I’m reading all Your discussions with a lot of interest, cause I’m very taken by this greek mechanism. I wanted to mention though that a person being able to make such an apparatus and describe its functions must have been at least 50 or 60 years of age. So this means it could have been made around 100 BC by somebody writing all the inscriptions from 150 BC. Couldn’t that be true?

Kind regards.

Volkmar E. Tabery

Tom must be right, as I just received an email for a comment by someone else on Virtual Corinth I. Sorry for the bother.

I think the way this works is: if you are a registered author on the blog, you get an email notice anytime someone other than you comments on a post you’ve written. That’s a separate function from the webfeed for comments, which is: http://www.currentepigraphy.org/comments/feed/ , which gives you the most recent 10 comments on any article in the blog.

You can also get a feed of comments for an individual article by subscribing to the individual page for that post (some browsers will give you an obvious way to do this or you can just append “/feed” — minus the quotation marks — to the url for that page, e.g.: http://www.currentepigraphy.org/2008/09/24/inscriptions-on-the-antikythera-mechanism-1/feed/

Hope that helps,
Tom

I was (long ago) signed up for the RSS comments and I got an email a week and half ago saying Alexander posted a comment. But when I posted a response, I didn’t get an email. I thought in the past when I posted a comment myself, I would get an email, but maybe that’s not the case? Or did I somehow manage to unsubscribe myself? I don’t see where, though.

http://www.currentepigraphy.org/2008/05/28/virtual-seminar-on-some-unpublished-inscriptions-from-corinth-i/#comments

(1) From Fr. B, more of the “back door” inscription. I’ve reversed the photo because these are offsets from part of the inscription plate that was once pressed against this surface but is now broken off, leaving behind a mirror image of the text.
http://www.currentepigraphy.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/frb_rev_mid_spec_refl.jpg
ΠΡΟΕΧΟΝ ΑΥΤΟΙΣ̣
ΦΕΡΕΙ ΩΝ Η ΜΕΝ ΕΧ̣
ΤΟΣ ΤΟ ΔΕ ΔΙΑΣ
ΤΗΣ ΑΦΡΟΔΙΤΗ̣
ΤΟΥ
ΓΝΩΜΩ

(2) From Fr. A, part of the inscription written in the space around the eclipse prediction spiral, along with a well-preserved “eclipse glyph” from the spiral. In the glyph, the omega-rho monogram stands for ΩΡΑ, and is followed in both lines by a theta. The damaged letter below the second line of the glyph is a rho.
http://www.currentepigraphy.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/fra_rev_text_spec.jpg
ΙΣΤ̣Α̣ΝΤΑ
ΚΑΤΑΛΗ
ΠΡΟΣΑ
ΩΤΗΝ̣
ΛΗΝ
ΧΡΩΜ
ΠΥΡ̣
ΖΟΝ̣

(3) Fr. 24, an offset (here reflected) of the same eclipse glyph and a bit of the surrounding inscription.
http://www.currentepigraphy.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/fr24_nat_refl.jpg

The remarks about ‘early’ letter forms are Kritzas’s, not mine, but I am glad though not the least surprised to have confirmation that his appraisal looks more solid than Meritt’s.

The inscriptions on the back dials have a much smaller letter size, which likely would affect the letter forms. I’d expect that if all the inscriptions were part of the original manufacture, they would have been executed by the same person, but the involvement of more than one hand–surely all around the same time though–can’t be ruled out. Unfortunately most of the back dial inscriptions are read from CT images. Part of the calendar spiral of the upper dial is in fact exposed, but the surface is pretty messed up there so that it’s not easy to read the text, let alone study the letter forms.
Alex