Antikythera Mechanism Trivia
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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
An analogue computer. Its gear trains are more complex than any other device known for at least a thousand years afterwards, yet nobody noticed them until a wheel was spotted in the corroded bronze in 1902.
Q 02Why had the divers who found the Antikythera wreck stopped at the island?
Weather
Weather. They had put in to wait for it to turn, and a diver who went down off the island came upon the cargo of a ship sunk some 2,000 years earlier, perhaps in a storm of its own.
Q 03The divers who found the Antikythera wreck in 1900 came from which Greek island?
Symi
Symi. Its divers, who lived by gathering sponges, went on to salvage the wreck themselves in 1900 and 1901, under the supervision of archaeologists sent by the Greek government.
Q 04Salvage of the Antikythera wreck stopped in 1901 after what killed one diver and paralysed two?
The bends
The bends. The divers were working more than 40 metres down, and after the casualties the wreck was left untouched for half a century.
Q 05What did the divers bring up in 1900 as proof that they had found the Antikythera wreck?
A bronze statue's arm
A bronze statue's arm. In one telling the first diver surfaced babbling about corpses and horses on the seabed, and his captain, suspecting nitrogen had fuddled him, went down and fetched the arm himself.
Q 06Which archaeologist is credited with spotting a gear wheel in a corroded lump from the Antikythera wreck in 1902?
Valerios Stais
Valerios Stais. The first newspaper reports gave the find to his cousin Spyridon Stais, the former education minister who had arranged the salvage.
Q 07Which museum holds all the surviving fragments of the Antikythera mechanism?
National Archaeological Museum, Athens
National Archaeological Museum, Athens. The sponge divers salvaged the wreck for the Greek government, with navy ships in support, so its statues and the corroded lump all went to the capital.
Q 08The Antikythera mechanism's case was about the size of which everyday object?
A shoebox
A shoebox. It apparently left the sea as one corroded lump that soon cracked apart, and cleaning and handling have since left it in 82 fragments.
Q 09One turn of the Antikythera mechanism's main wheel stood for what span?
One year
One year. Every other gear train took its motion from this wheel, so one input moved all the pointers on both faces of the device together.
Q 10In 1903 a Greek naval officer published the first study of the Antikythera gears, calling the device what kind of instrument?
An astrolabe
An astrolabe. Periklis Rediadis argued that the gearwork did the job of the engraved star projection on an ordinary astrolabe, and the label stuck to the device for decades.
Q 11Which Yale science historian revived study of the Antikythera mechanism from 1951 and published X-ray findings in 1974?
Derek de Solla Price
Derek de Solla Price. A Greek radiographer imaged the lumps for him with gamma rays as well as X-rays, and the wheels hidden inside became the basis of his book Gears from the Greeks.
Q 12Astrophysicist Mike Edmunds led the 2005 X-ray study of the Antikythera fragments from which Welsh university?
Cardiff
Cardiff. Edmunds's team had an X-ray machine brought to the fragments, which were too fragile to travel, and the scans let them read text buried inside the lumps.
Q 13About how many gear wheels survive in the fragments of the Antikythera mechanism?
30
Q 21The movable outer ring on the Antikythera mechanism's front dial carries the month names of which calendar?
Egyptian
Egyptian. That calendar was standard among Greek astronomers but had no leap days, and the usual reading is that the ring was made movable so it could be shifted a day every four years.
Q 22The fixed inner ring on the Antikythera mechanism's front dial has twelve equal 30-degree sectors standing for what?
The signs of the zodiac
The signs of the zodiac. Each sign got an equal twelfth of the Sun's yearly path, whatever the size of its constellation, so the Sun pointer crossed one of them in about a month.
Q 23The Antikythera mechanism made its Moon pointer speed up and slow down by means of what?
Epicyclic gearing
30. They lie packed in layers inside the corroded lumps, so they could be counted only once the fragments were X-rayed, and every reconstruction adds a few lost wheels to complete the trains.
Q 14Which Greek astronomer's theory of the Moon's uneven speed across the sky is modelled by the Antikythera mechanism?
Hipparchus
Hipparchus. He worked out a theory of how the Moon speeds up and slows down, and the device copies that rhythm so closely that some researchers suspect he had a hand in its design.
Q 15Jars in the Antikythera ship's cargo point to which island, a hub of Greek astronomy, as the mechanism's possible workshop?
Rhodes
Rhodes. The ship carried Rhodian jars and the island had the leading astronomers of the age, though a calendar on the device's back suggests it was adapted for a buyer elsewhere in Greece.
Q 16The month names on the Antikythera mechanism's calendar dial belong to the family used by which Greek city and its colonies?
Corinth
Corinth. The reading surprised the team in 2008, because the rest of the cargo came from the eastern Aegean, and it turned attention to Corinthian colonies in north-west Greece and Sicily.
Q 17The Antikythera wreck's silver coins came from Ephesus and which other city of Asia Minor?
Pergamon
Pergamon. Its silver coins lay with others from Ephesus, and the latest were struck between 76 and 67 BC, which gives the firmest date for the sinking.
Q 18The ship carrying the Antikythera mechanism sank around 65 BC, during the lifetime of which Roman?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar. Some researchers suggest the statues and luxuries aboard were loot on their way to Rome for a celebration he staged, though nobody knows who owned the cargo.
Q 19Geared machines as intricate as the Antikythera mechanism next appeared in medieval Europe as what?
Astronomical clocks
Astronomical clocks. Nothing as intricate is known for well over a thousand years: bronze was routinely melted down for reuse, so other devices of its kind have probably vanished.
Q 20How was the Antikythera mechanism driven?
By turning a small hand crank
By turning a small hand crank. The crank is lost, but the little crown wheel it turned survives, and winding it forward or backward ran the heavens to any date the user chose.
Epicyclic gearing. Two wheels riding on a third, linked by an off-centre pin and slot, copy the Moon's changing speed, though the Greeks had no idea that its orbit is an ellipse.
Q 24How did the Antikythera mechanism show the Moon's phase?
A small rotating half-black, half-white ball
A small rotating half-black, half-white ball. Michael Wright showed that it sat in the Moon pointer and was turned by the difference between the Sun's motion and the Moon's, so it ran through the phases once a month.
Q 25The two main dials on the Antikythera mechanism's back have what shape?
Spirals
Spirals. A pin on each pointer rode in the spiral groove through several turns, and when it reached the end the user had to move it back to the start by hand.
Q 26The Antikythera mechanism's 19-year Metonic cycle brings the seasons back into step with what?
Lunar months
Lunar months. Nineteen years come to almost exactly 235 of them, so cities whose months followed the Moon could use the cycle to tell when a year needed a thirteenth month.
Q 27The Antikythera mechanism's Saros dial followed a cycle of 223 months, a little over 18 years, to predict what?
Eclipses
Eclipses. Glyphs marked the months to watch and whether the Sun or the Moon would darken, though a predicted solar eclipse might not be visible from where the user stood.
Q 28The Antikythera mechanism's Exeligmos dial told users to add eight or sixteen of what to a forecast?
Hours
Hours. The Saros cycle runs a third of a day over a whole number of days, so each repeat falls eight hours later, and after three cycles the count comes back to whole days.
Q 29The small four-year dial on the back of the Antikythera mechanism showed the timing of what?
Panhellenic athletic games
Panhellenic athletic games. Researchers had taken the little dial for a 76-year calendar cycle until scans read in 2008 showed the names Olympia, Nemea, Isthmia and Pythia in its four sectors.
Q 30What is unusual about the pointer on the Antikythera mechanism's small four-year dial?
It moves anticlockwise
It moves anticlockwise. The four year-sectors are engraved in anticlockwise order, so one extra wheel, driven off the shaft of the calendar dial around it, gave the hand the matching turn.