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The Antikythera mechanism

Around 65 BC a Roman ship sank with its cargo, near the coast north of the small island of Antikythera, between Crete and the Peloponnese. The wreck was found, shortly before Easter 1900 and, among the marble statues and bronze jewelry and amphora, was also recovered a lump of limestone and inlaid metal. Only after two years Valerios Stais, director of the Archaeological Museum of Athens, where the instrument is still preserved, he realized the extraordinary nature of the object, not a piece of corroded bronze, but a complex mechanism, with gears and dials, with inscriptions in ancient greek. The Antikythera mechanism is, in fact, an astronomical instrument that anticipates that technologies will be discovered only at the end of the Middle Ages, with the construction of the first watches. His movement was composed of thirty gears driven by a single crank. On the front face, a face of bronze marked the movement between the constellations of the zodiac, the sun, moon, and probably other planets known at the time (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). The reverse, however, there were two superimposed dials, each engraved with a spiral staircase and a pointer to stretch. The upper trail for the Metonic di 19 anni, che è il periodo dopo il quale le fasi lunari si ripresentano negli stessi giorni dell'anno solare; il secondo, invece, indicava il ciclo di Saros di 18 anni, utile per prevedere le eclissi. Sorprendentemente il meccanismo riproduceva anche le variazioni di velocità della luna e dei pianeti lungo le loro orbite. Alcuni studiosi delle Università di Cardiff e di New York hanno recentemente scoperto che i nomi dei mesi incisi sul meccanismo appartengono a un calendario utilizzato solo nella Grecia occidentale e nella colonia di Siracusa. Il collegamento con Siracusa lancia un'intrigante ipotesi: l'ispiratore del meccanismo di Antikythera potrebbe essere stato Archimede, che costruì strumenti astronomici meccanici; l'ispiratore, ma non the manufacturer, since the mechanism is dated to between 150 and 100 BC, and Archimedes died in 212 BC The same researchers also found on the backside a small subsidiary dial marking the calendar of the Olympics, an event important for the social life of 'era, demonstration of how technology was integrated into the culture of ancient Greece.

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The Rosetta Stone


On July 19, 1799 in the Egyptian town of Al-Rashid (Rosetta called by Europeans) during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, a French officer unearthed a tall granite headstone in a little over a meter wide and about 70 cm, which appeared on the shiny side an inscription in three scripts different. Thanks to it, twenty years later, Jean-Francois Champollion was able to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics. The text engraved on the stele is divided into three parts: the upper part, consisting of 14 lines, written in hieroglyphics, the middle 32 lines appear in cursive writing, the demotic, which is the last phase of Egyptian writing, at the bottom 54 lines are drawn in greek, spoken and written language in Egypt since the Hellenistic period. Faced with the impossibility to decipher hieroglyphs and demotic text, both written forms of a dead language (Egyptian), the French scholars devoted themselves to the entry in greek. The translation revealed that it was of a decree promulgated in Memphis on the eighteenth day of the second month of the season of Peret (27 March 196 BC) by the Egyptian priests, gathered there to celebrate the first anniversary of the ascent to the throne of Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The text itself did not provide any information about historically significant, but at the end of the track offered to students that they needed. In fact, ordered the priests who make copies of the text in stone for the most important temples and was recorded both in the Egyptian language, with the "divine words of writing (hieroglyphs), and in the writing of the people (the demotic) both in the Greek language. It was therefore of the same text in three different versions. For scholars this then offered the opportunity to decipher, through a comparison with the Greek version, the two ancient writings hitherto incomprehensible.