Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Antikythera Mechanism trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Antikythera mechanism is a lump of corroded bronze that turned out to be a 2,000-year-old geared computer, and nothing of comparable complexity appears again for well over a thousand years. This quiz follows it from the sponge divers of Symi who found the wreck in 1900, through the museum director who spotted a gear wheel in 1902, to Derek de Solla Price's X-rays and the 2005 CT scans that finally read the inscriptions. The technical questions are written for curious people, not engineers: what the front dial showed, how the Metonic and Saros spirals worked, why there is an Olympic Games dial, what the hand crank drove, and how a pin-and-slot gear modelled the Moon speeding up and slowing down. There are also questions on the wreck's other treasures, Cousteau's 1976 dives, the skeleton nicknamed Pamphilos, the Rhodes and Archimedes theories, Cicero's descriptions of similar machines, and the mechanism's Hollywood turn in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the mechanism, the wreck and the people involved, so the tooth counts, dates and dial names will hold up against a museum guide.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Antikythera mechanism is generally described as the oldest known example of what?
An analogue computer
It could predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance.
Q 02In which year was the mechanism recovered from the shipwreck?
1901
The wreck itself was found around Easter 1900; the mechanism came up probably in July the next year.
Q 03The mechanism was found by a crew of sponge divers from which Greek island?
Symi
Captain Dimitrios Kontos and his men were sailing to fishing grounds off North Africa when they found the wreck.
Q 04At roughly what depth did the divers find the wreck off Point Glyphadia?
45 metres
The first diver down, Elias Stadiatis, surfaced so quickly that his captain assumed he was drunk on nitrogen.
Q 05What did diver Elias Stadiatis do at the wreck that made his captain think he was drunk from nitrogen?
Signalled to be pulled up at once
Captain Kondos put on the gear and went down himself to check.
Q 06Which museum director first noticed in 1902 that one of the corroded lumps contained a gear wheel?
Valerios Stais
His cousin, the politician Spyridon Stais, was with him; most scholars thought a geared device far too advanced for the period.
Q 07Which museum holds all the fragments of the mechanism?
National Archaeological Museum, Athens
Reconstructions by Price, Wright and others are displayed alongside them.
Q 08Into how many separate fragments has the mechanism been divided after conservation?
82
Only seven are mechanically significant, and four contain gears.
Q 09How many teeth did the largest gear, about 13 cm across, originally have?
223
That number matches the Saros eclipse cycle of 223 synodic months.
Q 10The mechanism's bronze had corroded into which mineral, which cracked and shrank when brought up from the sea?
Atacamite
It went untreated and unnoticed for two years while staff pieced together the statues.
Q 11Which Yale science historian revived study of the Antikythera mechanism from 1951 and published X-ray findings in 1974?
Derek de Solla Price
He and Greek physicist Charalampos Karakalos imaged all 82 fragments with X-rays and gamma rays in 1971.
Q 12A 2005 team from which university used X-ray tomography to read hidden inscriptions inside the Antikythera device?
Cardiff
The scans, led by Mike Edmunds, suggested the mechanism had 35 meshing bronze gears.
Q 13According to the 2005 scans, roughly how many meshing bronze gears did the mechanism have?
35
Thirty of them are still visible in the fragments.
Q 21The rotatable front-dial ring has long been assumed to carry the months of which calendar?
Egyptian
The month names are Egyptian but written in Greek letters; a 2024 study argues the ring may in fact hold 354 lunar-calendar days.
Q 22The fixed inner ring on the front face is divided into twelve equal 30-degree sectors representing what?
The signs of the zodiac
Following Babylonian custom, each sign got exactly a twelfth of the ecliptic regardless of constellation size.
Q 23The Moon pointer's motion was made to speed up and slow down using what, in its earliest known use?
Epicyclic gearing
Q 14Which astronomer of Rhodes developed the lunar motion theory used by the Antikythera mechanism?
Hipparchus
He was active from about 140 to 120 BC on Rhodes, a busy port and centre of astronomy.
Q 15Which Stoic philosopher founded an academy on Rhodes where one theory says the mechanism was made?
Posidonius
Cicero said Posidonius had 'recently' built a device showing the Sun, Moon and five planets.
Q 16A Corinthian-type calendar found on the Antikythera mechanism in 2008 suggested a link to which inventor's school?
Archimedes
Syracuse was a Corinthian colony, though a 2017 study showed the calendar cannot be that of Syracuse itself.
Q 17Coins at the Antikythera wreck prompted a theory the mechanism came from which city with a great library?
Pergamon
Its library was second only to Alexandria's during the Hellenistic period.
Q 18Multiple lines of evidence date the shipwreck that carried the mechanism to approximately when?
70-60 BC
Coins recovered in the 1970s were minted between 76 and 67 BC, ruling out any link with Sulla's earlier looting.
Q 19In which century did machines of similar complexity reappear, with Richard of Wallingford's astronomical clock?
14th
That is a gap of roughly 1,500 years.
Q 20How was the mechanism operated?
By turning a small hand crank
The crank, now lost, drove the large four-spoked gear and moved the date pointer about 78 days per full turn.
A pin-and-slot arrangement mimicked the Moon's elliptical orbit without the Greeks knowing it was an ellipse.
Q 24How did the mechanism display the phase of the Moon, as demonstrated by Michael Wright?
A small rotating half-black, half-white ball
It sat in the lunar pointer and turned via a differential gear based on the angle between Sun and Moon.
Q 25How many dials are on the back of the mechanism?
Five
Two large spirals, the Metonic and the Saros, plus three smaller indicators.
Q 26The Metonic dial tracks a cycle of 235 synodic months, which is very close to how many years?
19
It is the interval after which the lunar phases recur on the same dates, handy for converting lunar and solar calendars.
Q 27The Saros dial's cycle of 223 synodic months, about 18 years and 11 days, was used to predict what?
Eclipses
Glyphs in 51 of the dial's cells mark 38 lunar and 27 solar eclipses.
Q 28The Exeligmos dial covers a 54-year cycle equal to how many Saros cycles?
Three
Because a Saros is a third of a day over a whole number, three of them bring the count back to whole days.
Q 29The 'Olympiad' dial on the back tracked the four-year cycle of what?
Panhellenic athletic games
Its four sectors name Isthmia, Olympia, Nemea, Pythia, plus the minor Naa and Halieia games.
Q 30What is unusual about the pointer on the Games dial compared with every other pointer on the instrument?
It moves anticlockwise
One of the four sectors names the very minor Naa games of Dodona in Epirus.