5. Technological Advances Finally Allowed Archaeologists to Read Text Inscribed on the Mysterious Mechanism
As one scholar stated about the Antikythera Mechanism: “Before, we could make out isolated words, but there was a lot of noise —letters that were being misread or gaps in the text … Now, we have something that you can actually read as ancient Greek. We can tell what these texts were saying to an ancient observer“. That is thanks to new imaging techniques such as 3-D X-ray scans. They finally enabled researchers to legibly read about 3,400 characters that were inscribed on those parts of the device that were recovered. That is a lot, but it is only a fraction of the roughly 20,000 characters that scholars estimate had been inscribed on the archaeological find when it was whole.
The scanned texts of what was essentially a user’s guide helped unravel the final mysteries of the Antikythera Mechanism. As it turned out, much of what was written amounted to an ancient version of a user’s manual. For example, text inscribed on the device’s back is an inventory of all of its dials, and a description of what they are for and what they signify. It is from that text that we now know that the mechanism’s front had once contained a display of the planets as they moved through the zodiac.
