I don't think I'd count the Antikythera device. My understanding is that the mystery with it is how it was made. The astronomical and mathematical knowledge to design it was well known among the Greeks.
If Antikythera devices were common, with say every ship having one, every town and village temple having one, every school having one, and so on we'd have a big mystery because we don't think the Greeks had the technology for mass production of mechanisms with the necessary accuracy and precision.
But we've only found one, and we don't know how long it took to build.
The Antikythera device could be the work of one builder and his assistants over a lifetime, financed by someone very wealthy and able to supply as many slaves as the builder wanted. It could even have been built over more than one lifetime, if the sponsor was a government.
When you are not in a hurry and you have a lot of laborers you can make very precise mechanisms with little more technology than blocks of metal and hand files.
As Teller of Penn & Teller once observed, "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect". Penn has said "The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth".
In case anyone here hasn't seen it, I want to share this very cool youtube series of an Australian clock maker creating a replica of the Antikythera device using only tools believed to be available to the ancient Greeks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
If Antikythera devices were common, with say every ship having one, every town and village temple having one, every school having one, and so on we'd have a big mystery because we don't think the Greeks had the technology for mass production of mechanisms with the necessary accuracy and precision.
But we've only found one, and we don't know how long it took to build.
The Antikythera device could be the work of one builder and his assistants over a lifetime, financed by someone very wealthy and able to supply as many slaves as the builder wanted. It could even have been built over more than one lifetime, if the sponsor was a government.
When you are not in a hurry and you have a lot of laborers you can make very precise mechanisms with little more technology than blocks of metal and hand files.
As Teller of Penn & Teller once observed, "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect". Penn has said "The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth".