Celestial Clock Tracked Olympic Games

July 31, 2008 -- An astronomical calculator, considered a technological marvel of antiquity, was also used to track dates of the ancient Olympic games, researchers have found.

Experts from Britain, Greece and the United States said they have detected the word "Olympia" on a bronze dial, as well as the names of other games in ancient Greece on the device known as the Antikythera Mechanism.

Their findings are reported Thursday in the British science journal Nature.

The 2,100-year-old Antikythera Mechanism was recovered from an ancient shipwreck in 1901 near Antikythera, a small island off Greece's south coast.

Its insides look like a clock. About 30 bronze gears were cranked to calculate phases of the moon, eclipses and other celestial information specific to a certain date. Results were displayed on dials on the front and back of the mechanism.

Most workings of the device only came to light with recent advances in scanning technology and computer processing power.

In 2005, an X-ray tomography machine was brought from Britain to the National Archaeological museum of Athens, which houses the device's corroded and sediment-encrusted remains. Researchers soon found the gear structure -- including the number of teeth cut into the wheels -- corresponded to known theories of celestial cycles.

"It's like a medical scanner, but instead of putting people in it, we put the Antikythera Mechanism," Yanis Bitsakis, a co-author of the Nature report, told The Associated Press of the technology used to study the device.

Bitsakis, of Athens University's Center for History and Paleography, said finding the Olympian dial on the device was a surprise. Greece's ancient games had important religious significance and were commonly used dates for historical reference.

"We were astonished because this is not an astronomic cycle but an Olympian cycle, one of social events ... One does not need a piece of high technology to keep track of a simple four-year cycle," he said. "It is perhaps not extravagant to see the mechanism as a microcosm illustrating the temporal harmonization of human and divine order."