New mechanical discoveries at the Antikythera wreck

I don't get a paywall [apparently there is one for some people but not for me], so here's the new stuff :

Come 2012, a new team, led by Dr. Brendan Foley of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (and after 2017, Lund University), returned to the waters by Antikythera to relocate and resurvey the original wreck site, armed with the latest technologies. They found it, with its cargo scattered down a 55-meter downward slope, and also found the remains of a sixth person who had gone down with the ship.

Underwater archaeologists uncovered hundreds of artifacts, including two massive bronze spears, the life-size bronze representation of an arm, other pieces of marble and bronze statues, mosaic glassware, pieces of bone-inlaid furniture, blue game pawns, a sarcophagus lid, gold rings, and silver coins. They also found an encrusted, corroded disk, which was pulled from the seabed in 2017.

Like the original Antikythera Mechanism, after nearly 2,100 years underwater, the disk resembled greenish rock. About eight centimeters in diameter, the object still has four metal arms standing proud of the corners, with holes for pins. X-ray analysis shows the disk to bear the engraving of Taurus the bull.

It will be difficult to prove what exactly the Taurus disk is: part of the original Antikythera Mechanism, part of a second such mechanism, if one existed, or something else entirely. Based on the evidence so far, it looks exactly like other parts of the Mechanism, which had clearly been found incomplete. Based on the etching of the bull that can be seen with scanning, it may well be the gear that predicted the position of the zodiac constellation of Taurus.

Speaking of unsuspected technological prowess, recent X-ray imaging of a bronze statue discovered in the Antikythera wreck by Cousteau’s team in 1976 revealed a mechanical device inside its circular base, that apparently rotated the statue when a key was turned. This has yet to be confirmed. The statue dates from the second century B.C.E., contemporary or possibly older than the Antikythera Mechanisms. It could well be the earliest known example of a geared device.

While surveying the seabed, the divers found a second shipwreck, from about the same era. Like the first wreck, the second one is also scattered its bits and cargo down a steep slope, extending from 35 meters below sea level to more than 55m.

“We've only dedicated a couple of dives to investigation of this site, but what we've seen and recovered offers the possibility that the vessel sank in roughly the same time period as the Antikythera wreck," Foley said. "Comparing stamps on the handles of the Rhodian amphoras may help us narrow down the date of the sinking. Whether the two ships were associated directly is not yet known, and may never be known.”

As for the ship bearing the Mechanism, it had been a huge one, laden with precious cargo. It was a Greek grain ship from the Hellespont that was sailing for Italy, Foley avers, adding that the ship's planks are by far the biggest ever recovered from any other ancient shipwreck. "Even in their shrunken state, they are ten or eleven centimeters thick,” he says.

In fact, the only surviving comparable vessels are the "Nemi ships" that that the crazed Roman emperor Caligula had built as floating pleasure palaces in Lake Nemi the first century C.E. Two were discovered when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had the lake drained in the 1930s and divers have since been searching for a possible third.

“These were pleasure barges with a shallow draft but were 70 to 80 meters long," says Foley. "I don’t think the ship that sank off Antikýthera was that long, but the planks on these floating pleasure platforms are smaller than on the Antikýthera shipwreck.”

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium.MAGAZINE-missing-piece-of-antikythera-mechanism-found-on-aegean-seabed-1.6640779