The Antikythera Mechanism is a phenomenal discovery from antiquity, on par with the Rosetta Stone, brilliantly conceived with the then known cosmology masterfully woven into a mechanical device with economy bordering beyond belief, requiring decades for modern man to divine.
This repository hosts a pair of papers on the Antikythera Mechanism, providing detailed explanations on hypothetical dials and gearing that proposes...
- the use of the A1 crown gear ( 48 teeth ) and B1 gear ( 223 teeth ) to align the Egyptian Calendar Ring, and
- the use of the superfluous 63 tooth gear to indicate Eclipse Seasons.
These two papers were written around Jan 2020.
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"Antikythera Mechanism: A hypothetical A1 dial to provide in absolute terms both the Egyptian Regnal Year and the offset of the Egyptian Calendar Ring."
- With the modeling of the cosmos, the Antikythera Mechanism includes the manmade construct of the Egyptian regnal calendar as a means of attributing a date to a cosmological event. The Egyptian regnal calendar is a constant 365 days, and therefore is not tied to any cosmological periods, neither solar, lunar, Callippic, or Metonic. As such, every 4 solar years, it falls behind by 1 day relative to the same point in the solar year. In order to incorporate the alignment of the Egyptian regnal calendar with cosmological events, the designers of the Antikythera Mechanism included a movable calendar ring.
- This paper proposes a hypothetical auxiliary dial on the Antikythera Mechanism, associated with the input crank, with the dual purpose of providing a means to determine in absolute terms both the Egyptian regnal year and the offset of the Egyptian calendar ring. This hypothesis is based on the A1 gear of 48 teeth meshing directly with the B1 solar gear having 223 teeth. Other than the dial, no other physical or engineering elements are required of the current model of the Antikythera Mechanism to incorporate this calendar information.
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"Antikythera Mechanism: Eclipse Seasons and the 63 Tooth Gear in Fragment D."
- This paper proposes a gear train and dial presenting the Eclipse Season, employing the apparently superfluous 63 tooth gear in the Antikythera Mechanism Fragment D, in addition to a 45 tooth gear as possibly suggested by "ME" (which represents "45" in the ancient Greek letters-for-numbers system) engraved on the 63 tooth gear. This paper is a natural follow up to the recently proposed hypothetical dial that correlates the Egyptian regnal year with the solar year, as the premise in both these papers is that the side of the Antikythera Mechanism potentially contained dials.
- This paper is primarily focused on the mathematics behind the proposed gearing, which reveals a very strong correlation to the Eclipse Seasons. The paper falls short, though, in exploring the concept from other facets which will require other subject matter experts along with review of the available evidence. Note also that this paper uses modern estimates of the Eclipse Seasons, and does not explore whether ancient astronomical knowledge of the Eclipse Seasons existed.