The Antikythera Mechanism

mrk said:
That is what I have read and seen in docus too in more recent years, no slavery but the entire culture coming together and chipping in their part to build the pyramids over an entire lifetime or even beyond. That's the only way they could have done it to that kind of scale and complexity. The engineering involved to stop slabs of stone weighing severeal tons each at the lightest weight collapsing on the inside from the weight of sections above is mind boggling.
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Which is why they're mostly solid. Pyramids are a simple but very inefficient way of making a tall building.

New imaging techniques have revealed a previously unknown chamber above the king's chamber in the great pyramid. It's there, but there's no way of knowing what's in it or why it's there without breaking into it or at least drilling a hole through to it and inserting a camera and there's no way permission for that is going to be given. One hypothesis is that it's just a void to reduce the weight above the king's chamber. Which sounds plausible, though much less interesting than a secret chamber untouched for millenia.
 
Angilion said:
It's definitely not true for the Egyptians - that's a myth from thousands of years later.

The others I don't know about. Do you have any references to sources? Apart from the Austrians :)
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I've checked and you're right on the egyptians. Consensus now is the pyramids weren't built by slaves- that's changed since I was in school. Ta, I've learned something new there.

Assyrians seems pretty unclear, without access to research sites. They enslaved vast numbers of people as war booty, and there's lots of evidence of slave sales. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume a large pool of labour would be used when it was available.

The aztecs murdered tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of people they took as slaves. Again, why wouldn't an available resource be used?

I should probably have mentioned the romans, too. Lots of slaves, plenty of records of them being used for all kinds of work.

I'm not looking up whips, for obvious reasons...
 
potatolord said:
I've checked and you're right on the egyptians. Consensus now is the pyramids weren't built by slaves- that's changed since I was in school. Ta, I've learned something new there.

Assyrians seems pretty unclear, without access to research sites. They enslaved vast numbers of people as war booty, and there's lots of evidence of slave sales. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume a large pool of labour would be used when it was available.

The aztecs murdered tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of people they took as slaves. Again, why wouldn't an available resource be used?

I should probably have mentioned the romans, too. Lots of slaves, plenty of records of them being used for all kinds of work.

I'm not looking up whips, for obvious reasons...
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Slave labour in general, yes, in many places. But the "humungous blocks of stone" situation is different, for the reasons I stated before.

The question of why slave labour wouldn't be used is a good one, so I'll suggest answers more explicitly:

i) Not enough slaves. That would have been true for some such building work. The Egyptian pyramids, for example, or Stonehenge.
ii) The structure being too important for slaves. Would a temple built by slaves offend the god(s) it was dedicated to? Maybe. Something not to be risked. It would definitely be less meaningful to the god(s) than a temple built by their followers.
iii) Working on something of such extreme perceived importance would be seen as important work, a valuable contribution to society. Slaves wouldn't be needed. In many cases, people would volunteer as an act of piety. In other cases, the expense of hiring skilled workers would be part of the point - that would be the way a wealthy person contributed. You can see both those things happening in the construction of medieval churches and cathedrals, for example.

Ancient Rome might have had some construction in which none of those things applied. They did some very large scale construction work that had no religious connection. They had slaves who had a high status (Roman slavery was unusual in some ways). But they also had mass produced concrete and used it extensively, so there was a lot less in the way of "humungous blocks of stone".

I lean towards "lots of slaves and big whips" being a "maybe it was done that way sometimes, maybe not" answer rather than a "that's how it was done" answer.
 
Angilion said:
Slave labour in general, yes, in many places. But the "humungous blocks of stone" situation is different, for the reasons I stated before.

The question of why slave labour wouldn't be used is a good one, so I'll suggest answers more explicitly:

i) Not enough slaves. That would have been true for some such building work. The Egyptian pyramids, for example, or Stonehenge.
ii) The structure being too important for slaves. Would a temple built by slaves offend the god(s) it was dedicated to? Maybe. Something not to be risked. It would definitely be less meaningful to the god(s) than a temple built by their followers.
iii) Working on something of such extreme perceived importance would be seen as important work, a valuable contribution to society. Slaves wouldn't be needed. In many cases, people would volunteer as an act of piety. In other cases, the expense of hiring skilled workers would be part of the point - that would be the way a wealthy person contributed. You can see both those things happening in the construction of medieval churches and cathedrals, for example.

Ancient Rome might have had some construction in which none of those things applied. They did some very large scale construction work that had no religious connection. They had slaves who had a high status (Roman slavery was unusual in some ways). But they also had mass produced concrete and used it extensively, so there was a lot less in the way of "humungous blocks of stone".

I lean towards "lots of slaves and big whips" being a "maybe it was done that way sometimes, maybe not" answer rather than a "that's how it was done" answer.
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Ta, that's a really decent response.

I think slave labour for major construction could only be a factor in cases of war booty. Most slaves would have been used for domestic or agricultural work.

As you say, a lot of maybes.

My original post was a quote from Red Dwarf, but please don't ask me to reference it.
 
If there are slaves available in society, use them for low-status manual, unskilled labour to provide enough food or raw materials for free, skilled labourers to be able to concentrate their effort on more valuable work. Without slaves, a society is desperately working just to feed itself.
 
Angilion said:
One hypothesis is that it's just a void to reduce the weight above the king's chamber. Which sounds plausible, though much less interesting than a secret chamber untouched for millenia.
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Theres a series of void spaces above the main burial chamber and reduction of weight is almost certainly the reason, at least one has been explored and its nothing special its rather like roof space or loft its functional but not designed to be seen. The most interesting thing is the hieroglyphs that state it was Khufu's gang that built it, a message from 4 and a half millenia ago.
 
potatolord said:
Ta, that's a really decent response.

I think slave labour for major construction could only be a factor in cases of war booty. Most slaves would have been used for domestic or agricultural work.

As you say, a lot of maybes.
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There's a lot of maybes, even about ancient societies that left as big mark on the world as Rome. Sometimes what evidence does remain probably isn't representative. A disproportionate amount of surviving references to slaves in ancient Rome cover the high status slaves of wealthy and powerful people. For example we know a lot about Tyro, a slave who was the secretary (in the original sense - the keeper of secrets, i.e. personal assistant, confidante, etc) of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Nowhere near as much about Cicero's slaves who cleaned his house, cooked his meals and suchlike. Next to nothing about any particular slave who worked on any of the huge farms owned by absentee landlords. But there were a lot more slaves on those farms than there were slaves in Cicero's house and a lot more slaves in Cicero's house than Tyro.

My original post was a quote from Red Dwarf, but please don't ask me to reference it.
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I vaguely remember it. IIRC Lister said it to Rimmer concerning how the Egyptian pyramids were built after Rimmer cited them as evidence of the existence of aliens. So it would probably have been an early episode because Rimmer's fascination with aliens was a bigger thing earlier on. Red Dwarf was a fair few years ago. The only episodes that stick in my head to any extent are Queeg and that one where they enter a Wild West scenario to fight a computer virus. But mainly Queeg because at the time I thought it was the funniest thing I'd seen on TV.

EDIT: Found it, I think. Series 1, episode 4 "Waiting For God", about 13:40. Lister's answer was "They had massive whips, Rimmer".
 
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Angilion said:
There's a lot of maybes, even about ancient societies that left as big mark on the world as Rome. Sometimes what evidence does remain probably isn't representative. A disproportionate amount of surviving references to slaves in ancient Rome cover the high status slaves of wealthy and powerful people. For example we know a lot about Tyro, a slave who was the secretary (in the original sense - the keeper of secrets, i.e. personal assistant, confidante, etc) of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Nowhere near as much about Cicero's slaves who cleaned his house, cooked his meals and suchlike. Next to nothing about any particular slave who worked on any of the huge farms owned by absentee landlords. But there were a lot more slaves on those farms than there were slaves in Cicero's house and a lot more slaves in Cicero's house than Tyro.



I vaguely remember it. IIRC Lister said it to Rimmer concerning how the Egyptian pyramids were built after Rimmer cited them as evidence of the existence of aliens. So it would probably have been an early episode because Rimmer's fascination with aliens was a bigger thing earlier on. Red Dwarf was a fair few years ago. The only episodes that stick in my head to any extent are Queeg and that one where they enter a Wild West scenario to fight a computer virus. But mainly Queeg because at the time I thought it was the funniest thing I'd seen on TV.

EDIT: Found it, I think. Series 1, episode 4 "Waiting For God", about 13:40. Lister's answer was "They had massive whips, Rimmer".
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Roman slaves' status varied hugely. A household slave to an important family probably had higher living standards than many free Romans. The master could kill you with no repercussions, so swings and roundabouts, eh?

I haven't seen Red Dwarf in about 25 years. The wild west one, Rimmerworld and the time running backwards episodes were my favourites. My wife has never seen Red Dwarf, which still amazes me.
 
i don't believe using captured slaves would have been sensible either, for reasons mentioned above. the Nazis used Jews in some factories, and that just gave some of them the chance to subtly sabotage the Nazi equipment etc.

I don't think the pyramids were made by the pharaoh who claimed it. firstly, i've heard they were referred to as "ancient" even by some of the pharaohs. secondly, if i recall the calculations correctly, someone claimed a 20 year build time: there are about 2.5 million stones in the pyramid which would mean placing over 300 per HOUR every day.
 
D.P. said:
Think of the power you could yield when you do a magic trick that nakes hhe sun disappear
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Or imagine if you believe that a solar eclipse is an act of the gods and must be met with the appropriate rituals. Being able to prepare in advance could be very important.

Or maybe it was scientific interest and they wanted time to prepare to make observations.
 
wolfie138 said:
[..] I don't think the pyramids were made by the pharaoh who claimed it. firstly, i've heard they were referred to as "ancient" even by some of the pharaohs.
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That could be due to the length of time for which there were phaorohs. The pyramid building phase was early in Egypt's very long history. It still had phaorohs a couple of thousand years after the last pyramid was built, so the pyramids would have been ancient to them.

Here's a fact that brings home how far back Egypt's history goes. Cleopatra. The famous one, lover of Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius. Cleopatra the 17th, IIRC. Anyway, the famous one. One of the most famous of the ancient Egptians. Certainly ancient to us, since she lived more than 2000 years ago.

She lived closer in time to us than she did to the building of the Egyptian pyramids.

Seriously, she really did. The Egyptian pyramids are old.


secondly, if i recall the calculations correctly, someone claimed a 20 year build time: there are about 2.5 million stones in the pyramid which would mean placing over 300 per HOUR every day.
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Yeah, the great pyramids are an anomaly. The others are fully explained, but some aspects of those 2 aren't. Not yet, anyway. Sure, it would have been a very large construction site with a huge number of workers. Ancient sources make claims as high as 100,000 workers, but wildly exaggerated numbers aren't uncommon in ancient sources. Certainly a huge number of workers. Modern estimates are in the region of 10,000. But even so, the placing rate is pretty out there.

EDIT: I found this modern analysis of how it could have been done, taking into account seasonal variations in workforce (farming in ancient Egypt was extremely seasonal and very large numbers of farmers had significant amounts of time per year in which they had no farming work to do) between 13,000 and 40,000 and assuming the obvious prep work of having stone blocks cut pretty much continuously to create stockpiles available when a pyramid was to be constructed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070608101037/http://www.pubs.asce.org/ceonline/0699feat.html

By the way, the placement rate would be over 300 blocks per day, not per hour.

2,500,000/20 = 125,000 per year.
125,000/365.24 = 342.24 per day.

Extraordinary organisation and logistics involving a huge number of people. Not just the workers at the construction site, of course. Workers at the quarries. Workers in transportation. Workers supplying huge quantities of food and drink to the enormous number of workers at the construction site. Pretty out there. Extremely impressive. But doable for a massively wealthy and highly organised empire that was willing to throw resources at it to such an extent that it damaged the economy.
 
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lol aye, total typo re days/hours there! Even so, that's 14 per hour for a 24 hour day, and i don't think there's a hope in Hell of that when you look at the block sizes. Given the height of the constructions it must have taken a fair time just to hoist the blocks up to the right height and i don't think you could have had a construction around the pyramid that would have allowed for doing multiple blocks at a time.
AAAND...that's looking at the pyramids as they are now. they were originally covered by smooth white casing stones, who know how many perfectly-cut blocks that added into the equation. IIRC, at least one of them had a gold cap on it too.
 
wolfie138 said:
lol aye, total typo re days/hours there! Even so, that's 14 per hour for a 24 hour day, and i don't think there's a hope in Hell of that when you look at the block sizes. Given the height of the constructions it must have taken a fair time just to hoist the blocks up to the right height and i don't think you could have had a construction around the pyramid that would have allowed for doing multiple blocks at a time.
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I don't see why not. The construction site was huge. There would have been plenty of space for multiple work crews to work simultaneously. It would have required excellent logistics, planning and precision, but the whole project required that anyway regardless of how many work crews were placing a block at any one time.

The height is misleading because the higher up you go the fewer blocks there are and the smaller the blocks are. The great majority of the work on a block-built pyramid is on the lower levels. Hoisting wouldn't have been necessary for most of it - simple solid ramps could be used like they were in most ancient constructions with heavy pieces. Solid ramps might have been used for all of it, but the method of doing so is much less clear further up. The usual simple external ramp wouldn't work - the ramp itself would have been implausibly big and wouldn't fit at the location. But a simple external ramp would have been fine for a large majority of the work, the work on the lower levels.

AAAND...that's looking at the pyramids as they are now. they were originally covered by smooth white casing stones, who know how many perfectly-cut blocks that added into the equation. IIRC, at least one of them had a gold cap on it too.
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Far fewer casing stones would have been required as that's just the outer edge. Covering something with a layer of gold is a quicker job too, since it doesn't have to be done in one piece. Those things added a huge amount to how impressive the construction would have been but not a huge amount to the amount of work involved. Assuming the gold was actually there. I'm a bit sceptical about that. That's an awful lot of gold or a wafer-thin layer that wouldn't last long in a sandy desert. Which would be relatively quick and easy to do. Maybe it was only ever intended as a very temporary covering, mainly for the burial ceremony.
 
This appeared on Ancient Aliens a couple of episodes ago concerning artifacts out of time.
Even though I don't believe in Ancient Aliens I find stuff like this interesting.
 
SexyGreyFox said:
This appeared on Ancient Aliens a couple of episodes ago concerning artifacts out of time.
Even though I don't believe in Ancient Aliens I find stuff like this interesting.
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I'm not fond of the "out of time" labelling because it's become so strongly linked to the idea of the object not really being from that time and place. Aliens or time travel. Or time-travelling aliens.

The aspect of the Antikythera mechanism that's anomalous is the complex gearing. The knowledge of astronomy behind it was quite widely known at that point in time in Greece (and other places). The materials used to make the device were very widely used at that point in time in Greece (and other places). Knowledge of gearing existed at that point in time in Greece (and other places). It's the complexity and precision of the gearing that's the standout thing. But I don't think it's "out of time". I think it's within the scope of a brilliant mathematician/scientist/engineer-style philosopher of that time (and place). No more "out of time" than, for example, Watt's steam engine. Or Newcomen's (sp?) steam engine. Or many other innovations.
 
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