WILL WE EVER UNLOCK ITS SECRETS?

2,000 Years Ago, the Greeks Built What May Be the World's First Computer.

- DARREN ORF

THE year is 72 B.C.E., and the Roman Republic has already punched a one-way ticket toward empire.

The evergrowing Mediterranean power is embroiled in yet another conflict, and the Roman conqueror Lucius Lucinius Lucullus has chartered a series of ships to ferry home riches from newly plundered regions.

Although most ships eventually reach their destination at the port of Ostia, southwest of Rome, one Greek ship-loaded with jewelry, coins, statues, glassware, and bronze masterpieces-never arrives. As the vessel traverses the Aegean Sea, a violent tempest tosses it into the rocky shores of an island called Antikythera. The collision tears into the ship's five-inch-thick hull, causing it to sink more than 100 feet beneath the waves until finally resting on a submerged slope off the island's coast.

This is the story-or at least one of the stories-of how one of the world's most confounding archaeological objects, the Antikythera mechanism, began its 2,000-year-long residency at the bottom of the Aegean. Pinpointing the mechanism's origins, including the mystery of how and when the ship sank, is only the beginning.

Sponge divers first exhumed the mechanism-thought to be an ancient astronomical calendar and one of the earliest progenitors of the modern computer-off the coast of Antikythera at the turn of the 20th century. Since then, mathematicians, clockmakers, metallurgists, astrophysicists, and underwater archaeologists have tried to make sense of this fragmented, corroded, and maddening amalgamation of gears, pins, and dials.

In fact, the device is almost as famous for its incompleteness as it is for its complexity. Now housed at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, only one-third of the roughly shoebox-sized mechanism, spread across 82 fragments of varying sizes, has been found. The rest has been lost to the sea.