![]() Although there are parts still missing, reconstructions have shown that such is the amazing craftsmanship, sophistication, and ingenuity of the device that it was shockingly accurate, and could even compensate for the extra quarter-day in the astronomical year, long before the idea of a leap year had even been introduced into the mainstream Julian calendar. However, later research would show it to have most likely been a sort of early analog computer of sorts, in this case one for making precise astronomical calculations and mapping out the positions and movements of the sun, moon, planets, stars, as well as track the lunar phase and predict lunar and solar eclipses. It was amazingly, impossibly advanced for its era, far beyond what was thought possible, and by all rights this thing should not have existed at all, but there it was.Īt first it was unknown as to just what the purpose of the device could have possibly been, and it was often speculated at first to be some sort of navigational device. Here was an ancient machine entwined with the mists of time, utilizing complicated, incredibly precise gear works far ahead of its time, with the earliest such machines of this quality previously thought to have emerged in around the 14th century. Over the years the complexity of this amazing machine was slowly revealed, and it quite frankly stumped the scientific community. Rather than a solid clump of bronze and rock, it was found that there were dozens of complex gears, dials, and rotating hands embedded within, all precisely positioned into some sort of clockwork machine, with some marked with cryptic inscriptions. ![]() In the 1970s, advanced imaging procedures allowed archeologists to peer into the device for the first time, and they were astounded by what they found. It would not be until the 1970s that another close look was taken at it, and what would come to be called the Antikythera Mechanism would finally have its ancient mysteries revealed after 2,000 years of being buried at the bottom of the sea. Stais surmised that this was perhaps part of some complex ancient machine, but at the time the scientific community was skeptical of this, and so the exciting discovery sat there without any further serious research for several more decades, a mere curious anomaly that no one could really make any sense of or was even willing to try. It was the archaeologist Valerios Stais who first realized that there was perhaps more to this strange lump of crud than met the eye, when he uncovered what appeared to be a whole gear wheel embedded within its mishmash. At first the artifact looked to be merely a rusted out misshapen blob of bronze corroded and degraded over millennia banished under water, and it was placed in the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens along with other artifacts from the wreck, where it sat collecting dust for years before anyone would take another look at it, seemingly an unimportant, ugly mass of metal and rock at the time. Probably the most widely known ancient technological anomaly was found quite by chance in 1900, when sponge divers off the remote coast of the Greek island of Antikythera found an ancient shipwreck that held ensconced within it a device from the far corners of history that would eventually go on to baffle the scientific world. Here are some of the strange objects from the depths of time that have been dug up only to remain anomalies stuck in some fringe realm of history like strange ancient insects in amber, and indeed by all rights should not even exist at all. However, sometimes a relic or artifact will emerge that shatters that window through time, sending spiderwebs of cracks through what we thought we could see and distorting our sense of what we think we know, something so jarringly out of place as to make us question even reality itself. We know of the past through the various pieces of it we manage to dig up throughout the world, which illuminate history and allow us to cobble and piece together a cracked, often foggy window through which we can glimpse past events. Of course there are the discoveries and artifacts from past times that we know of and which have helped to shape our view of what the world was once like and how it developed. History is an irresistible, inexorable force, moving on and plowing through time to leave many things simply buried in its wake even as it carves and barrels its way to the future.
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