

Famed Antikythera wreck yields more treasures - Thevet
http://www.nature.com/news/famed-antikythera-wreck-yields-more-treasures-1.16124

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mmanfrin
The Antikythera Machine is so remarkably cool -- it is as complex as any
machine humans could create up until the 14th Century. There are tendrils that
possibly connect it to Archimedes or his School.

Classical Greece was millenia ahead of the rest of the world. Pindar writes of
the automata found in Rhodes:

    
    
      The animated figures stand
      Adorning every public street
      And seem to breathe in stone, or
      move their marble feet.
    

There was even a working steam engine in Alexandria before it was burned down:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile)

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elliptic
A more sober translation seems to be:

And the gray-eyed goddess herself bestowed on them every art, so that they
surpassed all mortal men as the best workers with their hands; and the roads
bore works of art like living, moving creatures, and their fame was profound.

Which perhaps doesn't carry the same implications as the rather florid
translation you quoted.

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pjungwir
Let's see how Hacker News handles Unicode! :-)

Pindar's 7th Olympian Ode, lines 50-54:

    
    
        αὐτὰ δέ σφισιν ὤπασε τέχναν
        πᾶσαν ἐπιχθονίων Γλαυκῶπις ἀριστοπόνοις χερσὶ κρατεῖν.
        ἔργα δὲ ζωοῖσιν ἑρπόντεσσί θ᾽ ὁμοῖα κέλευθοι φέρον:
        ἦν δὲ κλέος βαθύ.
    

Your version is pretty exact!

~~~
elliptic
Just to be clear, it's not my version. I've always wished I could read
Classical Greek.

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joshu
Old, but a pretty neat way to relight (and then read) the writing on the
Antikythera mechanism:
[http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ptm/antikythera_mechanism/](http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ptm/antikythera_mechanism/)

