How Would Technology advance in a continuing Hellenistic Age?

Triple post FTW! I came across this as well: http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/HeroAndLoon.htm

... For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.
Aristotle Politics Chapter 3, Book 1
^The development of technology and science depends on a complex way on socio-politic-economic parameters. Why should Greeks develop a telescope if Prolemy's cosmological model was accurate enough? More likely it would be interesting as an instrument useful for the military (see Galileo). Why should the Athenians adapt the Meton calendar or later more accurate calendars? If you develop one accurate measuring device then sometimes you discover other unexpected effects or phenomena (or other interesting things such as some moons of Jupiter) and to study these you develop other devices. Today we know this and we hope by increasing the capabilities of a device also to expand our knowledge with new discoveries. You need of course some financial support for the development, for the material and the necessary experiments. Ancient Greeks knew that heated air expands, or that the length of a cord as Heron describes changes by humidity, but there was no reason to use this information to produce a device to measure temperature (by the expansion, just by placing a scale) or humidity. The question is how the volume or the length depends on temperature but one can find this with controlled experiments. Such experiments were performed by Greek engineers when they developed the catapults. Recently there was an interesting BBC report of the construction of a giant catapult. Experienced engineers constructed a catapult and after 2-3 shots the catapult was damaged. Engineeers using Laptop computers estimated the range, experiments in modern laboratories were used to find a material that can be used for the storage of energy. They had to lift the heavy parts of the giant catapult with a modern device after they tried to use a device used by the Romans and the experiment failed. The engineers were happy that they were able to use the catapult 2-3 times whereas for the ancient Greeks and Romans it would be a disaster if they had to produce a new catapult after a few shots. The ancient engineers probably reached the physical limits of these devices with wood as material and some maybe metal support.
I was reading the notes of a US professor discussing the reason why technology was not developed for almost 1000 years from 400 to say 1500. We assume that the ancient Greeks were more “theoretical” oriented but devices such as the Antikythera show that this is not the truth. Ptolemy's model even geocentric was accurate enough to describe most of the astronomical events and even Copernicus did not improve its precision but instead he provided more scientific evidence of the heliocentric model of Aristarchus. Various sources are mentioned where Plato or Aristotle think that to ask about the utility of something is bad. Plato is very strict and forbids the use of anything than ruler and compass in geometry, where the ruler actually cannot be used to measure distances as in this case the trisection of an angle is very simple. Is he different from the mathematician Hardy, a number theory expert, who was proud that his science is of no use? Then the professor asks whether the Jew Christian religion was responsible for the later advance of technology. One may ask whether actually the opposite is true, whether the decline of Greek Science in the Roman dominated period was due to the mixing of cultures: The result of occultic Egyptian influences slowly took over the more rational Greeks (even today it is unbelievable that millions read each day their horoscope or think that their zodiac sign matters what they do or what will happen). Later the Romans leaders, Pagans or Christian, did not supporting science like the Ptolemies in Alexandria. I agree that during the Byzantine Empire very nice religious songs were produced and some remarkable churches but I am not aware of any comparable advance in science such as around the period 500-200 BC. Devices like clocks using gears actually were less complicated than the Antikythera device. A very important contribution was that the ancient Greek texts were partially preserved so that if we talk about Greek texts actually we mean Byzantine copies as the originals were all lost. Another important source was the work of the Arabs who copied the Greek texts, translated them and extended these with their own research. So the question is not why the ancient Greeks did not develop technology but rather why the others did not develop further science and technology much before 1500.
The amount of mechanical development will always be in inverse ratio to the number of slaves that happen to be at a country’s disposal.
Van Loon’s Law

Heron of Alexandria invented the use of steam power in 50 AD (steam energy transfer into rotational motion) with a device of small efficiency but could we expect more from the first every build machine of this type? The birthday of Heron is not known and so some consider that he lived around 150 BC but it is more likely that he lived in the period 10-70 AD. Some 200 years before Heron steam power was also used: Archimedes invented a steam operated gun (more than 1500 later called Architronio by Leonardo Da Vinci ) and Philon of Byzantium produced a Siren for the Pharos of Alexandria (he described various devices that work with air or steam). Heron's Aeolipile was the first jet engine, although the principle behind its operation was not fully understood until Isaac Newton's Third Law of motion (1690): "Every action produces a reaction equal in force and opposite in direction." The steam engine reappeared again only in 1698 when Thomas Savery invented a steam pump. The first practical steam engine was the atmospheric machine of Thomas Newcomen in 1701. In 1804, English inventor Richard Trevithick introduced the steam locomotive in Wales. In 1815, George Stephenson built the world's first workable steam locomotive.
It's not so much that slaves were available, which indeed they were. No, the ruling classes were scared, as the Puritans said, of Satan finding work for idle hands to do. One of the great things about not developing a source of energy that did not depend on muscle power was the fear of what the muscles might get up to if they weren't kept fully employed. Peter Green, Hellenistic History and Culture
Why was Hero’s steam turbine developed no farther than a novelty? In 1st century Greece, slaves were an important element of the economy, salves outnumbering freemen by more than two to one and they provided all the work anyone needed. The slave-based economy would have been rocked by the introduction of laborsaving devices and displaced slaves might have caused unrest or even revolution. And, so, the steam engine played a role in entertainment, but not business. Were the Greeks aware about such consequences? We only can speculate about this. But it is reported that in Rome, at about the same time, the emperor Vespasian to have purchased and destroyed the model of a mechanical device that would have made construction work more efficient, saying, “You must let me feed my poor commons (Sine me pascere plebeculam meam)” In these cases, preserving political stability motivated government to suppress technology, but at other times, governments have been motivated to support it.
[If there had been no Manhattan Project] Nuclear physicists would have spent years forming theories and doing experiments while competing with scientists from other fields to get money for their work…[the U.S.] had plenty of coal and oil…[so] the 1990s would have had low-power nuclear reactors operating to produce medical isotopes, but nothing else.
Robert Pool

“We think that architects [master craftsmen] in all fields are more honorable and know more and are wiser than the artisans because they understand the reasons for the things done, while the artisans do things, just like some inanimate objects, without knowing how to do the things they do .... Artisans accomplish their work through customs .... As more and more arts [technai] were discovered, some pertaining to necessities and some to pastimes, the inventors of the latter were always considered wiser than the inventors of the former, because their knowledge was not oriented towards utility.”
Aristotle Metaphysics 981a-982a

The Greeks made a distinction between science and Engineering or technology. Engineers teached their skills to their sons or apprentices who learned more from practice and experience than by reading books. Their skills were generally kept sometimes as "trade secrets" within the artisan group or groups, much as the medieval guilds kept their secrets in later centuries. They did no controlled experiments to understand the nature of the material they used except probably trial and error methods for developing better, cheaper products. The Scientists and Philosophers, were skilled in argument, debate and formal reasoning. The classical logic of hypothesis and syllogism and the logical beauty of Euclidean plane geometry are examples of this turn of mind and culture. The idea of resolving a dispute between theories by experiment rather than by debate would not have occurred to them. Even if it had, the technological ability to do the experiments was often absent; more important, perhaps, was the conceptual problem, because the concepts of their science were not clearly enough defined to suggest experiments that they could have carried out. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the Greeks could not make accurate measurements; they could and did make quite accurate measurements in estimating for example the size of the earth: It is also mistake to consider that they were not skilled in observation as astronomy shows the contrary.

The device of Antikythera, the planetarium, the screw device of Archimedes etc, shows that a more advanced technology could be developed on a broader basis. Archimedes considered his technical devices to be not worthwhile to write about. There is no material written for the planetarium, the screw, and other machines like his war devices. He liked more his geometric-mathematical discoveries. The idealism of Plato and Aristotle were probably a reason that Archimedes did not consider his technical work as important as mathematics and geometry. At least he used methods that were not “conformal” according to Plato.

Plato: Mechanics as corrupter and destroyer of pure excellence of geometry.
Aristotle: To dwell on utility is bad taste.
Plutarch: Archimedes regarded “work of an engineer and every art that ministers to needs of life as ignoble and vulgar”

In the history of Greek science one has to distinguish between two parallel developments: on the one hand scientific achievements in the technical sense, comprising all the factual discoveries and inventions in mathematics, astronomy and the physical and biological sciences, and on the other hand scientific thought, aiming at the formation of comprehensive theories and the philosophical foundation of a scientific world-picture. The development of science proper, taken in the first sense… faded out after the second century AD…. Scientific thought, however, continued… until the last Neo-Platonists in the middle of the sixth century AD. … In ancient Greece the scope of experimental research remained restricted because the Greeks, with very few exceptions, failed to take the decisive step from observation to systematic experimentation. Thus hardly any links were formed between the few branches of science that developed, and they did not expand sufficiently to produce a coherent and interdependent system…. The scientific world-picture of Aristotle… became dominant in Greek and medieval thought. In fact, it is one of the three major world views in the history of science, being followed after a long interval by that of Newton which has since been replaced by that of relativity and quantum physics.
Samuel Sambursky, The physical world of late antiquity, Routledge and Kegan Paul, [1962]
There was some technical advance in the work of Hero later even if some consider it very simplistic. The development of Greek Science was much slower at the Hellenistic period compared to the advances in the 3rd to 2nd BC century. While the expansion of the Greek world due to the campaign of Alexander the Great was impressive it was also the reason of its decline. The mixing of the more rational Greek culture with others more mythical oriented, the sophists the democracy and small city states replaced by huge Empires and Christian religion combined was the reason that only 3 centuries later a new almost 1500 year long dark period started for the Western World.
It is the combination of controlled observation for the purpose of advancing understanding which we call an experiment which is missing from the natural philosophy of the ancient Greeks. The representation of numbers also seems to be a limitation for further mathematical advances. Would the ancient Greeks be able to “discover” experimental science if the conditions would be favorable such as in the golden age of Athens and how much would be technology be advanced today? We will never know.
The opinion is that Greek Science was different than today in that there was no interest in controlling nature. Was religion a reason that we have no industrial revolution, or requires technological revolution some specific elements for its initiation?

Part from

Ancient and Modern Science: Some Observations
by
Ian Johnston

Greek Science and The Vision of the World

We should not, however, too quickly claim to see the start of everything in the modern enterprise we call science in the activity of these ancient Greek thinkers. For there were some really important differences between the old philosophers and the modern scientific researcher. To begin with, the primary aim of the Greek thinkers was to arrive at a better contemplative understanding of the nature of things. They had no notion of using their speculations as a means of gaining control of nature or of altering the natural conditions of life.

This point is crucial. At its heart, the Greek philosophical interest in mathematical investigations of the natural world was moral and religious. It was motivated above all by the desire to arrive at a higher knowledge of the divine, the permanent ordering principles by which the world, in all its manifestations, was arranged. In a sense, these philosophers saw a rigorous study of mathematics as a process of spiritual cleansing designed to prepare the human mind for the contemplation of the divine purpose (in other words, as an alternative to many irrational religious rituals, myths, and mysteries). This tradition is very much a part of Socrates's entire project (as recorded and interpreted by Plato).

Since the ancient Greeks saw nature as divine, as having a mysteriously vital soul of its own, an essence with which human beings constantly interacted, there could be no question of "changing" nature or seeking in some ways to alter the given facts of life. Such an endeavour would have violated the way these philosophers understood the world. Nature (including the world around them and the cosmos) was a divinely alive mystery which might be intellectually apprehended and contemplated (at least in part). The aim of scientific speculation was to assist in that essentially contemplative exercise.

For that reason, Greek scientists showed no great interest in experimentation and no desire to develop their scientific thinking into practical applications. By the Hellenistic period (the fourth and third centuries BC), for example, Greek scientists knew about all the principles necessary to construct a steam engine. But the notion that they might actually build one and use it to overcome certain natural limitations never occurred to them. Nature was there to be wondered at, contemplated, even worshipped, not to be tampered with or altered.

Moreover, since the mysterious divine powers which were the creative source of everything, including political structures just as much as natural phenomena, were good, a mathematical understanding of the world linked the inquiring spirit of the thinker with the search for the ultimate purposes of things. To such a mind, it was far less important to figure out how things worked than to focus upon what these things might mean in the overall moral arrangement of the universe. Hence, the pursuit of what we might call science was primarily an inquiry into questions of value. A properly disciplined inquiry into nature could lead to a fuller understanding of the moral issues on which questions of justice in the community depended. The practical value of such inquiry was thus primarily moral.

The Four Causes

This major emphasis on value becomes most apparent in the Aristotle's famous explanation of the different causes for all phenomena. If scientific speculation is, in very large part, a search for rational explanations of cause (i.e., for an answer to this question "How did this natural phenomenon come into existence?"), then, according to Aristotle, there were four possible ways of accounting for that cause: the Material Cause, the Efficient Cause, the Formal Cause, and the Final Cause.

The material cause explains the phenomenon in terms of the material out of which it is made; the efficient cause explains the phenomenon in terms of the process which puts the materials together; the formal cause explains the phenomenon in terms of the plan or design or arrangement of the materials; and the final (*) cause explains the phenomenon in terms of its purpose (especially its moral purpose).

(* The original text used the word “formal” and not “final” which is probably a typing error)

So, for example, if we wanted to account for the existence of, say, a house, the material cause would be the wood, nails, glass, concrete, and so on which make up the house; the efficient cause would be the actions of the various workers who constructed it (carpenters, roofers, carpet layers, and so on); the formal cause would be the architectural design and drawings; the final cause would be a moral reason why the house ought to be built at all and why it should look the way it does in the wider context of the community and the world.

The explanations sought by classical science were concerned above all with the final cause, that is, with an account of whatever one was speculating about which placed it in the overall moral scheme of the universe, linking that object or institution with a sense of moral purposiveness and hence with the divine structure of the universe (what Plato and Aristotle call the Good). This was the central purpose in almost all the most important speculations of Greek philosophy about the natural world or about politics, simply because for these thinkers the most challenging fact of life was an ethical concern: knowledge about the world only mattered if it helped people to understand how they ought to behave (i.e., gave them insight into the ultimate standards of morality and justice). Such thinking is called teleological (from the Greek word telos meaning goal), because it seeks explanations for things in terms of their final purposes.

Given this emphasis, it is not difficult to appreciate why ancient Greek science placed little emphasis on experimentation or working with theories which might enable them to manipulate nature (i.e., change some factor in nature). Of course, like all cultures the classical Greeks had a certain technical knowledge, for example, in medicine, metallurgy, pottery, construction (especially of ships), and selective breeding of domestic animals, but it is clear that the philosophers inquiring into nature considered this form of knowledge (which we prize highly as something immediately allied to our scientific endeavours) distinctly inferior. Extending this technical expertise in some way played no role whatsoever in their speculative theories (even though some of them were experts in technical matters, like military defenses and weapons).

I remember the days when I visited my grandmother in Greece, in a small village called magiko or “magic” in Xanthi around 1970 (not far from Abdera the City of Democritus). I traveled by train from Germany to Greece. Moving from the north to the south it was like a travel back in time. I was a witness when her house was for the first time connected with a power-line and electricity was available almost 70 years after Edison made a demonstration of electric light in New York. Before this life in this small Greek village was almost not different than in ancient Greece.

And this: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rrice/usna_pap.html

The Antikythera Mechanism:
Physical and Intellectual Salvage from the 1st Century B.C.


At some time around 80 B.C. a heavily laden merchant ship sank to the bottom of the sea off the Southern coast of Greece. After two millennia, materials from that vessels cargo have combined with the work of several scholars to allow wider speculation on the subject of seafaring in Greek and Roman antiquity. The objective of this treatment of the chain of events involved is to provide a useful survey of early and modern underwater archaeology and the mechanics of artifact preservation and interpretation as well as to offer conclusions drawn from the data presented here concerning ancient celestial navigation and the island of Rhodes. The united efforts of a wealthy Roman, a frightened Greek sponge diver, an English physicist, and an American naval historian have combined to allow some further inquiry into civilian and military seafaring in the first century before Christ.

Sailing further south past the island of Antikythera off the southernmost coast of Greece offers an alternative to, as a very ancient proverb says, "rounding Malea and forgetting home." Whether he sought to avoid the pirates or the storms clustered around the infamous cape, the skipper of what apparently was a good-sized Roman merchant vessel of around 300 tons made a wrong decision. His ship crashed into and sank off the island's coastal cliffs, and what was probably a wealthy Roman buyer eventually learned that his treasure ship's cargo had gone down in nearly two hundred feet of very cold, current-swept water.[1]

"Treasure ship" is a legitimate label. The corbita had held everything from original bronze life-size statues, to marble reproductions of older works, jewelry, wine, other bronzes, and at least one immensely-complicated scientific instrument. It was the statues that frightened a Greek sponge diver named Elias Stadiatos nearly out of his wits in 1900, when his captain winched him back over the side, removed his helmet and breathing hose, and found him babbling about a "heap of dead naked women."[2]

Rumors from around that time show a resulting pattern of events all too familiar to the modern underwater archaeologist. The local divers had found the ship first. The villagers of Simi, near the site, speak of many small bronze statues sold in Alexandria soon after the wreck was found, and when later archaeologists surveyed her, the vessel was missing all her heavy lead anchor stocks. The ship was big enough to have had five anchors, in water too deep to have used any of them, and divers needed lead weights to find their sponges and rare black coral, just as they needed money to support their families.[3]

Still, Captain Kondos of the sponge vessel in 1901 told the Greek government of Stadiatos's discovery, and agreed to hire his ship and divers for the salvage. He pushed his equipment and his men to the limit, but he recovered one of the most amazing troves ever winched from the bottom of the sea. Statues, jewelry, transport jars, utensils, and tableware of all kinds came to the surface. "Huge boulders" obscuring the cargo and hauled up to the salvaging vessel with difficulty turned out to be statues covered with marine growth, their marble eaten away by the chemical action of centuries of sea-water and animals. The divers suffered from all the hazards of their trade, one fatally. When the winter storms came up, the divers and the Greek government were ready to quit. The bronze statues went into galleries, the jewelry into display cases, and a great deal of material went into museum storage, waiting for careful analysis to determine the significance of, among other things, clumps of marine growth and corrosion surrounding what looked like some kind of gearing. What wood was brought up resembled wet cardboard in more ways than one as it dried out and shriveled away.[4]

It would be unfair to call this proto-excavation "unscientific," for there were trained archaeologists from the Greek antiquities service waiting to process the material once Kondos's divers had brought it to the surface. A modern excavation would, for all that, hopefully progress a great deal differently, using techniques pioneered by Peter Throckmorton and George Bass over the course of research beginning in 1959. Archaeologists themselves would descend to investigate the wreck. The hoses and helmets that had hampered the sponge divers of 1901 would be replaced by self-contained apparatus designed to bleed off the carbon dioxide that had exhausted and dazed the original divers. Modern compressors would be filling air tanks and pumping air down to the wreck level, and that air rising up again inside a tube would lift silt and small items up to the surface for sifting and removal. Inside plastic bags rising bubbles would lift statues and jars. A decompression chamber would stand ready in the event of nitrogen narcosis, with atmospheric pressure within carefully regulated to let the nitrogen built up by the compressed air breathed underwater leave the diver's arteries slowly enough to avoid damage. A grid over the wreck made of plastic plumbing pipe would direct drawings and photography for stratigraphic records of the objects discovered. Drawings and recorded measurements would possibly be combined with stereoscopic photography, the whole allowing graphic reconstruction of the original ship and its cargo.[5] There might be a diving bell with a telephone to talk to the surface, or a midget submarine to help with the photography. An underwater metal detector would be useful, and an "air probe" to jet into the sea bottom with compressed air to prod for things under the mud. Computers would store information topside, and potentially underwater as well, since one of the things that suffers with exposure to water is a diver's short-term memory.

Funding, as well as the physical difficulties of such intricate underwater activity can act to limit such exploitation of first-hand ancient material. The additional hazard of post-recovery destruction of recovered material is not always countered by techniques of modern artifact conservation. Shifting during the descent of the original ship's hull to bottom had already inflicted extensive damage on her cargo before the first diver approached the wreckage. The ubiquitous Mediterranean teredo worm employed the intervening centuries to destroy the integrity of the hull and larger wooden artifacts, while marine bacteria left only the hollow cell walls of the remaining timber. Marine shellfish devoured the limestone of the statues, while the sea's own electrolytic bath wrought havoc on all metallic artifacts unprotected by bottom mud. Unauthorized "pot-hunting" before the official excavation undoubtedly also further damaged the available material left behind.[6]

The bronze gearing retrieved from the Antikythera wreck, with its own chemical and animal accretions, broke into several pieces soon after its return to the surface. The ship's wooden planks and what appears to have been a case for the mechanism shriveled soon after retrieval. The marble statues were eaten away and disfigured wherever they had been exposed to the sea. As usual in terrestrial archaeological sites around the Mediterranean, ceramic material in some form survived, except for the damage inflicted by the heavier cargo and defacement by marine growths. The chemical composition of the glassware retrieved in 1901 was fortunate. Phoenician beads George Bass recovered off Cape Gelidonya exploded into dust once they began to dry.[7]

Modern conservators would place everything but the pottery into a tank of fresh water until preliminary analysis was possible. Marine conservators are a rare combination of archaeologists and chemists, employed on occasion, and on occasion, in vain. The wood can be preserved, as was the Swedish 17th-century galleon Vasa, in polyethylene glycol, which fills the empty cell walls with a waxy material over a great deal of time. Metal artifacts receive their own immersion in chemical solutions with the goal of stabilizing each piece and hopefully removing accumulated corrosion, an expensive and not always successful procedure. Cleaning off what lived and died on all materials submerged for any length of time can be difficult as well, particularly when the person so doing is uncertain of what lies under the accreted material and how much cleaning the object can withstand before disintegrating or losing desirable features.[8]

In the case of the Antikythera fragments, the four large pieces and a box of much smaller fragments were momentarily overshadowed by the staggering other results of the first directed retrieval of archaeological evidence from the sea. The original excavators had their hands full reassembling the bronze statues, sorting and identifying coins, and cataloguing all the items for museum storage at Athens. Eventually, other scholars found time to consider the fragments of original artifact. The initial belief was that the bronze object was an astrolabe--a type of navigational instrument first attested in 625 A.D. Correctly, one Konstantin Rados in the earliest debate insisted that what was visible on the lump's surface was too complicated for such a device, intricate as in fact were some medieval examples. At the same time other scholars argued that the Greek artisans who had fabricated the wreck's statues could not have built even an astrolabe.[9]

In 1951, a British physicist and historian of science named Derek De Solla Price went to the Athens Museum for his own analysis of the fragments taken from the Antikythera wreck. Price himself was familiar with construction of medieval astrolabes, and the complexity of the device and the astronomical inscriptions visible on the surface led him to eight years of informed study. In 1959 Price published his own conclusion that the fragments represented some form of intricate clockwork.[10] The idea was sufficiently unthinkable to the experts of the time for one professor to claim in responding that someone in the Middle Ages had dropped a machine of that era into the sea coincidentally over the same current-swept spot off Antikythera's rocky coast.[11]

Price remained undiscouraged and maintained his conclusions. In 1971 the Oak Ridge national laboratory published an article on the use of high-energy gamma radiation to examine the interiors of metallic objects. Price soon secured the assistance of the Greek Atomic Energy Commission in shooting gamma rays into the clumps of corroded bronze. He was able to produce photographic plates that not only allowed him to reconstruct the device but to ascertain its date of construction.[12]

The Antikythera mechanism was an arrangement of calibrated differential gears inscribed and configured to produce solar and lunar positions in synchronization with the calendar year. By rotating a shaft protruding from its now-disintegrated wooden case, its owner could read on its front and back dials the progressions of the lunar and synodic months over four-year cycles. He could predict the movement of heavenly bodies regardless of his local government's erratic calendar.[13] From the accumulated inscriptions and the position of the gears and year-ring, Price deduced that the device was linked closely to Geminus of Rhodes, and had been built on that island off the southern coast of Asia Minor circa 87 B.C. Besides the inscriptions' near-identity to Geminus's surviving book, the presence of distinctive Rhodian amphorae among other items from the wreck supported Price's deduction and date once Virginia Grace had re-examined the pottery recovered in 1901.[14]

Price's straightforward and viable analysis came despite a host of ideas the device's discovery should have dispelled. He was too concerned with what was before his eyes to realize that prevailing beliefs among historians of the period would lead others to slight or ignore what physics and archaeology had combined to discover. Price correctly noted that Rhodes was a center for astronomical thought. He mentioned Poseidonius, Cicero's friend and teacher, who built a much more complicated astronomical computer than the one recovered.[15] He was unaware of the widespread belief that continues to maintain that Rhodes in the first century B.C. was little more than a fading ghost of past glory, crippled economically by the competition of the Roman free port of Delos after 166 B.C.

It is neither facile nor uninstructive to remark that the Antikythera mechanism dropped and sank--twice. The second submersion came after Price's publication of Gears from the Greeks in 1975. Since that time little attention has been paid to our most exciting relic of advanced ancient technology. It was in the course of research into the navy of Rhodes that the mechanism first came to this author's attention, and it was that research and knowledge of extant flaws in earlier scholarship that allows this assessment of the significance of the device and Price's reconstruction.

Scholars before and after Price ignored and continue to ignore the length of Rhodes' enduring reputation among the ancients themselves as a center for intricate military and naval technology.[16] Rhodes had resisted the largest and most advanced weapons systems produced by the Macedonian warlord-inventor Demetrius. In 305 "the Besieger" sent a siege tower nine stories tall, pushed by two thousand men against the Rhodians' walls. Rhodes was a center for the construction and use of antiquity's heaviest and most intricate catapults. The historian Diodorus of Sicily would record how Demetrius's helepolis, or city-taker, had to retreat from one of the most intense artillery barrages of antiquity, burning from several direct hits with incendiary bolts.[17] The tradition of advanced technology on Rhodes continues to appear for centuries in the surviving historical records of the Hellenistic Age. Mithridates V of Pontus fared no better than the Macedonian attacker in his own onslaught of 88 B.C., in which he encountered what F.E. Winter considers to be one of the most formidable protected catapult batteries in antiquity.[18] Polybius, Strabo, and Aristides in later years attest to the legendary speed and surpassing deadliness of the ships and weapons built behind the wall of Rhodes neorion.[19] The pirates of the Mediterranean feared and fled before the war fleet of a single small island, and the last of the Greek democracies successfully warded off even Roman domination until 43 B.C.[20] Years afterward, the finest ships in the Mediterranean world could still be found in her shipyards.

In the light of the ancient literary evidence and the physical existence of the Antikythera mechanism, it is necessary for scholars of the period to discard the idea that Rhodes and her economy were ruined by the Roman actions concerning Delos. An impoverished, decaying backwater could not have provided impetus for such a mechanism, much less supported the minds that conceived it. Among other advances, the apparatus found among Rhodian coins and amphora contained a differential gearing system more complex to design than to build, and its presence among original bronzes, gold jewelry, and marble statues clearly attests to the buyer's recognition of its value.[21] The Roman Cicero reports that the general Marcellus prized an orrery, or analog planetarium, of Archimedes' more than any other booty from captured Syracuse.[22] The Rhodians could apparently build similar devices for export to such wealthy Roman buyers--including, possibly, Cicero, who knew Rhodes well and was governor of a neighboring province shortly before the ship was lost.[23]

Further research into the island's history reveals additional nourishment for the speculation the Antikythera mechanism's existence prompts and should have prompted about Rhodes, ancient technology, and our study of the past in general. On Rhodes, Philo of Byzantium encountered and described the polybolos, a "machine gun" catapult that could fire again and again without a need to reload.[24] Philo left a detailed description of the gears that powered its chain drive and that placed bolt after bolt into its firing slot. Philo and scholars since have believed that the polybolos was useless because the Rhodians had convinced him that it was close range only and couldn't traverse from side to side.[25] The perspective of a naval historian can provide a kind of warfare where a fixed weapon at close range could be useful--in an era when ships routinely rammed each other. Anyone could have wondered why the Rhodians built and refined something so complicated if they had no idea of using it. Again, they conceived and built the Antikythera device, and someone else had thought enough of it to send it overseas.

The proof the mechanism offers of Rhodes' enduring technological expertise poses a question the device also helps to answer: What could have led to the construction of such an expensive and intricate device? Certainly the mechanical expertise that built the polybolos indicates the physical ability to build the mechanism. But what inspired the intricate theories and substantial body of astronomical knowledge that lay behind the mechanism? Rhodes even in its supposed "glory days" was chiefly famous for the abilities of its seafarers--and therein lies the answer.

Very little indeed, is known about ancient celestial navigation, besides indisputable proof that it did, in fact, occur.[26] It is worth noting, however, that the man who invented trigonometry and first scientifically catalogued the stars' positions was Hipparchus of Rhodes; that in more than one ancient system of latitude and longitude the meridians crossed at Rhodes, and that a man Strabo rated second only to Aristotle--Poseidonius--found support for his travels and devices on the same island where Geminus did his writings, and inspired or built the Antikythera mechanism.[27]

There is a evidence for a clear tradition of scientific research on Rhodes, just as there is an anecdote preserved in by the Roman architectural authority Vitruvius concerning two engineers' competition for a city stipend.[28] Geminus's surviving book shows him making a determined effort to bring the transmitted data of the Babylonian astronomers to the attention of his Greek readers in the first century B.C. In the preceding century Hipparchus had laid the groundwork for Geminus's efforts to "popularize" Babylonian astronomy by working their surviving eclipse data into his own astronomical writings. Modern scholars of scientific history have yet to pay Hipparchus his due honor for his failure to construct a planetary system of his own even as he catalogued the observable stars. Although he had used observed parallax to make an extremely close estimate of the moon's distance from the earth, Hipparchus had the scientific honesty to state that there was insufficient data in his time to understand the true arrangement of the solar system.[29] The refusal of others to admit that hobbled scientific thought until well after Galileo's death. Geminus's contemporary Poseidonius did much more than build complicated astronomical devices of his own. One of the journeys celebrated and preserved by his friend and pupil Cicero took him beyond Gibraltar to the Bay of Biscay, where he was the first to note the connection between the tides and the moon phases Hipparchus had measured. He also possessed the novel theory that all the world's oceans formed a single body of water.[30]

Hipparchus, Geminus, Poseidonius--we must still search out details of what may well have been an analogue to our own and Britain's naval observatory, in competition and parallel with the state-funded research at Alexandria's museum. The Rhodians' immunity to the pirates of the Mediterranean continued long after their supposed post-Delian decline. The island could not feed itself, but the grain ships continued to arrive--possibly steering by starlight through the deep sea while the frustrated pirates hugged the coast. The Rhodian navy displayed in a long and distinguished operational history an almost uncanny ability to function and maintain unit cohesion at night. In 198 B.C. a Roman fleet eluded a Syrian squadron sent to intercept it by what seems to have been a difficult nocturnal cruise--shortly before two of its Rhodian escorts openly made a night voyage to locate an arriving Roman praetor.[31] In 88 B.C., directly before Price's date for the device's construction, the Rhodian admiral Damagoras set the world an unforgettable example of Rhodian courage and naval expertise. After eluding a Pontic blockade of the city's harbor, Damagoras led a force four times the size of his own on a day-long chase, pausing only before sunset to turn and sink two of the larger enemy vessels and disable two more. With the rest of the enemy fleet alert and positioned to intercept his return, Damagoras kept his command integrated and functional for an entire night on the high seas, and returned safely to blockaded Rhodes in the morning.[32]

The discovery of the Antikythera mechanism has much to offer besides tantalizing hints concerning state-funded research and technological expertise on Rhodes. The very existence of such a complicated gear train should also prompt fundamental change in the way the ancient sources are read. We have found the tracks for the emperor Nero's revolving ceiling, and the Tower of the Winds still stands in Athens, its clock faces empty, but its functioning success materially and textually preserved.[33] When Cicero, Ovid,[34] Plutarch and others speak of "celestial spheres" going back to the time of Archimedes, and describe their use, the Antikythera device's very existence should prompt us to something besides unthinking skepticism. Perhaps we should take a look at the device and believe a little more of what we have been told. Wooden ships have been set on fire with sunlight,[35] and John Morrison's efforts to reconstruct the trireme demonstrate that the full complexities of ancient ship construction continue to elude us. When all the implications of Price's discovery are understood and acted upon, it will then be possible to say that we have begun to understand the Antikythera technology.

Cicero mused:

"Suppose a traveller carried into Scythia or Britain the orrery recently constructed by our friend Poseidonius, which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, the moon, and the five planets that take place in the heavens every day and night, would any single native doubt that this orrery was the work of a rational being?"[36]

With the evidence before our faces, do we continue to believe that Rhodes declined, the ancients were technologically inept, and that our sources can be easily discarded? Or do we accept the existence of ancient advanced technology, study its implications, and look for deeper meaning in what we have difficulty understanding? Much has been learned about ancient technology and ancient seafaring. With the right set of mind and purpose, it is clearly possible to learn a great deal more.
 

forget

Banned
I think technological advances are very much limited by human stupidity and extreme humanitarian and destructive tendencies.
With out even mentioning the destructive bureaucracies humans are so good at making to disrupt tec advance.
 
Thanks for the article Sly I will have to read it later.

One thought I had though is that while Syracruse, Alexandria and Athens were well known for their knowledge the other exemplar of the Hellenistic Era was the vast and decaying Seleucid Empire. It is not very well known for its open mindedness or innovation. If as part of the POD that is preserved as well I'm not sure if the Ptolemies will continue to be able to hold them off. The Seleucid empire was a big enough that if it continues to reform only slightly it would probably be able to rule over Greece and Egypt. This would be a little far fetched, but if the POD is the Hellenistic Age continues that would entail no rise of the Parthians. Which I think would be a shame since the Parthians had quite a few innovations to their name.
 
Thanks for the article Sly I will have to read it later.

One thought I had though is that while Syracruse, Alexandria and Athens were well known for their knowledge the other exemplar of the Hellenistic Era was the vast and decaying Seleucid Empire. It is not very well known for its open mindedness or innovation. If as part of the POD that is preserved as well I'm not sure if the Ptolemies will continue to be able to hold them off. The Seleucid empire was a big enough that if it continues to reform only slightly it would probably be able to rule over Greece and Egypt. This would be a little far fetched, but if the POD is the Hellenistic Age continues that would entail no rise of the Parthians. Which I think would be a shame since the Parthians had quite a few innovations to their name.

Well the Hellenistic Age ended after the rise of the Parthians to power in Iran (30 BC). So what you really have to do is prevent the rise of Rome in the east. But I think had the Seleucids conquered Alexandria, it wouldn't have diminished Alexandria's knowledge or ability to produce great thinkers. Unlike the Romans, the Seleucids lack of all that the Ptolemies and other Hellenistic powers had was not really because they shunned it (like the Romans) and looked down upon it, but because they just didn't possess the same attractiveness as say Alexandria or Pergamum or Rhodes did.
 
There are two technological trends started and ended by the Romans: the Romans invaded and destroyed lots of stuff (they killed Archimedes...) so that definitely retarded progress, and they also built a road system, connecting and centralizing a grand empire which connected disparate threads of intellectual inquiry. Therefore, depending on what angle you want to take, if you believe the Hellenistic nations would continue to hold power then you need them to start projects to connect the world if knowledge is to advance (or the opposite if you're feeling mean), this could be done with a second Alexander or something like that (being mindful of how feasible that is with whatever PoDs such a tl would have). If you want to completely eradicate progress then have classical civilization collapse, perhaps add in an analog to the Huns to make things worse for any other civilizations.

Really you could take any angle with this, it is up to the author to say whether this is a good or bad thing that the Hellenistic Age continues.
 
A second Alexander conquering a large area is going to be at least as destructive as the Romans were and probably more so, so I don't see that as offering any inherent advantage over OTL - it could go better, but you could have OTL go better too.
 
A second Alexander conquering a large area is going to be at least as destructive as the Romans were and probably more so, so I don't see that as offering any inherent advantage over OTL - it could go better, but you could have OTL go better too.

Agreed, though maintaining a large middle eastern greek empire (i.e. the seleucids) might do wonders for infrastructure in that area over time-or for that matter, a large middle eastern empire regardless of the culture.
 
A second Alexander conquering a large area is going to be at least as destructive as the Romans were and probably more so, so I don't see that as offering any inherent advantage over OTL - it could go better, but you could have OTL go better too.

I guess you're probably right - not sure what I was thinking, perhaps one that instead of focusing on the other great Hellenistic nations focused on invading non-Hellenic Europe? Perhaps we could see soap and other amazing innovations make it back with the invaders.
EDIT: Also, confession, I'm a sucker for Hellenism that is probably part of this.
 
I guess you're probably right - not sure what I was thinking, perhaps one that instead of focusing on the other great Hellenistic nations focused on invading non-Hellenic Europe? Perhaps we could see soap and other amazing innovations make it back with the invaders.
EDIT: Also, confession, I'm a sucker for Hellenism that is probably part of this.
Don't worry, I can't control my inner Hellenophile sometimes either. :p
 
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