Home / Humanities / History / Ancient Greece & Rome / A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World

A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World

AUTHOR
Price
€23.90
€26.60 -10%
Upon request
Dispatched within 15 - 25 days.

Add to wishlist

In 1901 divers salvaging antiquities from a Hellenistic shipwreck serendipitously recovered the shattered and corroded remains of an ancient Greek gear-driven device, now known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Since its discovery, scholars relying on direct inspection and on increasingly powerful radiographic tools and surface imaging have successfully reconstructed most of the functions and workings of the Mechanism. It was a machine simulating the cosmos as the Greeks understood it, with a half dozen dials displaying coordinated cycles of time and the movements of the Sun, Moon, and planets.

A Portable Cosmos presents the Antikythera Mechanism as a gateway to understanding Greek astronomy and scientific technology and their place in Greco-Roman society and thought. Although the Mechanism has long had the reputation of being an object we would not have expected the ancient world to have produced, the most recent researches have revealed that its displays were designed so that an educated layman would see how astronomical phenomena were intertwined with one's natural and social environment. It was at once a masterpiece of the genre of wonder-working devices that mimicked nature by means concealed from the viewer, and a mobile textbook of popular science.

Author: Jones Alexander
Publisher: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780190931490
Cover: Paperback
Edition Number: 1
Release Year: 2019

Preface

Chapter 1. The Wreck and the Discovery

Chapter 2. The Investigations

Chapter 3. Looking at the Mechanism

Chapter 4. Calendars and Games

Chapter 5. Stars, Sun, and Moon

Chapter 6. Eclipses

Chapter 7. The Wanderers

Chapter 8. Hidden Workings

Chapter 9. Afterword: The Meaning of the Mechanism

Bibliography

Alexander Jones is a classicist and historian of science whose interests center on astronomy and related scientific traditions in the Greco-Roman world and the ancient Near East. Before joining the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in 2008, he was for many years on the faculty of the Department of Classics and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto.

You may also like

Newsletter

Subscribe to the newsletter to be the first to receive our new releases and offers
Your account Your wishlist

This website uses cookies

We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners.