Episode 13: Blackthorn After Dark - The Antikythera Device

The Ancient Greek Computer That Shouldn’t Exist

Picture it: a dimly lit speakeasy, somewhere between myth and memory. The candles are burning low, the bottle is open, and tonight’s pour is Paterianakis 2023 Moschato Spinas — a wine as rare and enchanting as the mystery we’re about to unravel.

Moschato Spinas — or Muscat of Spina — hails from Crete, Greece, where the bees once gathered around the harvest baskets drawn to its perfumed sweetness. It’s the kind of wine that seduces you twice: first with its floral, honeyed nose, and then again with a crisp, citrus-kissed palate that feels like a cool breeze through an olive grove.

It’s also the perfect companion for tonight’s story — one that begins in Greece, in 1901, and dives deep (literally) into one of the most mind-bending discoveries in human history.

The Discovery Beneath the Waves

A group of sponge divers, caught in a storm off the island of Antikythera, stumble upon a shipwreck. When they resurface, it’s not with treasure chests or gold coins — it’s with something stranger. Bronze arms. Marble statues. And a corroded, gear-filled hunk of metal that would eventually challenge everything we thought we knew about the ancient world.

This unassuming lump would come to be known as the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2,000-year-old device that scholars now believe was the world’s first analog computer — capable of predicting eclipses, tracking the stars, and charting the movements of the sun, moon, and planets with eerie precision.

But here’s the thing: by every measure of history, this machine should not exist.

A Machine from the Future (or the Gods)

At first glance, the mechanism looks like little more than a rusted clockwork puzzle — but inside? A labyrinth of gears, teeth, and astronomical calculations that rivaled anything built for another thousand years.

The more researchers uncovered, the stranger it got.

Some thought it was the work of Archimedes, the great inventor of Syracuse. Others whispered of Atlantis, imagining that perhaps the knowledge of this lost civilization survived longer than we thought.

And then, of course, came the theories of time travel and ancient aliens — because when you find a differential gear (a technology not seen again until the 1700s) inside a 2,000-year-old Greek artifact, you start asking impossible questions.

Was the Antikythera Mechanism an astronomical computer? A navigational tool? A gift from the gods? Or the ultimate cosmic joke — proof that history is far stranger than our textbooks allow?

What the Greeks Believed About the Sky

To the ancient Greeks, the heavens were not just stars and planets — they were divine messages. The Antikythera Mechanism’s inscriptions, painstakingly translated over the years, reference lunar phases, planetary alignments, and even the color of eclipses, which were believed to predict the future.

This was more than science. It was prophecy.

With the turn of a crank, a priest, scholar, or dreamer could map the movements of the cosmos — and perhaps, their own destiny.

The Mystery That Endures

Despite a century of study, no one fully understands how the Antikythera Mechanism was made or who its creator truly was. What we do know is this: it shouldn’t exist.

And yet, it does.

Like a secret passed through time — a whisper from a civilization that may have known more about the stars, the sea, and the shape of reality than we can imagine.

Pour a Glass, Press Play

So pour yourself a glass of Moschato Spinas and join us as we dive into one of history’s greatest enigmas — a story of shipwrecks, lost civilizations, and the machine that might just rewrite everything we know about the ancient world.

🎧 Listen to the full episode of Blackthorn After Dark wherever you get your podcasts.