

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Authenticity of Ilkley rock carvings challenged

Elaborate rock art which for years is believed to have been created by prehistoric Ilkley man (West Yorkshire, England) was probably only created about 170 years ago, it has been revealed. A Victorian workman could have been responsible for some of the markings on one of Britain's most famous examples of prehistoric rock art.

Ilkley archaeologist Gavin Edwards says he has proof which suggests the cup and ring markings on the town's internationally-known Panorama Stones were tampered with by a workman called Ambrose Collins in about the 1870s. He said the ladder-shaped markings are what has made the design on the largest of the three stones, the most elaborate example of bronze-age' art in the UK - but he seriously doubts they are the real thing. He got suspicious when he was studying sketches of marked stones which were donated to the town museum in 1880. He said: "The ladders were not on the drawing. Because I feel the ladders are so prominent it's difficult to believe they could not possibly have been noticed or been omitted by artistic licence. There has been talk of this Victorian embellishment before but people have really not wanted to acknowledge or admit tampering could have happened. It will cause a debate but the bigger, the better."

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