MODES OF THOUGHT IN ANTERRAN LITERATURE
c667, 2nd year classics
file: 107
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RAQUEL (OVER PHONE)
Hey Professor, everything okay?
PROFESSOR
Yeah, yeah totally. I was just gonna ask if you could do me a favor. Would you mind, um, if you're stopping there, could you bring me one of those fancy coffees you always get?
RAQUEL
You have a rough night?
PROFESSOR
No. Man, no, I just, I told you I haven't been sleeping. And it's getting worse. And, uh, I've started having these nightmares that are just insane, but then I wake up and I can't quite remember.
RAQUEL
You should really see a doctor. Like, for real.
PROFESSOR
I know. I know. I actually, I did call and try to make an appointment, but, uh, at least right now they can't see me until Thursday. So, I just, I can't spend all night, like, going down these rabbit holes on archaeology tik tok. That, that's a joke. It doesn't exist.
RAQUEL
Yeah. Okay, well, um, I will pick you up some rocket fuel and see you in a few.
PROFESSOR
Alright, thank you. I really appreciate it, Raquel.
RAQUEL
Yeah, of course.
PROFESSOR
Bye.
INT. LECTURE HALL
PROFESSOR
Thank you, Raquel, thanks.
Students file in.
PROFESSOR
Okay. Good morning, everybody. Um, Raquel, can you hit the lights and fire up that first image? Thanks. Does anybody recognize this? Uh, it's a piece of ancient technology. I realize it looks like a rusted out green blob, but in ancient Greece, this was basically the equivalent of an iPhone.
A student answers.
PROFESSOR
Yeah, nice. Very good. That is correct. So it was called the Antikythera device. This enigmatic machine is the most enduring unsolved mystery in the classical world. The Antikythera device. It's currently housed at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. But the artifact was found originally at the bottom of the ocean in a Roman shipwreck.
Sound familiar? Um, on a vessel that sank sometime in the first century BCE off the coast of an island called Antikythera.
So, it's wood and metal. Um, which means it didn't necessarily hold up that well, uh, being under the ocean for hundreds of years. Um, and it was found by Greek sponge divers in 1900, but there were so many other valuable artifacts that they recovered in that shipwreck that the first publication about the Antikythera device did not come until 1975, right? 75 years later. Um, it's kind of, to me, it's sort of a similar story to how long it took George Smith to translate the Epic of Gilgamesh after those cuneiform tablets were discovered and brought back from the Levant to the British Museum. Uh, it's just wild. So, you know, they were sitting on this device for 75 years and they had no idea of its significance.
Um, before this device was found, the first known sort of precision geared mechanism, Was a Byzantine sundial and calendar from around 600 C.E. What? Uh, sadly, no. No, it's not fully complete. It's not intact. Um, we have 82 pieces of the machine that were recovered. Which scientists are thinking, you know, are only about a third of the required pieces to complete the machine. And because we can't see the complete machine, we can kind of only guess at what the machine was used for, um, which we'll get into in a second. Gets weirder. Raquel, can you hit the next slide?
CLICK of the slide moving forward.
PROFESSOR
Okay, it's hard to make out from this, but what we're looking at here is an artifact that was uncovered on the outskirts of Prime B by a Chinese exploratory drone.
If you look here, the machine is covered in algae, but you can still see the same sort of X shape on the surface. It's identical to the one that's discovered near Antikythera. Take a look. Put them up side by side. Okay. I promise, I'm not trying to be like a sensationalist here. This is not a weird attempt at like archaeological clickbait.
We only have a few rough images of the device found at Prime B, so we can't really get at any hardcore truths, right? So this is all speculation. We would need to study and verify. But, still, at first glance, that marking that you can see on this side, seems almost identical in shape and size and style to this one on the Antikythera device. Just saying.
Um, it asks a lot of questions. Then again, you know, if you look at the moon, it looks like there's a face on it. There's not a face on the moon. So, first impressions are not great. A former colleague of mine, um, who I went to grad school with, Dr. Yoli Chen, is an expert on archaeotechnology and pre modern physics. And recently she went back to Beijing, and she's been studying this, and if there's anyone whose expertise would be essential to understanding this new device, it would be her. I've heard through the grapevine that 113 pieces were discovered, of which 74 overlapped with pieces of the Antikythera device found in 1900.
But, the Prime B device predates that by roughly 65,000 years. So, okay, what does this device do? Most scholars agree, we're talking about the Antikythera device here, most scholars agree that it's some sort of celestial calendar or calculator. So like a clock the device has a circular face with rotating hands and there's also something like a hand crank which turned a complex gear mechanism moving the pattern of what we think are the sun, the moon, and pelted planets backwards and forwards. Um, there is a detailed inscription, uh, that we think describes its function, um, but, uh, there's only parts of it, so we don't fully understand, um, what those inscriptions are trying to tell us. Uh, most likely, this is the world's first analog computer to predict the location of celestial objects for any one date. You know, small stones or gems would rotate across the face representing Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, et cetera. And it could forecast lunar and solar eclipses. So there's not a similar device built with thi
s level of sophistication for another 1500 years if the Antikythera device was in fact the first of its kind.
PROFESSOR
Footsteps.
RAQUEL
Um, Professor?
PROFESSOR
Yeah?
RAQUEL
I just got a text. It says, don't mention me by name. YLC.
PROFESSOR
Okay. Okay, alright, thank you.
She walks away.
PROFESSOR
Uh, sorry about that. Okay, so, getting back into it. Um, so this is what we can infer. from this device, if indeed we suspect that Anterra was the mathematically sophisticated civilization that originally designed this Antikythera mechanism, right? You know, the Greeks believed that certain types of eclipses portended good omens or bad omens.
So, this machine, according to some scholars, In some ways allowed the user to predict the future and not just for fact, where the sun would be on such and such date, but for value. Will next year be a good year? Is it a good time to go to war or a bad time? Here's where we begin to see a crack in the foundational mode of thought of the Second Empire.
Okay? The whole culture is built on not knowing, and here's a machine that claims to know. I think we've all seen that history is populated by tyrants and zealots and dictators who claim to know things. They know who the problem is. They know who the good guys are. It's dangerous stuff.
A student asks a question.
PROFESSOR
Okay, yeah. Fair. Let's, let's go a bit more rigorous with our definitions here. If we think back to the story of the Idiot King and the establishment of the Second Empire, that describes a culture where not knowing things isn't a crime or even a liability. Their whole relationship with the notion of ignorance is so different from ours that it's hard to get a grip on it as a mode of thought.
But as we go deeper into other aspects of the society, We'll see that the way they viewed time, morality, karma, especially, and social hierarchy, all these had to do with a situational mode of thought. This is what is. Right? With the advent of this device, or concurrent with the period when this device was made, we start to see a very different mode of thought enter the equation.
Namely what people call the, the modal auxiliary, right? The word should, coulda, woulda, shoulda. That's the modal auxiliary. And what that means is, this is, now we're going from this is what is, to this is what should be. In order to have a state that knows what should be, You have to know something. Right? That. That is where politics and conflict and war thrive.
Another student asks a question.
PROFESSOR
What? Yeah, we, we really can. We can glean all of that from this little device. Well, okay, from the device and some writings in Prime A and Prime B. that we're going to go into. I know it doesn't look like much, in terms of a feat of technology, you know, um, but it took us almost 100 years to start to figure out the purpose of the device.
And now, what scientists are trying to understand, how did they build it? This is a marvel. of mechanical engineering. At this time in ancient Greece, they were making gears, but only on a sort of a huge scale for war machines like catapults. So their stonework was much more sophisticated than their metalwork.
So it's unclear how they could have made these dozens of tiny, precise, clock sized gears. And it's even more unclear how on earth that could have been done 65,000 years earlier, uh, on the other side of the world. So, ancient aliens, anyone? I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Um, but, but, one more thing. You know, Arthur C. Clarke, the sci-fi writer, genius. He said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Think about that. So, I put an assignment up on the class website. I'd like you to take a look at it. I think it'll help you in terms of investigating technology in the classics context.
Um, also, I'm going to keep today short. Next week we're going to have a guest lecturer come in from the music department. Really fascinating and that one might go a bit longer. So, uh, it turns out that. As I was sharing some of these materials, the music department found some variations in a wall in the building at the heart of the ceremonial center in Prime A that could hypothetically be mus
ical notation.
Um, so, uh, professors gonna come over, uh, and do a presentation on what they found and possibly we will be hearing music. Um, from roughly 80,000 years ago. So, pretty cool. Okay, uh, check out the website and I'll catch up with you guys next week. It'll be really fun. Thanks everybody.
Students shuffle out.
INT. PROFESSOR’S OFFICE
VOICEMAIL
Please enter your password, then press pound.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
VOICEMAIL
One new voice message. First voice message.
HAI RONG (OVER PHONE)
Hi professor, it's Hai Rong. I hope you don't mind me calling. Raquel gave me your number, but uh, after the lecture this morning, I was looking up some info on the Antikythera device and I looked up your friend Dr. Chen. I found something on the Beijing University website. It's an obituary. It says she passed away last weekend. I just, I don't know. I thought you should know. Okay. I'll see you next class.
Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature. This podcast is made possible by Harbridge University, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Peeler Prize in Archaeological Literature, and the Harbridge Family Trust. With an in-kind donation and production assistance from Wolf at the Door Studios. For more information and a reading list, please visit wlfdr.com.