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gus_massa
stan_rogers
That series still isn't over. It just got interrupted a couple of times. The first interruption was explained in Episode 10 - that was the discovery that the way one of the wheels was divided in the remaining teeth likely indicated that the mechanism was based on a lunar rather than a solar calendar, and that part needed to wait for the peer review and publication of a paper before the series could continue. The next interruption had more to do with Chris's real passion of watch and clock making - he had access to a couple of decorative engines (a straight-line engine and a rose engine), probably temporarily, since they would in no way both fit into the little closet he has for a shop, and he did some rather impressive guilloché and enamel work with those. When the series picks up (if it does), the hard parts are yet to come, like the planetary dial and its crapload of pointers.
One thing Chris has done that people like Michael Wright didn't was to assume that anyone who was building something like that, with its obvious signs of not being a rough prototype, would have made some sort of jig for some of the parts rather than, say, laboriously walking off tooth spacing for every single gear, and that some sort of lathe, which was known to exist and be used for wood from illustrations both contemporary with and far preceding the device, would have likely been used to make round things out of soft metal.
fho
Did I miss that he finished the mechanism? From what I've seen he went into hiatus and has been only posting ClickSpring "clips" for a while now?
db48x
He hasn’t completely finished his reconstruction, but he hasn’t entirely been on a hiatus either. He co–authored a paper on the calendar ring of the mechanism: https://bhi.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BHI-Antikythera...
But he hasn’t made many videos the last year or two.
jacobolus
Some of his videos are only available via Patreon.
gus_massa
I saw the videos a long time ago, so I'm probably misremembering. He probably made a good chunk of it that is way more than what I could do [1], and after a few years I got confused.
[1] In the secondary school I made a dice of iron and two hammers (one with a lathe and one with a ¿planer?). My ability is not even close to his.
n3dm
I was so intrigued by his videos, the story of the mechanism, that I went and saw the actual remains of it when I was overseas and in Athens. Chris tweeted a photo I took of it while I was there.
tzs
I think we tend to underestimate what ancient technology could produce because we forget that in ancient times they often operated on longer timescales than we do.
With our technology for example we could make all the parts for the Antikythera mechanism in a short time. The ancient Greeks definitely had no technology that would have allowed them to do that, so we see the existence of the Antikythera mechanism as a great mystery.
But I don't see any reason to believe that the Greeks built it in a short time. It could easily be the lifework of the builder, or even the lifework of successive generations of a family of builders.
If you need to make a very precise gear in a day you need our technology. If you need to make a very precise gear in 50 years you just need someone with an abrasive that is harder than the material you are making the gear from.
anyfoo
That some things in history took the span of multiple generations to finish was quite the revelation to me. The Cologne Cathedral took over 600 years to finish. As another example, this amusing video [1] tells the story of how King Louis XIV wanted a map of the entirety of his kingdom from Cassini, and how it was apparently Cassini's great grandson (4 generations over 120 years) who finally concluded the project.
For some generations in the middle of such projects, I can imagine that their huge undertaking is just "something they do", essentially just their job, and from their point of view it has always been there, and will always be there to the extent of their lifetime.
Do we still have anything like this?
shagie
> Do we still have anything like this?
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/26/1048358753/if-nasa-green-ligh...
> "We do need to learn how to conduct missions over these very long timescales if we are ever going to come close to achieving any of the aspirations of interstellar exploration that are so often posed in the popular media," she says.
> To help understand how to deal with the intergenerational nature of this proposed mission, the research team reached out to Janet Vertesi, a sociologist with Princeton University who has studied the organizational aspects of other projects in space.
> ...
> She's led discussions with the researchers to help them sort through this. Astronomer Carey Lisse, who is working on the interstellar probe study, said these sessions were "very blunt and made us think a lot."
> He's done the math. "I will be 75 in 2036 when we launch. That means that I know I'm not going to be on this mission probably for more than 10 years after launch," says Lisse, adding that the need for handovers is just a fact. "This isn't just theory or just talk. It's going to happen multiple times, probably two or three times at least."
> ...
> Ocker, who doesn't even have a Ph.D. yet, points out that she'll be late in her career by the time this probe reaches interstellar space, if NASA decides to support it and if it launches in the 2030s. "I'm very hopeful that this mission will happen. I really hope it does, in which case I'll be very excited to use the data when it does eventually come down," she says.
lapetitejort
> Do we still have anything like this?
In The Expanse series of novels, essentially every citizen on Mars is working towards terraforming the surface, something they know will not be achieved in their grandchildren's lifetime. This will probably be a goal very near in the future. Let's just hope it goes better than the novels.
Quantum physics was worked out for the most part within a person's lifespan. We've since slowed down, and it may take a few generations to make another great leap. In the meantime theorists and experimentalists will be formulating hypotheses and collecting data that may not be usable in their lifespan. Just look at how long we had to collect data on Mercury's orbit before we could use it to help prove General Relativity.
hutzlibu
"Do we still have anything like this?"
In terms of buildings, the longest one might be
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia
Otherwise I would say science in general.
anyfoo
Oh wow, did not know about that cathedral. Yeah, that definitely qualifies.
nosianu
Oh yes!
Our cities and mega-structures, including things like roads and fields.
Or more broadly, our terraforming of the planet.
When you look at time lapse videos of human developments it looks pretty similar to watching swarm insects construct big structures over long periods.
We started it a long time ago and it sped up a lot over the last few centuries, and it's still going on.
No need to look at individual pieces opf technology, all you need is to "zoom out" in both space and time to see the human swarm busily at work on a project that not a single individual understands.
If you do want to look at individual smaller pieces, things like the space station or (space/air/road) vehicles in general: We keep tinkering and changing them through space (in parallel across the world) and time (across many generations).
anyfoo
Yeah, but those things are always in flux, made of many individual parts that may often been seen in isolation (I don't think many people except for city planers know which particular "project" a given set of roads belongs to), and have no definitive "completion".
For the space station for example, I'd consider it "completed" the moment it was taken into operation, the rest is building upon it and maintaining. Cathedrals are single objects, though of course I don't know how they were built, and for how many hundred years they may have seemed "complete enough" to the untrained eye.
masklinn
> Do we still have anything like this?
There are multi-generational scientific experiments e.g. the pitch drop or (hopefully) LTEE.
Most significant archeological sites are multi-generational as well though I don’t know if we can describe them as a single work.
One thing that’ll be interesting if we actually manage more than one generation is the software projects, the early luminaries have been passing for a while, the early architects of still extant software projects are going to start retiring or (sadly) passing en masse pretty soon.
I don’t look forward to the obituary of donald knuth but I do wonder how tex and metafont will carry on.
anyfoo
> There are multi-generational scientific experiments e.g. the pitch drop or (hopefully) LTEE.
Are they building something, especially of scale? The pitch drop experiment in particular is extremely passive as I understand. You essentially wait for the pitch to drop, with occasional maintenance (which I imagine being minor, maybe I'm wrong). LTEE though I think qualifies, because when I watched a documentary about it, I had the impression that it's quite some work.
Even still, an entire Cathedral or traveling through all of France (and organizing people to do so) seems much larger in scope. Though maybe those are just more extreme examples themselves?
> One thing that’ll be interesting if we actually manage more than one generation is the software projects
I'm not entirely sure if there is a common UNIX descendant out there that still even has one original line of code from one of its early ancestors[1], but there's certainly building and maintenance going strong around it.
TeX and Metafont I'm less sure, but there seem to be so many developers of very elaborate packages, that I would be surprised if TeX itself was left rotten.
Generally, it seems that many software projects have changed maintenance teams many times, with no involvement of the original authors anymore... but that's also more maintaining something existing (and building upon it), not something with a clear completion goal several generations down.
[1] Though I would not be surprised if you pointed to, say, some terminal code in a BSD variant and tell me it's from the original BSD.
not-my-account
I am guessing that [1] pointed to this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTyX_EJQOIU
I don't see the reference.
anyfoo
Indeed, thanks. I went hunting for the video, but then forgot to paste it in (and am long past the edit window). :/
lumost
The economic structures that incentivises this are also pretty mysterious.
Why does Cassini's child continue a project that they won't finish? why does King Louis XIV's successor continue funding it? Was the payment structure lump sump for 4 generations of work? or simply compelled labor?
dabfiend19
the cathedral in Barcelona was the first time thing I toured where I really thought about multi-generational projects.
SavantIdiot
There is also this implicit form of -ism built into it, in that certain groups of people were "obviously" less intelligent so it is unlikely they could ever build something magnificent or intellectually obscure. Whether it is a belief that aliens must have built Mayan or Egyptian Pyramids because of a bias that they were dumb savages, or whether it is dismissal of alternate forms of successful government and social organization in "uncultured" parts of the world.
It is easier to assume something like "this mechanism shouldn't exist" if you (general "you") think a group of people are already beneath you due to your implicit biases.
darcys22
This is a very interesting thought to explore! We have this cultural default to assume that people back then were less smart than us. But we really are exactly the same but we have a better starting point then they did to build interesting things.
PostOnce
nobody thinks Einstein was beneath us because he didn't have an iPhone
if something "shouldn't exist" in a time period it has nothing to do with judging those people as inferiors, its simply the timeline of the development of technology (or our misconception thereof)
SavantIdiot
For those of us who study culture, this is absolutely a thing. Its called pseudoarchaeology and it has always been very popular with White Supremacists.
https://entangledstates.org/2021/10/05/the-connection-betwee...
https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/pseudoarchaeology-racism...
https://hyperallergic.com/470795/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-r...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.364.6436.110
Also, Even today white supremacists think Einstein was a fraud:
https://christiansfortruth.com/albert-einstein-plagiarist-an...
But that is harder to believe than "Dumb Egyptians couldn't make pyramids, so aliens did it..."
darcys22
Einstein is a bad example cause he was very recent also.
bsder
> The ancient Greeks definitely had no technology that would have allowed them to do that
Sure they did. Bronze is not that hard to work with. Simple silica (sand) abrasives cut through it quite well. Lapping makes things nice and flat. Accuracy is defined by your skill with tools.
Hand sheet metal layout is a real skill even in the modern world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DypIDbAVTc
colordrops
Same goes for the perfectly fitted stones in Inkan walls in Peru. They weren't built by aliens or telekinesis, but rather unoccupied workers that rubbed on the stones all day for decades. There is plenty of evidence that these walls and cities were never in a "finished" state, but always in progress, with partially complete stones and scattered pieces not yet near the wall in many sites.
Gravityloss
Then there are projects like Colosseum which took only 7-8 years to build. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum or Parthenon that took 9 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon
bsder
Most things in the ancient Greek world needed to be completed in less than a generation because a generation tended to be the recurring timeframe for wars (funny that).
zajio1am
I guess that in modern world, such buildings would not even get paperwork/permits in 7-9 years.
JJMcJ
Recently a group finished a stone block of the size in the Egyptian pyramids in just a few days.
Another group hauled a Stonehenge sized block of stone from area the stones came from to the site of Stonehenge in about two weeks.
Estimate is that, using existing tools of the time, 100 stonemasons could have done the Sphinx in about five years.
And we have medieval and classical buildings in Europe where the building methods are fully known and there were no flying saucers or other magical methods.
ds206
Do you have a link or more information regarding the pyramid block formation?
beamatronic
What's remarkable to me is to think about the infrastructure that must have existed, even to support this basic labor. All these stones had to get quarried and moved around. All these workers had to be fed, housed, and clothed. Whatever tools and simple machines they used, would have required constant maintenance.
gh0std3v
I agree. To me, the ancient Greeks were an extremely advanced civilization and we don't often comprehend quite how rich their intellectual culture was.
It turns out that Archimedes had actually discovered some of the foundational principles of integral calculus centuries before Newton or Leibniz even considered it [1]. In fact, Eudoxus — another Greek mathematician — had created a "method of exhaustion" which was essentially an informal, geometric method for computing limits (though he tried to make it as rigorous as possible) [2]. And if they don't impress you, then Euclid on his own is an extraordinary mathematician. The Elements is a modern mathematical marvel, with all of its theorems on foundational geometry and algebra stemming from 5 axioms.
Astronomy was a critical part of many ancient cultures, from the Aztecs to the Indians (and of course, the Greeks). After some pondering, it makes sense why they would invest so much time, energy, and innovative zeal into creating a device as intricate as the Antikythera. I wonder how many other inventions and revolutionary ideas created by ancient cultures have been lost to time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Method_of_Mechanical_Theor...
xibalba
Previously on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Antikythera+mechanism
I am curious, is this device as fascinating to the average person as it is to the average HN'er? I suspect not, but I don't really understand why. I myself have read quite a few articles/posts and watched a few videos about it. Every time I re-encounter it, I get sucked back in.
See also:
nefitty
It seemed like a near-mystical piece of technology when I encountered it as a kid watching The History Channel. Tech-minded people probably self-select here anyway...
ninjamayo
For anyone interested, this museum in Thessaloniki Greece: https://www.noesis.edu.gr/en/ancient-greek-technology/ has a lot of very interesting items. If you ever visit the city, worth going there. I was particularly impressed with Syracusia, the giant ship/castle designed by Archimedes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syracusia
tsoukase
Absolutely invaluable place for every age. A day full of experiences (technology, science, history...).
tragomaskhalos
As a kid I was really into the whole 'ancient mysteries' thing and wrote about the Antikythera mechanism in gushing / awed tones in my English O-level ! Luckily the examiner was kind, but years later I realise it must have come across as all a bit Von Daniken.
dandare
Other "out-of-place" artifacts
ChrisArchitect
Anything new in this that isn't in all the many posts from back in March or so?
Lots of discussion:
9 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435416
5 months ago, around the time this video was originally posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27934684
nathias
Technology can stay 'inert' even if it is invented, for example the Romans already knew steam machines but didn't find a use for them, probably because they had slaves to do all that cheaper. Until recently solar power tech was the same ...
rsynnott
This is a _bit_ of a myth; the main reason that Roman-era steam engines went nowhere was that they didn't have the metallurgy to make them practical. Like, they had _watermills_; the idea that they were uninterested in mechanical power because they had slaves doesn't really hold up.
nathias
Interesting, what metallurgical skills were they missing? Wouldn't even a very crude steam machine be better than animal harness? Maybe the missing part was coal, burning wood would be very inefficient ...
jccooper
Romans had bloomery-made wrought iron only, which was a hand-made process of uneven quality, and made only in small batches. The role of carbon (and how to introduce it) was only vaguely known, so quality would vary. It would be quite difficult to make a boiler with bloomery iron. The blast furnace only showed up around 1100.
The Romans could certainly have made a Newcomen-style low-pressure steam engine; the first boilers were made of lead and copper (though they quickly switched to iron). However, those are of only mild usefulness. Perhaps they would have found employment in the Roman world in the same place they did historically: de-watering mines. However, it would have to compete with slaves and mules, and there's not a lot of coal in the Mediterranean world, so fuel costs would be substantial, especially for such an inefficient device.
A more useful high-pressure Watt style engine could perhaps be made of bronze, but the cost would be fairly astronomical. The Romans could pay it, of course, if they wanted to; huge quantities of bronze would be used in ship rams and statues. But they didn't know they could, and it's uncertain that they'd want to if they did.
nerdponx
Romans knew about steam power? Never heard that one before, have a good place to read about it?
Karawebnetwork
Look also at Heron's automatic door, 1st century AD.
Lighting a pyre changed the water pressure in a container, which then used basic hydraulic concepts to open a temple door. It is imagined that it would be used to imitate magic. Light the fire after a sacrifice and suddenly a higher power would open the door to the temple.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
WJW
The first steam "engine" was the Aeolipile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile), but it was more a toy than a useful tool. IIRC there was also a temple somewhere that used steam to open its doors as a cool trick to impress the masses.
stabbles
I realize how much I miss the #dislikes for videos like these. The title sounds clickbaity and #dislikes would confirm that. I guess it is not clickbait given that it's on hackernews and by the BBC, but if this context was missing...
walterbell
Would YT remove comments which posted the dislike count from Archive.org?
nefitty
Automate it!
xyzzy21
The presumption that other people aren't smart enough to do what you can or imagine has a name: bigotry. The "shouldn't exist" is bigotry.
It's also evidence that we see even today that knowledge is fragile and easily lost when it has a large tacit component. Most things technological are highly fragile because half of the knowledge required to create them is tacit.
See also: "FOG BANK".
simonh
It has nothing to do with assumptions about how smart people in the past were, we have every reason to believe they were just as smart as us. In fact we have direct evidence from surviving mathematical texts, treatises on philosophy, etc that they could be highly original and insightful thinkers. Smarts is simply not at all the issue and frankly you describing diligent scholars who clearly have huge appreciation and admiration of the people they study bigots is highly offensive and uncalled for.
The real bigots are the conspiracy nuts who think ancient civilizations we know of couldn't have achieved the many things we evidence of, and think it must have been aliens or other advanced civilizations on implausible magic islands.
The question is simply one of technology. We can't simply assume that people at a certain time had technology we have no evidence for, no accounts of, and no evidence of similar or near precursor technologies. The Antikythera mechanism was a shock because there was no evidence any such thing could exist at that time. We also don't have evidence such things existed in Babylon a thousand years previously, or in Egypt 3,000 years before that. Equally we have no evidence they definitely didn't have them. So should we assume they had such things? We simply make the best estimates we can and adjust when we find wonderful surprises like this one.
codegladiator
I can understand why the op was down voted, but just assuming that a civilization was "not smart" simply because we cannot find evidence feels dumb.
> The real bigots are the conspiracy nuts who think ancient civilizations we know of couldn't have achieved the many things we evidence of, and think it must have been aliens
You are not presenting any evidence that it was otherwise. I am not saying that this device was presented by aliens, but neither you are that it was not.
> So should we assume they had such things? We simply make the best estimates we can and adjust when we find wonderful surprises like this one.
We have evidence that they had it. How they had it is a separate question.
I assume the next "civilization" might not be able to figure out how/what out machines are doing and they would have a similar discussion.
simonh
> I can understand why the op was down voted, but just assuming that a civilization was "not smart" simply because we cannot find evidence feels dumb.
As I explained very carefully, this has nothing to do with them being smart or dumb. We already know they were very smart from their written records. I explained how we know that. They just didn’t have our technology. It turns out they had more technology than we previously suspected, that’s all.
> You are not presenting any evidence that it was otherwise.
It’s not possible to prove a negative. The only route to reasonably reliable knowledge is following the evidence and preferring the simplest explanations for things.
If I have to provide evidence it wasn’t aliens to doubt that explanation, do I also have to provide evidence it wasn’t Atlanteans, and evidence that it wasn’t time travelers, and evidence that it wasn’t extra dimensional beings? If I can’t provide that evidence what do we conclude, that it was probably alien time travelling extradimensional beings from Atlantis?
ncmncm
"Shouldn't exist" simply means that nothing else like it has ever been found, and (almost) nothing like it has even been described in surviving literature.
nefitty
Presumably you're talking about the classified nuclear material: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
dang
Maybe a good time to do this:
The Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27934684 - July 2021 (29 comments)
The Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27915777 - July 2021 (3 comments)
Scientists Have Unlocked the Secrets of the Ancient 'Antikythera Mechanism' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26482765 - March 2021 (1 comment)
Scientists Have Unlocked the Secrets of the Ancient 'Antikythera Mechanism' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26469609 - March 2021 (1 comment)
Scientists solve another piece of the puzzling Antikythera mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26444311 - March 2021 (1 comment)
A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435416 - March 2021 (130 comments)
The Antikythera Mechanism – Evidence of a Lunar Calendar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25440018 - Dec 2020 (1 comment)
Antikythera Mechanism: Evidence of a Lunar Calendar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25412576 - Dec 2020 (1 comment)
Hacker’s Discovery Changes Understanding of the Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25408405 - Dec 2020 (5 comments)
2000 Year Old Analog Computer - Decoding the Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24247667 - Aug 2020 (2 comments)
Decoding the Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculator: Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195196 - Oct 2019 (24 comments)
Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20543223 - July 2019 (35 comments)
Was the Antikythera Mechanism the world’s first computer? (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18642978 - Dec 2018 (56 comments)
Missing piece of Antikythera Mechanism found on Aegean seabed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18455764 - Nov 2018 (3 comments)
Missing Piece of Antikythera Mechanism Found on Aegean Seabed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18446622 - Nov 2018 (1 comment)
Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18276098 - Oct 2018 (3 comments)
Human skeleton found on famed Antikythera shipwreck - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12538876 - Sept 2016 (6 comments)
The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11902342 - June 2016 (66 comments)
The Antikythera Computer, Circa 205 BC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10546474 - Nov 2015 (1 comment)
Marine Archaeologists Excavate Greek Antikythera Shipwreck - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280722 - Sept 2015 (1 comment)
Divers return to famous Antikythera wreck to hunt for treasures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10274733 - Sept 2015 (2 comments)
The 2000 Year-Old Computer – Decoding the Antikythera Mechanism (2012) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192082 - Sept 2015 (5 comments)
Famed Antikythera wreck yields more treasures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8438996 - Oct 2014 (8 comments)
Reconstruction of planetary gearwork in the Antikythera Mechanism (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329647 - Sept 2014 (1 comment)
The Two Thousand Year Old Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4878859 - Dec 2012 (1 comment)
Apple engineer uses Lego to rebuild Antikythera mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1993988 - Dec 2010 (42 comments)
Lego Antikythera Mechanism (video) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1991557 - Dec 2010 (2 comments)
Antikythera Machine built out of Lego - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1990493 - Dec 2010 (3 comments)
Lego Antikythera Mechanism (oldest known scientific computer) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1988818 - Dec 2010 (1 comment)
The Antikythera Mechanism: Animation and Analysis [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1948365 - Nov 2010 (1 comment)
Beautiful phyiscal model of the Antikythera Mechanism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1871202 - Nov 2010 (3 comments)
Antikythera Reborn – The Hackers of Ancient Greece - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101701 - Jan 2008 (2 comments)
kanzenryu2
The thing that really gets me is just how densely the whole mechanism is packed together. What a masterpiece. The techniques must have been developed incrementally over many revisions of the machine, perhaps over several lifetimes by various machinists and/or designers.
Sadly I read somewhere that the "slop" between the gears (the mechanical imperfections that add or multiply together over many gears) would overwhelm the more complex calculations that some of the machine was intended to perform.
6nf
From the Clickspring reconstruction, it seems clear to me that the 'slop' in the gears won't be a problem in the final mechanism.
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In case you have not seen it, there is a very interesting video series by Clickspring about building an Antikythera Mechanism with tools that were abailable at that time. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...
The tl;dw is that it was possible to build it with tools that were probably available, but some tools are specialized enough to guess that they had already build other similar devices. The final IRL reconstructed device is very nice. It's a long serie (10 episodes of 15 minutes each + some additional videos with even more details in other playlist) but it's worth watching.