They Called The Antikythera Junk. Scientists Were Wrong...
Ruins Untold
83 views
A diver surfaces holding a corroded lump of bronze. Nobody looks twice. It sits in a museum courtyard for a year, rained on, catalogued as scrap.
Then someone notices a gear — and for the next hundred years, the people who should have taken it seriously mostly didn't.
This is the story of how a two-thousand-year-old astronomical computer sat dismissed as junk until modern imaging made denial impossible.
The Antikythera Mechanism was pulled from a Roman-era shipwreck in 1901. Inside a shapeless lump of corroded bronze were more than thirty hand-cut interlocking gears — a mechanical calendar computer that tracked the Sun, Moon, and five known planets, predicted eclipses decades in advance, and modeled the Moon's irregular orbital speed with a pin-and-slot mechanism nothing else from antiquity comes close to matching. Mainstream scholarship treated it as too sophisticated to be real for the better part of a century, until 2005–2006 CT tomography finally revealed what was inside. The dispute over exactly what it could do isn't settled even now — researchers are still arguing about it in 2024 and 2025.
0:00 A Lump Nobody Looked At Twice
1:12 Ruins Untold
1:41 The World That Built It
5:19 The Gear Nobody Wanted To See
9:38 Why the Skeptics Had a Point
12:34 What The Machine Actually Says
17:06 What Else Got Melted Down
19:27 The Question That Remains
Ruins Untold covers ancient mysteries, forbidden archaeology, and the history mainstream academia won't discuss.
New episodes every week.
Subscribe to keep digging: @ruinsuntold-- Sources and Further Reading --
Freeth, Jones, Steele, Bitsakis, et al. (Antikythera Mechanism Research Project), "Calendars with Olympiad display and eclipse prediction on the Antikythera Mechanism," Nature, 30 November 2006 — the foundational CT tomography decoding publication
Price & Karakalos, "Gears from the Greeks: The Antikythera Mechanism — A Calendar Computer from ca. 80 B.C.," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1974 — the foundational early X-ray study
Woan & Bayley (2024), Bayesian statistical analysis of the calendar ring hole count, and Tony Freeth's public rebuttal — a live, unresolved 2024–2025 scholarly dispute
Szigety & Arenas, mechanical-function simulation study on the gearing's operational limits
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, ongoing Antikythera shipwreck excavation program, 2012–present
#RuinsUntold #AncientMysteries #AntikytheraMechanism #ForbiddenArchaeology
They Called The Antikythera Junk. Scientists Were Wrong...
Ruins Untold
83 views
A diver surfaces holding a corroded lump of bronze. Nobody looks twice. It sits in a museum courtyard for a year, rained on, catalogued as scrap.
Then someone notices a gear — and for the next hundred years, the people who should have taken it seriously mostly didn't.
This is the story of how a two-thousand-year-old astronomical computer sat dismissed as junk until modern imaging made denial impossible.
The Antikythera Mechanism was pulled from a Roman-era shipwreck in 1901. Inside a shapeless lump of corroded bronze were more than thirty hand-cut interlocking gears — a mechanical calendar computer that tracked the Sun, Moon, and five known planets, predicted eclipses decades in advance, and modeled the Moon's irregular orbital speed with a pin-and-slot mechanism nothing else from antiquity comes close to matching. Mainstream scholarship treated it as too sophisticated to be real for the better part of a century, until 2005–2006 CT tomography finally revealed what was inside. The dispute over exactly what it could do isn't settled even now — researchers are still arguing about it in 2024 and 2025.
0:00 A Lump Nobody Looked At Twice
1:12 Ruins Untold
1:41 The World That Built It
5:19 The Gear Nobody Wanted To See
9:38 Why the Skeptics Had a Point
12:34 What The Machine Actually Says
17:06 What Else Got Melted Down
19:27 The Question That Remains
Ruins Untold covers ancient mysteries, forbidden archaeology, and the history mainstream academia won't discuss.
New episodes every week.
Subscribe to keep digging: @ruinsuntold-- Sources and Further Reading --
Freeth, Jones, Steele, Bitsakis, et al. (Antikythera Mechanism Research Project), "Calendars with Olympiad display and eclipse prediction on the Antikythera Mechanism," Nature, 30 November 2006 — the foundational CT tomography decoding publication
Price & Karakalos, "Gears from the Greeks: The Antikythera Mechanism — A Calendar Computer from ca. 80 B.C.," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1974 — the foundational early X-ray study
Woan & Bayley (2024), Bayesian statistical analysis of the calendar ring hole count, and Tony Freeth's public rebuttal — a live, unresolved 2024–2025 scholarly dispute
Szigety & Arenas, mechanical-function simulation study on the gearing's operational limits
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, ongoing Antikythera shipwreck excavation program, 2012–present
#RuinsUntold #AncientMysteries #AntikytheraMechanism #ForbiddenArchaeology