An old view, that there was little technological development in antiquity, asserted more often than assessed, was based on a rather simplistic notion of technology and, frankly, a wholly inadequate and superficial knowledge of the relevant material. Failure to appreciate just how limited was the technological base inherited by the Greeks from their Mycenaean, Near Eastern, and Egyptian predecessors led to gross foreshortening of the story. This was particularly noticeable in the oversight of many fundamental inventions and discoveries that were made by the Greeks, such as the winch, the compound pulley and the ratchet, which three devices come together in the crane, which was also a Greek invention. It is all too easy to miss the depth here. Every technological area is replete with devices and techniques nesting inside one another like Russian dolls. For example, as pointed out above, writing is a technology. Now there was writing before the Greeks, but the Greeks invented the alphabet, which is probably one of the most important technologies ever devised. They invented the wax tablet and stylus, of which the modern electronic notebook is just the latest version, and which, incidentally, has reverted to the approximate size of the original. Meanwhile the Romans invented shorthand, and the book, qua a codex of parchment sheets bound together at the spine. From humble and low beginnings, a world without the alphabet and the winch and much else besides, the ancient Greeks and Romans went very far indeed.
By the first century bc, if not before, there were people capable of making machines that could show the changing positions in the sky of the sun, moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury {the five planets that are visible with the naked eye). For this, you need not only to be handy with a metal file to cut a lot of gear wheels of the right size and number of teeth, you need also to have a reasonably accurate theory of planetary motion, and an ability to translate that theory into a hands-on working model. This ancient device, which is known as the Antikythera Mechanism (after the find-spot), and was (probably) once composed of more than 70 gear wheels, allowed the user via a single knob to wind the appearance of the night sky backwards or forwards to see where these celestial bodies were on any particular date, past, present, or future (Wright 2006). It should be noted that this device, fished up from deep water by sponge divers over a century ago, and scandalously neglected for most of the time since, is far more complex than any surviving Greek or Roman treatise on mechanical topics. The old idea that those texts were flights of fancy describing machines that couldn’t be built was a reflection of the intellectual limitations of the moderns who said it, rather than of the mechanical abilities of the ancients who wrote them.
World History
