Library Exhibition on "Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity"

Last week the ISAW Library unveiled its contribution to the current ISAW exhibition Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Located on the second floor of ISAW, the small library exhibition showcases materials related to ancient timekeeping, with a particular emphasis on the Antikythera mechanism and Athens’ Tower of the Winds.

The Antikythera mechanism, generally considered the oldest known analog computer, was discovered in 1901 in a shipwreck dating to the first century BCE off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. For many years, the function of the device was a mystery, but the use of cutting-edge analytic techniques over the past two decades have made its function clear: the device was a complex calendrical computer used for tracking and predicting the positions of the planets.

Our exhibition includes several major publications related to the device, including the first published images of the artifact from N. Svoronos’  1903 publication Die Funde von Antikythera; Derek J. de Solla Price’s 1975 monograph Gears from the Greeks, which made groundbreaking use of radiographic imagery; and The Inscriptions of the Antikythera Mechanism, the recently-issued publication of the corpus of textual inscriptions found on and inside the mechanism, many of which were only decipherable through the use of three-dimensional imaging.

The Tower of the Winds is an octagonal structure in the Roman Agora in Athens that functioned as a sundial and a wind vane, with a  water-driven device inside that may have been a clock or planetarium. Our exhibition includes several notable representations of the building. Among these is the first archaeological publication of the tower, from James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s 1762 folio of The Antiquities of Athens, and a 1967 issue of National Geographic containing color images of the tower representing de Solla Price’s theory about the inner workings of the tower’s water system. Another large folio, Edward Dodwell's Views in Greece From Drawings, folio, was kindly loaned to ISAW by the Watkinson Library at Trinity College in Hartford. The volume contains two brightly-colored illustration of the tower’s interior during the Ottoman period, when it was used as a gathering place for members of the Mawlaw’īyya Sufi sect, whose mystics were often referred to as “whirling dervishes.” Of the two images of the tower in this volume, we selected the one that best shows the interior for our exhibition. (The other image, a landscape-format image showing the entrance to the tower, accompanies this blog post.) Lastly, the exhibition contains a 3-D printed miniature of the Tower of the Winds, created based on a three-dimensional computer model of the tower created by ISAW student Christine Roughan. (A computer animation based on the same virtual model, including lighting effects that show the effect of changing light at different times of day and year on the sundials, can be seen in the main gallery on our first floor.)

 The final volume in our exhibition is the oldest volume in the ISAW Library’s collection: an early 17th-century edition of Walther Hermann Ryff’s 1548 German translation of Vitruvius’ De Architectura. Book IX of Vitruvius’ masterwork deals with sundials and clocks, and is central for our understanding of the recording of time in Classical antiquity.

The ISAW Library is excited to provide a bibliographical supplement to Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity. We are grateful to all those who have helped to make this display possible, especially Sally Dickinson of the Watkinson Library, the entire ISAW Exhibition Department, ISAW Interim Director (and curator of Time and Cosmos) Alexander Jones, and ISAW Library Clerk Emma Sarconi.