Another Golden Compass

[shewhomust]

This is by no means a new story, but it was new to me, and it's too good not to share: it begins in 1900, with the discovery of an ancient Greek shipwreck dating from around 70 BC. The showy part of the discovery was the cargo of luxury goods - jewellery, pottery, wine and the statues that caused the discoverer to report finding naked women lying around on the seabed.

But there was also a mass of corroded metal, and a painstaking process of cleaning, x-ray examination and years of work has produced - taDAAH! - a working model of the Antikythera mechanism (video).

I learned about this from the Today programme, as guest-edited by Jarvis Cocker, in a rather unsatisfactory interview used to prove a point. Cocker was apparently taken aback to discover that the oh-so-clever-interviewers on the programme have their questions prepared for them by researchers, so presenter Evan Davis went unprepared into an interview with Jo Marchant, who was their to promote her book on the subject.

I can't find any evidence that Philip Pullman was thinking of the Antikythera device when he invented the alethiometer, but the term 'golden compass' seems an obvious description: here are some pretty pictures exploring that thematic area.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Ooh, new Antikythera links! Thank you.

Nine

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

I saw the antikythera vid a little while back - I think my overwhelming reaction was to be both surprised and relieved that there are still people like that in the world :-)