In 1900, sponge divers discovered a wrecked Roman cargo ship near the Greek island of Antikythera. This was a true instance of discovering sunken treasure. The following year, from within the wreck, the divers were able to recover numerous Roman coins, priceless jewelry, and statues of both marble and bronze, as well as a variety of other artifacts, glassware, pottery, and assorted unidentified detritus. Like real life Indiana Joneses, these divers surrendered everything to a museum: the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens, to be specific. There, the recovered artifacts were stored and slowly but surely analyzed. A year later, in 1902, an archaeologist at the museum was examining a rock that had been given to the museum with the rest of the items, and he noticed that a gear wheel appeared to be embedded within it. This artifact, surviving only as a fragment, was really no more than a corroded chunk of bronze and wood. Unfortunately, had it been treated as soon as it was removed from the saltwater, it may have remained in better condition, but even in its deteriorated state, it appeared to contain miniature gears like that of an astronomical calculator. This, however, did not comport with the archaeological record, as no such devices were known to exist until the 14th century. Nevertheless, all scientific analysis of the Antikythera Mechanism since this time has tended to confirm that this device was a sort of hand-powered orrery, its clockwork gears activated by a crank. Scientific testing began in the 1970s with simple X-ray imaging, and have continued to more recent X-ray tomography and CT scanning. Imaging has revealed not only previously hidden gears, but also faint inscriptions on what was once the outer casing. All of this data tends to confirm that this device was an astronomical calculator, designed to track the movements of both the sun and the moon, with indications that missing portions of the device also tracked the movements of all five planets known to exist in antiquity. Evidence suggests that the Antikythera Mechanism was used to predict eclipses as well as to determine the dates of Olympic Games. Numerous lines of evidence confirm that the shipwreck in which the Antikythera Mechanism was found dates back to around 60 BCE, with some dating the device itself as much as a hundred years older. With this, as well as mentions of such orrery devices in 1st century BCE Roman sources, it seems quite apparent that this is a genuine example of lost ancient technology, or a technology known in antiquity that would not be developed again for around 1500 years. Is it then reasonable to entertain other claims of lost ancient high technologies, such as those associated with the pyramids and other monument building cultures?

Last year, throughout much of my 2023 season of the Historical Blindness podcast, I devoted numerous episodes to the MacGuffins of the Indiana Jones films, concluding with one on the Nazi plunder trains, which served as the setting for the opening set piece of the latest film. Of course, the real MacGuffin of the new film, the Dial of Destiny, was the Antikythera Mechanism, which the film calls Archimedes’s Dial. In reality, the mechanism looks nothing like the well-preserved artifact depicted in the film, nor do any of the proposed reconstructions of the device really resemble the Dial of Destiny in the film. And of course, it was likely not designed by Archimedes to predict time rifts, as the film claims. But there is, in fact, some reason to associate the mechanism with Archimedes, ancient Greek mathematician and inventor who was so central to the latest Indiana Jones film. Some historical texts have actually been turned up that indicate such devices definitely did exist in Hellenistic Greece, and one of them mentions Archimedes by name. The Roman politician and orator Cicero seems to describe such a device in De re publica, referring to some kind of machine “on which were delineated the motions of the sun and moon…” and explicitly stating that “Archimedes…had thought out a way to represent accurately by a single device for turning the globe those various and divergent movements….” While this does appear to credit Archimedes with the invention of such a device, in another work, Cicero also describes such an “orrery recently constructed by our friend Posidonios, which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, moon, and the five planets that take place in the heavens every day and night.” In short, it’s not certain that Archimedes was the inventor of such devices, though he does seem to be the best candidate, as Pappus of Alexandria, writing hundreds of years later, mentions a work of Archimedes, called On Sphere Making, that apparently described the creation of such devices. At the time that the Dial of Destiny released, I did not see a feasible way to approach this MacGuffin. Simply put, I did not think I could stretch it into an entire episode, even with all the other bits in the film about ancient inventions that Archimedes had built, such as the weapons of war that Archimedes is said to have invented to defend Syracuse from Roman invasion. But I imagined that I could talk about both the Antikythera Mechanism and the Archimedes Weapon in an episode or series about these and other claims of lost ancient high technology. And of course, after my long series on pyramid myths, discussing the claims that some lost technology or lost advanced civilization must have been responsible for their construction, now just seemed like the right time. So you can consider this, in part, one further installment of my series on Indiana Jones MacGuffins, though maybe not the last, with the upcoming release of the video game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which I imagine is raising an old Victorian idea about ancient sacred sites being aligned around the Earth, so it could be interesting to do an episode on that next year. In the meanwhile, though, let’s consider, first, what evidence there really is for actual lost ancient technology.

A speculative reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism. Attribution: Tony Freeth, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).

The Antikythera Mechanism is really the only hard piece of material evidence of a sort of high technology, like a computing system, existing in our ancient past, and dating to only a century or two before the common era, it isn’t really that old, compared to the antiquity that is often claimed for lost high tech civilizations, which we will discuss before we’re done. The fact is that the knowledge and technology needed for the creation of the orrery found near Antikythera already existed. It was a combination of mathematics taught at Plato’s Academy and the theories and cycles of Greek and Babylonian astronomy. Although the Antikythera mechanism is the earliest example of gears discovered in Europe, they appear to have been around already for hundreds of years, as gears have been found in China that date back to the 4th century BCE, and in 330 BCE, gear trains were clearly described in the pseudo-Aristotelian work Mechanica, which though spuriously attributed to Aristotle was certainly written before Archimedes’s time. And with the attribution of the orrery’s invention to Archmedes also uncertain, what advanced technology can we actually credit him with inventing? What we find when we look at the life and accomplishments of Archimedes is rather similar to what we found when looking at Pythagoras. There are traditions and legends about his life and his inventions, but little is known for certain. It is said that he went to Egypt to learn from scholars in Alexandria, perhaps even from Euclid, but much as was the case with Pythagoras’s travels and the influence of Eastern knowledge on his mathematics, this is only a tradition, a legend. Stories of his scientific breakthroughs are likewise questionable, framed in colorful narratives, just like Pythagoras supposedly discovering musical harmony by listening to the hammering of blacksmiths. Take for example the story of his discovery that through water displacement one can measure volume, and when combined with weight could determine density, in order to determine whether something was pure gold or alloyed. It’s said he figured this out by seeing the water level rise when he sat in a bathtub. This is the story of Archimedes crying “Eureka!” as he ran naked through the streets, exulting in his breakthrough. It is so simplistic an explanation of the discovery that, like the apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head raising the notion of gravity, it is likely not true, and indeed, it has long been thought apocryphal, with some scholars even pointing out that there was a far simpler way to determine the same thing, simply by balancing the item with pure gold and plunging the scale into water to see if they remained balanced despite buoyancy. With Archimedes and his discoveries thus shrouded in questions of legitimacy, we must look skeptically at the more outlandish claims about his inventions.

As depicted in that last Indiana Jones film, during the siege of Syracuse by Roman forces in 213 BCE, there is a legend that Archimedes devised a number of ingenious war machines to repel their ships. One was the iron hand or claw, said to be extended out from the walls of the city to grasp Roman ships by their prows and submerge their sterns. Another was his heat ray, the Archimedes Weapon, said to have reflected the rays of the sun onto the Roman ships, causing them to burst into flames. Conventional explanations of the Claw of Archimedes imagine it to have been a grapnel or pincer depending from a wooden beam by a chain, which by means of levers and pulleys could then be pulled by teams of men or animals, thereby raising the vessel. Some recent BBC and Discovery Channel programs have found engineers that declare the device to have been feasible, and it probably is possible for such a device to work. As Archimedes is said to have once stated of levers, "Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.” However, is it believable? This device would require huge freestanding wooden structures within the walls of Syracuse, as well as extremely long and sturdy wooden beams. First, it is unlikely that there was so much large open space just within the city’s walls to accommodate not only the massive wooden towers that would have been needed to support the device but also space for all the people and/or teams of animals needed to haul the chains and raise the ships. Moreover, the wooden beams would need to be so long and so straight and sturdy that they would have needed to come from sequoias or fir trees or other similarly tall and straight-trunked trees, which were not then available in the Mediterranean. Lastly, nautical maps indicate that the waters around Syracuse were actually shallow at the time, and standard fortification practices of the era would have included the sinking of stones offshore to make it even more inaccessible by ship. These last two facts alone demonstrate that not only would the sinking of ships by such a device be unlikely, there may not have even been a need for such devices. Likewise, the Archimedes heat ray, conventionally held to be a kind of burning mirror or lens, which either reflects or concentrates sunlight, is also feasible, if still not likely. Anyone who has used a magnifying glass to burn ants knows the concept, but the fact is that the claim did not appear until hundreds of years after the siege of Syracuse. Earlier historians, like Polybius, Livy, and Plutarch, who all wrote about the siege, make no mention of such a weapon. The Greek geometer Diocles, a contemporary of Archimedes who wrote about the use of parabolic mirrors to focus light, makes no mention of the weapon or of Archimedes interest in the topic. The first mention comes in the 2nd century CE, when it is only said that he burned Roman ships, with no mention of any unique device. The full legend does not seem to have actually appeared until 700 years after the siege, when in a treatise on parabolic mirrors, Anthemius of Tralles suggested offhandedly that Archimedes might have used a “burning-glass” to set fire to the invaders’ ships. So it is nothing more than conjecture that came to be taken as genuine history. Moreover, three times in 6 years, the television program MythBusters devoted episodes to testing the plausibility of the Archimedes Death Ray. Discovering that ships would need to remain essentially motionless, and the sky would need to be cloudless, and since the seaward side of Syracuse faces eastward, the Roman fleet would have only been vulnerable to such attacks during the morning, they declared the myth busted each time they tested it.

Painting imagining Archimedes’s Death Ray by Giulio Parigi, c. 1599

This is not to say that the existence of these weapons was impossible. As I’ve said, the engineering principles behind both make them plausible to some degree. While documentary evidence clearly suggests the heat ray legend arose later from conjecture, Plutarch did describe the claws in his account of the siege, and it’s possible that it has only been reconstructed erroneously in modern times, and that Archimedes actually had a more elegant design that had no need of such long wooden beams, for example. Plutarch explicitly says of Archimedes’s weapons that he “would not deign to leave behind him any commentary or writing on such subjects.” We can take this as a lame excuse for why there is no surviving evidence of such technology, or we may believe that he chose to destroy his plans for them, whether because he hated that his work was used for warfare or, as Plutarch says, that “repudiating as sordid and ignoble the whole trade of engineering,” he simply preferred “purer speculations.” It would not be the last known time in history that the knowledge of some specific weapon technology would be lost, after all. Take for example the technology of Greek Fire. Much like the devices of Archimedes, which were said to have intimidated the Roman invaders, convincing them that they were fighting against gods, Greek fire, originally called liquid fire or sea fire, was used to repel a far superior naval force in 941 CE, when Byzantines used it to repel the invading Russian fleet attacking Constantinople. Historically, Greek fire has been confused with other incendiary weapons, such as hand-thrown or catapulted fire bombs. Because of this, it was wrongly thought, at different times, to have been a sulphur- or quicklime-based explosive, or even a gunpowder weapon hundreds of years before the appearance of gunpowder. In examining contemporary descriptions, though, scholars have come to recognize that it was a petroleum-based weapon that appears to have been sprayed from hoses or nozzles aboard Greek ships. It was essentially a flame-thrower. Although there are some aspects of the weapon’s workings that remain a mystery, such as the consistency of the fuel, and the method of pumping and siphoning it, the technology itself is not so very mysterious today. We know where the inflammable oils they needed could have been collected, in the North Caucasus oilfield, where wells naturally produced naphtha, and the fact that such petroleum oils may not have been as readily available elsewhere may account for the decline in the weapon’s use. Then there is the fact that it was something of a secret weapon, intended not only to incinerate but also to inspire dread. Historically, technology used for weapons is less likely to be shared, less likely to spread through cultural diffusion, for the simple fact that one group does not want their enemies to have as advanced weaponry as they have. When a technology is purposely kept secret, there is just a higher chance that it may be lost. Take for example the material used to line thermonuclear warheads in the seventies and eighties, which was codenamed Fogbank and was kept so classified that, in the nineties, when it was time to restore the warheads, it was discovered that the composition of the material and the process for its manufacture was never documented, and the retired scientists who had produced the material decades earlier could not recall how to produce it.

Another such medieval weapon technology thought to have been lost is the process for forging Damascus steel. True Damascus steel blades were said to be the strongest and sharpest of blades, such that a swordsman who wielded one could slice easily through a rifle barrel. Legends surrounding Damascus steel make it almost supernatural, like the adamantium or vibranium of Marvel comics. Besides those qualities, it was marked by its appearance, with a rippling water-like pattern in the metal, providing its other name, “watered steel.” Modern experiments have recreated this pattern, but the resulting blades to not appear any stronger than other blades. We could take this for evidence that Damascus blades were never as strong as claimed, but scientific examination does seem to support that genuine Damascus steel blades are different than modern reproductions. In 2006, a German research team claimed that they had discovered nanowires within the blade, which of course sets the imagination afire with ideas about medieval electronics. However, other researchers protest that they actually appear to be carbon nanotubes that formed naturally from cementite during the blades’ forging. This does indeed give us some indication of what made Damascus steel different, though. While there have been alternative notions of the origins of its name, such as that it came from the name of the swordsmith who made them, or that it derives from a root Arabic word, damas, meaning “aqueous” or “watery”—which doesn’t seem like an accurate translation at all, as far as I can determine, so I suspect it’s entirely made up—it is typically thought that the name associates the swords with Damascus, a medieval city in Syria, just as Damask fabric was named after the city, though some say the name comes from the rippling pattern being likened to Damask fabric. The notion that it could have taken its name from Damascus makes sense, though, as these swords were likely first encountered by Europeans in the Middle East. However, their actual forging has been traced to India and Sri Lanka, where a particular crucible steel, called wootz, was used, the ore of which contained just the right trace impurities, with carbide-forming elements such as tungsten and manganese, that made the peculiar qualities of Damascus steel possible. Thus we find that this was not some special technology or process but rather a fluke determined by the specific materials used. The “technology” was lost likely because of the British colonialist rule of India, which disrupted many Indian industries, including mining.

12th century illustration depicting the use of Greek fire in naval warfare.

But again, it is possible that, in addition to the unique materials used in the forging of Damascus steel, there may also have been some unique technique involved. This is exactly the case with another supposed lost technology sometimes cited as a kind of precedent for the idea that ancient civilizations were more advanced than we give them credit for. This one has to do with Roman technology. There are numerous Roman legends about technologies that we would today consider beyond their time. For example, there was Mithradatium, a supposed miracle drug said to have been invented by the Anatolian King Mithradates to save himself from attempts to poison him. This herbal concoction, said to have been brought to Rome by Pompey, was real in the sense that Roman physicians mixed it according to recipes that started to spread, and added to it new ingredients. But certainly it was a myth in that it was just herbs like ginger, cinnamon, and parsley, and certainly not the panacea it was claimed to be, and this was seen as far back as the 2nd century CE, when Pliny the Elder suggested that, with all of its more than fifty ingredients, each in such specific proportions, it was a fraud, calling it “a showy parade of the art, and a colossal boast of science.” Then there was the legend of vitrum flexile, the flexible and therefore unbreakable glass that I mentioned in my episode on technofear last year. The story of this lost technology claims that Tiberius Caesar had its inventor beheaded because he feared the economic effects that such an invention might have. This story is plainly a fiction. It first appeared in the Satyricon, a work of satire, yet the story of flexible glass is still sometimes cited as an actual example of lost technology. The more serious-minded look to genuine Roman accomplishments in infrastructure, such as the aqueducts, and magnificent structures like the Pantheon Dome. The lost technology for which they are credited is their concrete, which was used to build the Pantheon Dome, as well as many other structures, which remain strong and intact. This should not be the case with the kind of crude lime concrete known to be in use in antiquity, yet their concrete appears to be more durable and to stand the test of time better even than modern concrete. Much like the fluke of wootz steel in India, though, the secret of Roman concrete appears to have mostly been in the qualities of the materials they used, in that they used pozzolanic ash, volcanic ash from Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples, which seems to help prevent the spread of any cracks that may form in it. However, just as Damascus steel may have resulted from the convergence of a unique material and a special technique, research published as recently as last year suggests that a particular hot mixing technique may have been used, resulting in unique lime clasts that allow the concrete to “self-heal.” It’s really quite amazing, but with no treatises in existence detailing the development of this technology, we can’t be certain that the Romans themselves knew why their concrete would last so long, or even that it would.

So with this discussion of building techniques, we come back to the foundation, so to speak, of claims about ancient lost technology. How did the ancients build these grand things that they built? In answering this, we are brought back to Archimedes, who is given credit for first describing the “simple machines,” as well as for inventing one of them, or at least one use for it. The simple machines are basic mechanical devices that it was long held must serve as the components of any machine, though since the Industrial Revolution, this is no longer accurate. The six simple machines—levers, wedges, pulleys, the wheel-and-axle, the inclined plane, and the screw—all work using leverage to increase force, and leverage was Archimedes’s jam, as we’ve established. Clearly he did not invent leverage, though, nor did he invent these simple machines. Ancient Egyptians had knowledge of them, and the simple answer of how they built the pyramids is that it was done using ramps and levers. Since part of Archimedes’s story was that he learned from scholars in Alexandria, it’s feasible that he was introduced to the mechanical uses of these simple devices while in Egypt. Interestingly, he is credited with inventing the Archimedes screw, which is not the simple screw but rather the water screw, a device for lifting or pumping water, while he was in Egypt, for the irrigation of the Nile Delta. However, it is also argued by scholars that the water screw was invented by the Assyrian King Sennacherib in Mesopotamia hundreds of years earlier, and that it may have already been in use in ancient Egypt long before Archimedes’s supposed time there. Archimedes was preoccupied with the mathematics of spirals, and how it corresponds to movement away from a fixed point, the Archimedean spiral, so it’s suggested these mathematics are what led to his invention of the water screw, but it may just as well have been that he had encountered a water screw or other simple screw machine and this inspired his exploration of the mathematics behind such devices. But regardless of when this water screw was invented, it was used simply to raise water. It was a simple machine. The fact is that the very simplicity of the technology associated with ancient civilizations, the simple leverage devices we know Archimedes worked with, and even the rather mundane nature of the ancient advanced technologies often cited as having been lost—strong steel and durable concrete—demonstrate that there was no high technology comparable to modern technology lost to time. Even the legendary war machines of Archimedes, if they really existed, were essentially just a crane with a grapnel and mirrors to reflect the sun. Only the Antikythera mechanism is impressive as an example of surprisingly ancient high technology, but even that is just a clockwork orrery. It did not run on electricity. Yet unsurprisingly, there are those who would suggest that the Archimedes screw was really a hydroelectric turbine, and that ancient Egyptians used electricity. In the second part of this 2-part series I’ll look at those claims, and in examining ideas about lost ancient tech, I’ll be led inevitably back to Graham Hancock’s claims about lost ancient civilizations.

Ancient High Technology - Part One: The Archimedean Spiral

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