ANCIENT TECHNOLOGY
Posted by anthonynorth on November 4, 2007
In the early years of the 20th century an artifact was recovered from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. Dated to about 80BC, it was considered a mere artifact. However in 1971 research on the Antikythera Mechanism showed it to have an intricate arrangement of gears, dials and graded plates.
One theory is that it was a computing device to work out the movement of the Sun and planets. If this idea is true, then the ancients had a degree of technology way above previously imagined.
MYSTERIOUS MECHANISMS
This is further shown by a crystal skull found in 1927 belonging to the Maya civilisation of ancient Mexico. The skull is carved from a single block of quartz crystal. So perfect is the skull that it would have taken some 300 years to carve by known means of the time. If a light is placed below it, a prism in the mouth directs the light through the eyes, lighting up the skull.
A further hint of advanced technology used by the ancients comes from the Baghdad Battery found in 1936. Said to be at least 2,000 years old, fruit juice was added to a replica and it produced half a volt of electricity.
Archaeologist Flinders Petrie added to the controversy with his words on certain elements of ancient engineering. A most systematic and exacting man, he wasn’t prone to flights of fancy, but he noted grooves and inscriptions on pottery and other artifacts that could not have been produced by modern precision engineering techniques.
SOUNDS GOOD
Modern toolmaker Christopher Dunn suggested a possible explanation for such precision engineering …
This essay has now moved to Anthony North’s new website. Read more of it here, including his own theories and more data.
© Anthony North, November 2007
BEYOND THE BLOG 
dmduncan said
You forgot to mention The Ark of the Covenant, whose precise building instructions, as detailed in The Bible, creates a capacitor. http://www.keyhoereport.com/
TiamatsVision said
There was an interesting article in the LA Times about a man with cancer who has no degree who worked with radio waves all his life. He is attempting to find a cure for cancer with radio waves. Check it out. Pretty amazing.
“John Kanzius, sorely weakened by leukemia treatments, drew on his lifetime of working with radio waves to devise a machine that targets cancer cells. The miracle: It works.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-cancer2nov02,0,1721192,full.story?
coll=la-tot-topstories
(I realize your blog set up won’t fit the entire link. Just type the bottom line on the top for the complete link, lol)
anthonynorth said
Hi Dmduncan,
Welcome. I write about the Ark here:
Although I don’t accept the ‘mechanism’ theory, I’m afraid.
Hi TiamatsVision,
Thanks for that. The more I study science the more certain I am that we have followed merely one track of knowledge, manipulating natural forces in a very myopic way.
There is so much yet to discover, and cannot even begin until it is realised that ALL natural forces have a theoretical multitude of applications.
Indeed, I’m reminded of many eastern philosophies that say the universe was created with the sound of ‘Om’.
Anita Marie said
Hey Tony
This is a ‘hot post’
Congrats
ps….see any ghosts or UFO’s on Halloween?
Me neither.
Oh well, there’s always next year
Keep it cool…er hot my friend
anita marie
GuardianAngel said
Tony,
Your articles always catches my interest. I believe ancient civilizatins had the ability to invent things more readily than what we think. I also believe that the ancient civilizations had better developed brains and more ‘functions’ readily available to them.
If you understand the basic of magnetism, you will be able to grasp the more difficult areas of the subject. You will also develop things that work on very simple principles, but play a big role in any society.
The Greeks built buildings that rivalled the pyramids. The Acropolis and some other Greek buildings display the same tight fitting stone concept as the pyramids. It could be that information was traded via the Great Library at Alexandria. The worlds greatest minds went there to study and meditate, and they went out of their own free will.
With that huge amount of experience and knowledge concentrated in one place it must have been very interesting. Nothing stopped these people to jointly develop things and discuss new technology.
Keep in mind that most of these people lived closer to nature than most of us. Their understanding of the world around them wasn’t marred by the Playstation 2 or the Nintendo Wii or the Apple IPhone. Their studies was seen as a privelege at the time, now it is seen as something that changes lives forever.
anthonynorth said
Hi Anita Marie,
I’ve missed your input. Thanks for the kind words. I don’t need Halloween to see ghosts. I see them every day – people walking about in half a world – the purely material world – and thinking it is all there is to reality 🙂
Hi GuardianAngel,
I’m pleased you like my articles. I’m convinced the ancient mind WAS different to us. Today, we are specialised, compartmentalised, materialist. In the past a more ‘holistic’ mind-set allowed people to see the world as a whole, and no doubt had different knowledge, different wisdom.
I wouldn’t necessarily say it was greater than ours. Simply different. But if we could learn, and access both mind-sets? Perhaps that should be the route to true knowledge.
anthonynorth said
Anita Marie,
I’ve just checked my spam folder and found a comment from you. I wish the Great WordPress Comment Eater wouldn’t be so hungry at times.
As you’ve repeated most of the comment I haven’t saved it. But now I understand what you mean by ‘congrats’. I take it I’ve been on WordPress front page again.
I’m ecstatic. That’s the second time in a few weeks that I know of. Hey, I ‘Can Haz’ success, too! 🙂
Anita Marie said
LOL Cats ain’t got anything on you Tony…ps I noticed I got the SPAM treatment at my OWN blog.
Go figure.
anita marie
subirkrdatta said
We are all going and reserching our ancient past.
http://www.geocities.com/datta4vaastu/vaastu.html
Jewels Vern said
There is a strong tendency to assume that ancient people were ignorant savages, not nearly as intelligent as we are today. In fact, almost everything we consider a hallmark of our civilization has been invented more than once. The steam engine was invented in ancient Egypt, credited to someone named Hero. Cities have been found with indoor plumbing and flush toilets, dated 4,000 years ago. The bible and other ancient books mention things done with water that we have no idea how to duplicate, such as rechannelling rivers to gain a military advantage. The Jews tunnelled a mile through solid rock to gain access to a spring. They worked from both ends, and the crews met perfectly in the middle with no detectable error. We could maybe do that with lasers and theodolites and stuff, but they did it with stone knives and bear skins.
The simple truth is that a clever fellow with slight education can do amazing things with no technical tools at all, just by knowing what he wants to do. The Antikythera Mechanism could have been built by many philosophers of the time, with metal working experience and astrological training. It just happens that only one such example was preserved for us to admire. He did not need an industry to support his efforts, he only needed a patron who wanted a navigation instrument.
Modern man really has added only two new concepts: mass production and gonzo marketing. Hero’s steam engine was not reproduced because there was no entrepreneur to see the market value for it. Hero only saw it as a trinket, and only used it to open a temple door. The Baghdad battery discovered recently was near some artifacts that looked like they might have been electroplated; some metal worker had discovered a useful trick and didn’t bother to pass it on to anybody outside his metal working guild. History is full of such inventions that were never used by anyone except their inventors.
Another factor is that archaeological discoveries are mostly studied by archaeologists, who are not always competent to assess things they have never seen. A museum in Norway displayed little wooden boats for a long time, calling them “prayer boats”, and freely admitting that they didn’t actually know what they were for. One day a tourist interrupted the guide to inform him that they were levels. He was a mason, and masons still used little wooden boats to level stones. When the inside of the boat was waxed, a drop of water would slide easily and indicate when the boat was setting exactly level. Another example comes from etymology: John Ayto wrote a book on etymology with a long tale of the difficulty in finding the origin of the word ‘groin’. It was eventually associated with the word ‘ground’, but he obviously didn’t understand the connection. What was missing from his store of knowledge was the fact that masons have always used ‘groin’ to mean the line where two vaults intersect, and ‘ground’ is the treatment applied to the meeting of any two surfaces. You can to this day walk into a hardware store and buy a ‘ground’ for that purpose.
Our amazement at these ancient discoveries is merely an indication of our unfounded assumptions about the intelligence of our forebears and our own lack of experience in basic matters.
rcjgraves said
So with the Perry Reese maps, the fact that both the Egyptian Sphinx and Machu Picchu are aligned to the cosmos as they appeared 100,000 years ago, and the smatterings of evidence (spurious and otherwise) that you’ve partially sketched above, there seems to be quite a bit of evidence to support the notion that human civilization is much older than we had thought and that perhaps there was (lost) golden age of early civilization. Furthermore, our mythologies, our inherited collective consciouses, indicate that such a “lost” golden age wasn’t entirely lost. All that makes sense to me, and I think the theory should receive more serious academic consideration.
However, many of the extrapolations made from theories of enlightened ancients (including links to ancient civilizations on Mars, hollow earth theories, benevolent space aliens coming to Earth to teach the ancients, and so on) give the skeptics more than enough to “treat with[. . .]disdain.”
I think the focus of such “forbidden archeology” and speculative history should be on locating, dating, and documenting artifacts while offering the only most grounded interpretations of them. Radical interpretations only hurt the “golden age” theory, and it is already has an uphill, against the wind claim as it must battle against the culturally internalized paradigm of human civic evolution posited by Egyptology.
anthonynorth said
Hi Jewels Vern,
Thanks for that. Very interesting.
Hi Rcjgraves,
If you click on my Lost Civilisation cetegory I have a number of posts on the subject and my own theories.
ponakamad said
Hi,
It is an interesting article.I have had the occasion to interact with a gentleman who says the same thing about our ancients’ way of looking at science.He says that they had a different way of looking at things and knew about using sound/vibrational energy in different fashions.The fact that Vedas were not put to writing for a long time but passed on through speech from generation to generation essentially to retain their precise pronunciation so that the required effects are obtained points to this.
In the Hindu culture as per our ancient books certain yagnas produce certain end results when performed as per instructions.There are yagnas which can even result in rain,cause childless couples to have children etc.The same yagnas being performed today are not giving the results quite possibly due to the violation of the required conditions relating to pronunciation/vibrations and also due to other conditions not being properly understood.
All these require a knowledge of the required mantras and more importantly a very precise way of pronouncing the sanskrit words which probably is now not widely known.
Also in the ancient times spirituality was an inherent trait on the part of great thinkers/teachers/philosophers as opposed to rabid materialism of today .They usually thought of the society a a whole rather than the me ,ME and MORE ME of today’s world.This is probably true across ancient cultures wherever found.
It stands to reason that highest philosophical works of our ancients(here i am thinking about Advaitha,Bhagawadgita, works of ARISTOTLE,PLATO, and their equivalents in other cultures where available) would require a level of civilization not generally associated with the current findings about those times.
Even as late as in the nineteenth century there have been very curious very remarkable individuals trying to learn about the world as one can see from the interesting book A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYTHING written by BILL BRYSON.
We definitely must use a more open approach to studying these issues rather than trying to discredit each other.It is quite possible that civilizations have risen to glorious heights in the pasts ,some even surpassing the current level of technology that we possess now but been destroyed utterly due to various natural calamities.Evidence as currently accepted maybe very sketchy or not understood even if it is in front of us because of a culture’s way of looking at things.
If something were to happen to our civilization and we revert to a relatively primitive state of affairs (just medieval Europe for example would do)how would a citizen of that world use a computer-may not have any way to power it and the technology involved in manufacturing such a device requires a basic understanding of various branches of knowledge that might not be available and if available cannot be put to use because the supporting technologies have gone down the drain.So just maybe a few hundred years after our current civilization our descendants would be talking about us as if we were some sort of Gods/aliens etc based on evidence which makes no sense.Could this be happening to the way we are currently looking at our ancients because they probably looked at science and life in a different fashion and we may not yet understand it?
Do hope that my comment isn’t too long.
timothy koughan said
in my opinion just because you find one piece of ancient technology doesnt mean that they used advanced unknown technologies. it could just be a single person tryin to do a certain thing in a different unique way or an inventor that was ahead of his time like leonardo davinci was.
anthonynorth said
Hi Ponakamad,
Welcome. Mystical traditions involving sound are not only in the eastern tradition. Western Monotheism holds its own traditions.
Consider, for instance, ancient Judaic mysticism in the Cabala, where the ‘sounds’ of the Hebrew alphabet have a creative function. This idea is at the base of western occultism and the idea of word magic.
It should not be lost on the more mystical intellect that in Genesis, every act of Creation is preceded by the words: And God SAID.
Could basic engineering abilities have been gleaned from a msytical, more ethereal understanding? The modern scientist would laugh at the possibility, to which I would remind him of the microchip, which came as an engineering solution from a most ethereal understanding of the subatomic world.
Hi Timothy,
Welcome. I’m afraid I must disagree with you. First of all, Leonardo was not really an inventor. He was a conceptualist. Yes, ahead of his time, certainly, mainly because the engineering abilities were not around.
Can a man invent something out of the blue like this? I’m not sure. Normally, our discoveries are part of a continuing thread of knowledge, built up over time by many minds.
This suggests that the ‘mechanism’ would be unlikely to have been a one off by one man.
red pill junkie said
Great article.
Although there’s reason to suspect the crystal skull is a forgerie made by a bavarian jeweler.
But the Antikythera device is definitely no forgerie. Nor are the chemical batteries of Bagdhad. I’m also fascinated by that strange wooden artifact found in Egypt and first catalogued as a “bird”, but later found to have exact aerodynamic properties; it is the perfect rendition of a glider. Or those enigmatics hyerogliphics at the temple of Dendera, which to our westerner mind appear as gigantic light bulbs. Whatever it is, the egyptians made a lot of jewelry with silver plating, produced ONLY by the process of electrolysis.
So for me there’s still reason to believe there was an ancient advanced knowledge under-estimated by current archeology. Maybe some of the ramblings of Von Daniken have the slightest hint of truth.
Nevetheless, we have to understand that, if there was such power and technology on ancient times, we have to discover why these civilizatons collapsed nevertheless. It could be because, like us, they only tried to pursue more power for a few elite groups while the rest of the world lived in ignorance and poverty.
Like a famous argentinian cartoonist once wrote: from an arrow to an intercontinental ballistic missile, it’s amazing how much human technology has changed… and depressing how little his INTENTIONS.
anthonynorth said
Hi Red,
One reason for the possible loss of ancient technology is the change from ‘holistic’ thinking to ‘specialised’, which seemed to begin with Monotheism. People just stopped thinking in certain ways, and, as happened with the fall of the Roman Empire, people moved backwards for a while, ignoring the tech around them.
Alternatively, such tech could have been part of an ancient lost civilisation (see Lost Civilisation category to see that I’m not going mad), and only a few people survived the processes to take the tech to the ‘new’ world.
You’re right about intentions. It stinks.
TiamatsVision said
Hmmm, sounds like you’re talking about the ‘evolution versus devolution’ argument in your last post, Tony. And I have to agree with that being a possiblity.
anthonynorth said
Hi TiamatsVision,
I wouldn’t quite go that far. Rather, in moving from one way of thinking to another, we first step backwards into a period that can best be described as ‘indecision’, before steaming ahead again on another road.
Basically, I don’t say that we are more or less knowledgeable today than in the past – simply that that knowledge is different.
Only I wish that scientists today could just consider the possibility that the suggested different knowledge of the past was also as knowledgeable as today – but (you’ve guessed it) different.
Adam said
Hi Anthony
While I don’t usually invoke ETs for historical explanations the Seven Sages of Sumerian legend seem to have been aliens rather than ‘gods’ – so I wonder what influence they might have had. There’s nothing anomalous about Sumerian technology that we know of, but they insisted that the arts of civilisation itself came from “outside” sources.
All the clever technology of the ancients didn’t really blossom I suspect because private enterprise was never encouraged, viewed as a virtue, or given protection by the state. Inventors of ancient times kept their innovations a secret from possible imitators and thus technical knowledge had to be reinvented by indivudals time and time again.
anthonynorth said
Hi Adam,
I’m often intrigued by the idea of ancient knowledge from ‘outside’. The Culture Hero in mythology is particularly fascinating, be it Gilgamesh, Osiris, Veracocha, Quetzalcoatl, or a host more.
My own theory is that they were from a parallel advanced civilisation. I write in more detail on the Lost Civilisation category, but basically I think this:
Human distribution around the planet must have involved sea journeys, suggesting boats much earlier than thought. I argue this led to a split between hunter/gatherer and fisheries. Indeed, a fisheries revolution occurred many thousands of years ago, requiring static community and social/technological advancement.
This world-wide civilisation came to an end with the last ice age, swamping their ports, buried under the coastal waters. Some went inland, thus kick-starting the agricultural revolution, who’s mythological instigators were always associated with the flood.
Of course, as a separate theory, I’d argue their tech was very different to what history ended up with.
Crisis von Parsimony IV said
This is such a great thread, I wish I had something useful to add. Instead, I’ll just ask a question.
So, I think ancient use of sound vibrations as a mechanical tool is worth looking into. But wonder about human language being used in similar ways. (As with the yagnas mentioned by Ponakamad above.) How can we conclude that “precise pronunciation” was passed down over thousands of years when in all of recorded history, human language has been in constant flux? Pronunciation never stays the same. Not even in 50 years, let alone 1,000.
I am very intrigued by language, so if anyone has information on how it could remain static, essentially, please post!
anthonynorth said
Hi Crisis Von Parsimony IV,
An interesting point. I don’t think languages, as such, can remain the same. Most changes are quite valid and innocuous, but even here, sound has vital functions. I point out in the link below how modern language is being used in totalitarian ways:
This highlights the ‘magic’ of language. However, in a future post I do look at the possibility of an original human language, from which we could argue the original ‘word magic’ came.
It would be a requirement of language to change in order to maintain the ‘mystery’ and ‘power’ of this original form.
lorigloyd said
What a fascinating thread, Tony. I enjoyed reading this.
anthonynorth said
Hi Lorigloyd,
All part of the service. I do a deep piece like this every week. Coming up tomorrow, the Cult Guru.
There, you’ve had advance warning 🙂
subir kr datta said
I am really grateful for this long, hot and interesting thread.
Well as our past reveals, Arya Bhatta, the great astronomer discovered in 475 A D that the earth is rotating around it’s own axis but, the credit gose to Copernicus in 1543 A D.
http://www.kolkatavaastusolutions.blogspot.com
anthonynorth said
Hi Subir Kr Datta,
Indeed. There was even an understanding of the reality of the Earth prior to Aristotle.
Zab said
I know the crystal skull technology. I know how it works. If you want to know, Email me. my email is ZabParadox@gmail.com
Noble said
Hello! The babes are here! This is my favorite site to visit. I make sure I am alone in case I get too hot. Post your favorite link here.
burrodriver said
Here is some ANCIENT TECHNOLOGY
I AM TWITTER Horus
Stone Quarry Mystery
Winds of Egypt Not Copper Tools
Boats over the Pyramids
Howard West