At the heart of the newest film in the Indiana Jones series lies “an ancient hunk of gears”. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is based around the Antikythera Mechanism: an actual ancient Greek object that tracked the cycles of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets against the stars.
The Antikythera mechanism and its bronze gearwheels totally reconfigured the study of ancient technology. It was among a bunch of other antiquities pulled out of a shipwreck by sponge divers in 1901. And it was tangible proof of a level of technological sophistication otherwise thought impossible for the first century BCE.
