The Jewel of Babylon (The Unusual Operations Division Book 1)

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These pillars are often found by the forces who fight in the Kondor theater, but unlike the Lammasu Its missions have remained the same for years now: Coming from all nations, all continents, these men have chosen to fight for Freedo The squad is equipped with three squad sized support weapons, two Maschinengeweh Each member of the unit carries a squad sized support weapon with plenty of ammunition, the Fliegerfa Or have not been destroyed yet.

Its missions have remained the same for a few years now You don't want to be disturbed when you plan to enslave the Human race! You need a discreet hideout that is also recognizable by your peers The Cultists Dwelling is the perfect lair to conspire For years its armored regiments received second hand vehicles but this has changed recently. Thanks to its two massive Tesla guns, the Type 47 is a threat to Welcome to Zverograd, the Doomed City where the three Blocs fight a desperate battle to gain control of what lies below this once jewel town, the pride of all the SSU.

It is now a field of ruins where survivors from all forces are engaged in brutal city fighting. One of the very first officer in the Axis Army to ever wear a schwer SturmGrenadier Different variants built on this chassis have been in service of the Axis Army since Model 43 is e Each member of the unit carries not one but two squad sized support weapons, the Maschinengewehr 44 Zwilling Thanks to its thrusters, it can be parachuted directly on the battlefield, joining the action as soon as the rest of the invasion force arrives.

This model is tasked with destroying enemy attack planes and heavy infantr Thanks to its weight, it can be parachuted along with the airborne troops, offering them a much needed fire support during the first phase of an operatio Thanks to its advanced technology, it can miniaturize these deadly devices to have them available at any level on the battlefield.

Some weapons are even shared bet It greatly enhances your Babylon tables with unique looking and very versatile scenery. Some parts of the set can also be used as markers or objectives. The Babylon Rubble doesn't a Get ready for a scorching summer! These men and women come from all over the planet, from all walk of life, to fight for freedom and the inevitable victory of the Allies. Thanks to their Fliegerfaust Rocket Launchers , they are not helpless against air They are equipped with assault rifles and a rocket launcher, and their presence on the battlefield can change the entire course of battle, thanks to their precious skills.

A wise general should Many are even fielded before the trials are over: The Hexe is such an a New Releases - BTG. A superior marksman, she uses a specially designed Sniper Rifle to take down enemy officers and key personnel. It serves as an objective in Dust and allows any unit in contact to use the Makeshift Repair special action on itself. It can also be used with any WW2, modern or Sci-Fi gaming syst And as such deserve the best equipment available! Thousands of books are eligible, including current and former best sellers. Look for the Kindle MatchBook icon on print and Kindle book detail pages of qualifying books.

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The Jewel of Babylon (The Unusual Operations Division)

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Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention hard to put next book wait for the next reading a book action military unusual errors marcus grammatical paranormal. Showing of 22 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Can't Wait for the Sequel! Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. This normally isn't the type of book I generally read but it was given to me by a friend so I decided to check it out.

To my surprise I found myself engulfed in the story and had a hard time putting it down. After about the second chapter the book really picked up speed and between the interesting story line and the unforeseen plot twists, I was hooked. The authors experience in the military and his military knowledge was evident throughout the book but not too technical as to confuse the reader. To this day I still find myself thinking about the book, which means at least to me, that it was a great book. I can't wait for the sequel to come out! One person found this helpful.

A division of the DoD, the team is seeking objects that cause strange, even dangerous, behavior in individuals that are for lack of a better word allergic to them.

On this particular mission, they come across two caches of these relics, which were gathered and hidden around the world by none other than Adolf Hitler himself. Great story, hope he writes many more! I found this book to be riveting, delightful, and hard to put down. I am no professional book critique, but I did enjoy this book very much. I am surprised that little more has been made of the difference between the styles of thought which have been referred to here as Greek and Babylonian.

Though the sharp difference is most apparent in their mathematics and in the historic consequences of these two quite distinct but mutually interacting systems, surely it is also apparent in art and in literature. Think, for example, of the Mayan, Hindu, and Babylonian art works with their clutter of content-laden symbolism designed to be read sequentially and analytically, and compare it with the clean visual and intuitive lines of the Parthenon! Strangely enough, it has now emerged from the psychological researches of Robert. Ornstein and others that the difference in styles corresponds very closely with that of the activity of the left and right hemispheres of the human brain.

We would often like to think that our voyages of exploration in the world of learning were precisely navigated or that they followed prevailing winds of scholarship. As often as not, however, it is the chance storm that drives us to unsuspected places and makes us discover America when looking for the Indies. On some three and a half occasions it has been my extraordinary good luck to have been precipitated into unfamiliar and rich regions where I would never have looked but for the winds of fate that suddenly puffed my sails.

The fortunate fact that these several happenings proved coherent provides my excuse for attempting to communicate some of the excitement as well as the conclusions of this personal testament. My original course was set, in , toward a study of the experimental tools and laboratories of the scientist, a. This was in accordance with my specialized training in experimenting with scientific instruments, and it was a particularly appropriate subject at Cambridge University, where the then recently opened Whipple Museum of the History of Science provided access to a wonderful collection of antique instruments exemplifying the only prime documents in that field.

The instruments, and indeed all the available secondary histories, provided reasonably complete documentation only after the sixteenth century, which saw the proliferation of practical science and heralded the Scientific Revolution. From that time on, there was plenty of material to work with. Before that period, sources were remarkably scarce and it was apparent that a considerable effort should be made to see what there was in medieval times and perhaps hack into antiquity.

With this in mind, and also being aware of the rare privilege of constant access to the great manuscript collections of Cambridge, I made a point of trying to examine every available medieval book that contained something about scientific instruments. After some months of relatively trivial result, and at a point about halfway through my list of manuscripts to look at, a gust blew for me.

At the Perne Library of Peterhouse—the oldest Cambridge library—there was but one noteworthy item dealing with instruments. As I opened it, the shock was considerable. The instrument pictured there was quite unlike an astrolabe—or anything else immediately recognizable. My high school had had a mad English teacher who, instead of spoiling Shakespeare, taught us Old and Middle English for a year, so fortuitously I was not completely unprepared for the task.

The significance of the date was this: It was an exciting chase, which led to the eventually published thesis that this tvas indeed very probably a second astronomical tract by our great poet—and, moreover, the only work in his own hand- writing. It was a search in the Public Record Office to compare the writing on the Peterhouse manuscript with that on a slip of paper which had been proposed as the only other possible document that might be a Chaucer autograph. He was on the point of looking in the catalogue to see which of all those was the.

It was indeed the very one sought. This pair of instruments was to a medieval astronomer what a slide rule is to an engineer.

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The astrolabe was used to calculate the positions of the stars in the heavens it could also be used for simple observations, just as a slide rule can function as a straight edge and the equatorium was used to calculate the positions of the planets among the stars. This new background in the early history of other instruments led me to realize that the astrolabe and equatorium occupied a strategic place in history. They were by far the most complicated and sophisticated artifacts throughout the Middle Ages. Their history seemed to extend back continuously in that period, though it was uncertain whether they should be ascribed to a Hellenistic or just an early medieval origin.

At the other end of the time scale, they survived in some form or other until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, becoming then involved with the great astronomical clocks of the Renaissance and the orreries and planetariums which, respectively, had such a spectacular vogue in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Here one was fishing in very rich waters. The specific task at hand was to see whether the astrolabe and equatorium would contribute to what was surely a very complex and unsatisfactory state of knowledge of the origin of these astronomical showpieces.

They heavily influenced the thought of such people as the theologian Paley, the scientist Boyle, and the poets Dante and, of course, Chaucer. They pushed philosophy toward mechanistic determinism. Put in its setting of the history of science, the larger task seemed to be one that was fundamental for our understanding of modern science. This large task concerns an appreciation of the fact that our civilization has produced not merely a high intellectual grasp of science but also a high scientific technology. By this is meant something distinct from the background noise of the low technology that each civilization and society has evolved as part of its daily life.

The various crafts of the primitive industrial chemists, of the metallurgists, of the medical men, of the agriculturists—all these might become highly developed without presaging a scientific or industrial revolution such as we have experienced in the past three or four centuries. The high scientific technology seems to be based upon the artifacts produced by and for scientists, primarily for their own scientific purposes. The most obvious manifestation of this appeared in the seventeenth century, when all sorts of complex scientific gadgets and instruments were produced and proliferated to the point where they are now familiar as the basic equipment of the modem scientific laboratory; this is, indeed, the story of the rise of modern experimental science.

Curiously enough, this movement does not seem to have sprung into being in response to any need or desire on the part of the scientists for devices they might use to make experiments and perform measurements. Galileo and Hooke extended their senses by telescope and microscope, but it took decades before these tools found further application.

On the contrary, it seems clear that in the sixteenth and earlier centuries the world was already full of ingenious artisans who made scientific devices that were more wondrous and beautiful than directly useful. Of course, many of the things, to be salable at all, had to be useful to a point. Consider, for example, the clock.

It certainly had some use in telling the time a little more accurately than common sundials, but one gets much more the impression that even the common domestic clock, not to speak of the great cathedral clock, was regarded in early times more as a marvel and as a piece of conspicuous expenditure than as an instrument that satisfied any urgent practical need.

The usefulness, of course, developed later. Eventually the artisans became so clever and were producing such fine products that the public and the scientists came to them to obtain not only clocks but a whole range of other scientific devices. The problem was to account for the production of highly complicated clockwork and the development of its ingenious craftsmen in the sixteenth century. Now, the history of the mechanical clock is as peculiar as it is fundamental.

Almost any book on the history of time measurement opens with a pious first chapter dealing with sundials and water clocks, followed by a chapter in which the first mechanical clock described looks recognizably modern. It appears to spring forth at birth fully formed and in healthy maturity, needing only a few improvements such as the substitution of a pendulum for the foliot balance and the refinement of the tick-tocking escapement into a precision mechanism. It is even worse than this. It so happens that the very earliest mechanical clocks we know are the magnihcent astronomical showpieces, such as the great clocks of Strasbourg Cathedral and Prague.

In fact, the earliest of them all, a clock built by Giovanni de Dondi in Padua in , is by far the most complicated of the series.

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It uses intricate multiple trains of gear wheels, even with pairs of elliptical gear wheels, link motions, and every conceivable mechanical device. Nothing quite so exquisite mechanically was built again, so far as we know, until a couple of centuries later. Even today a more cunningly contrived piece of clockwork would be hard to hnd.

If one begins the history of the clock with this specimen, it is plain that the art declines for a long time thereafter, and that a glorious machine that simulates the design of the Creator by making a model of His astronomical universe is eventually simplihed into a device that merely tells the time. Thus, one might well regard the modern clock as being nought but a fallen angel from the world of astronomy!

What, however, of the state of things before de Dondi? His clock contains the very remarkable device of the escapement and all the wheelwork and weight-drive that is basic to the original invention. Where did these inventions come from? Something so sophisticated as the escapement could not have come into being suddenly except by a stroke of genius. We are, however, completely ignorant of a beginning. All that de Dondi tells us is that the escapement is a common device in his time.

To inject some unity into the story, I therefore attempted to disentangle the clock from the history of time measurement and connect it instead with the longer and earlier history of astronomical models such as the astrolabe and equatorium. Luck was with me, for it seemed just the attitude that was needed. This led to the tentative hypothesis that the early perfection of astronomical theory had induced men to make divine machines to duplicate the heavenly motions.

These proto-clocks were necessarily as complex as the astronomical theory, and their execution called forth a great deal of fine mechanical skill of a sort not expended elsewhere in early times. Such models acted as a medium for the transmission among scientific artisans through the ages of high skills which reached a pinnacle in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance and provided a reservoir of mechanical ability that. There were still many problems to solve.

Perhaps the greatest was that of the mysterious origin of the clock escapement, one of the few major inventions that remained completely anonymous and unaccounted for. While worrying about this, I called one day at the office of Joseph Needham in Cambridge, famous for his monolithic work on Science and Civilization in China. My purpose was to seek the latest information on a well-known mechanical equato- rium, a planetarium-like object that had been constructed by Su Sung in a. But those who had written about it, and presumably all those who had looked at the many editions, had apparently never bothered to read the really technical material in it or to examine critically the numerous diagrams showing these mechanical details.

Quite apart from sundry astronomical peculiarities and the fact that the prime mover looked like a large water. Now this object was securely dated some three centuries earlier that the first European mention of the escapement, and Needham needed little further urging to translate pieces of the text and confirm that the mechanism was indeed an escapement. From then on we worked day and night for some four months, with Needham and his assistant, Wang Ling, translating texts and providing the rapidly increasing historical background, so that together we could understand the mechanical details and fit this object into the known history of scientific technology.

Thanks to the early invention of printing in China, and to the Chinese custom of producing in each dynasty a sort of analogue to Great Books of the Western World so that little of vital importance was lost, we have amazingly fine documentation for Su Sung and his machine. The information preserved is perhaps superior in completeness in some details to the facts we have about many nineteenth- and twentieth-century inventions. The only very considerable difficulty arises from a peculiarity of the Chinese language: In the course of this we acquired so much new understanding of the terms that we were able to seek other more fragmentary texts and glean from them a previously unintelligible but now usefully complete story of how Su Sung was only the end of a long line of sim.

It stood some thirty feet high, with another ten feet of observing instruments mounted on a platform on top. Concealed within the housing was a giant water wheel fed by a carefully controlled flow that dripped at a steady rate, filling the buckets of the wheel slowly. Each quarter- hour the wheel became so loaded that it tripped its escapement mechanism, and the whole tower burst into a cacophonous activity with a great creaking and groaning of wheels and levers.

On the tower top, the observing instrument was turned automatically to keep pointed steadily at the moving heavens. At appointed times, whenever the escapement tripped, these doors would open and little mannikins would appear holding tablets marked with the hours of the day and night, ringing little bells, clashing cymbals, and sounding gongs.

It must have been a most spectacular sideshow. For all the complexity of its externals, the Su Sung clocktower was a comparatively simple mechanism. The big water wheel needed only a simple pair of gears to connect it to the rest of the paraphernalia, which in turn needed only the most elementary mechanical levers and such de-. Only the escapement mechanism was totally unexpected and refined.

It did not tick backwards and forwards quickly, as in the mechanical clock, controlling all the time-keeping properties. Neither was it like the European water clocks, in which a continuous stream of water produced continuous or intermittent action depending solely on the rate of drip of the water. This was definitely an intermediate and missing link in the development.

We managed to trace the invention of this form of water-and-lever escapement back to one of the many earlier astronomical clocks built in a. We also succeeded in tracing the line back to the first known clock in the series, which had been built, perhaps as a non-timekeeping astronomical model, by Chang Heng, about A.

What was perhaps more important was that we were able to suggest, at least, how this Chinese invention might have been transmitted to Europe. Curiously enough, one of the other workers on clocks, contemporary with Su Sung, was Shen Kua, who is deeply involved with the history of the magnetic compass. This device seems to have become known in Europe at much the same time as the escapement would have come if it, too, had been transmitted to Europe and was not a home product as we had previously supposed. Bound up with this is another curiosity.

The chimera of perpetual motion machines, well known as one of the most severe mechanical delusions of mankind, seems also to have first become prominent in Europe at this same time; it was quite unknown in antiquity. There are several Latin and Arabic manuscript sources and allusions which involve two or even all three of these otherwise unconnected items, the mechanical clock, the magnetic compass, and the idea of a wheel which would revolve by itself without external power.

Time and time again one finds this intrinsically un likely combination of interests.

Science Since Babylon (Full Text)

As yet we have no proof, but I suspect very strongly that all three items emanate from some medieval traveler who made a visit to the circle of Su Sung. Vague tales of the marvelous clock and of the magnetic compass could easily be told in Europe and lead mechanics there to contrive some arrangement of levers that could control the speed of a wheel and make it move round in time with the heavens. Just such a stimulating rumor led Galileo to reinvent the telescope.

How was the traveler to know that each night there came a band of men to turn the pump handles and force the tons of water from the bottom sump to the upper reservoir, thus winding the clock for another day of apparently powerless activity? In the context of the larger history of civilizations, it is of the greatest interest that heavenly clockwork developed not only in the West but also in China, where mathematical astronomy was much weaker and not nearly so complicated.

The reason is, of course, that even something so basic and mathematically simple as the daily cycle of rotation of sun and stars, and the yearly cycle of the sun and calendar, was so fascinating that it must have been almost irresistible for some men to play god and make their own little universe.

It bears emphasizing that since the existence of such clockwork is the most sensitive barometer we have for the strength of the high scientific technology in a society, we must say that at this period in the Sung, the Chinese had reached a very remarkable level in the ratio of high technology to pure science. In East and West the technology. In the East, pure science was certainly not inconsiderable; the Chinese had done many things not yet achieved at that time in Europe. The West, on the other hand, had that special glory of high-powered mathematical astronomy that eventually dominated our scientific destiny.

The more recent events in the chronological development were beginning to fall into a pattern. It provided a whole range of clockwork before the clock, included a reasonable suggestion for the origin of the escapement, and united the previously separate provinces of water clocks, mechanical clocks, and astronomical proto-clocks. One might add that there resulted even more security in the supposition that this was no mere piece of antiquarian parochialism within a province of the history of technology or science. Rather it was an essential key that would lead ultimately from some beginning to an understanding of the whole world of fine mechanics and complicated machines that grew up during the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.

This should be a history with more structure than an almost independent linear series of great inventors and mechanics each with his own special problem. At this point, taking stock of the situation, I began to feel more puzzled about the historical origins of the whole process at the early end of the time scale. Although I felt sure in my bones that the initial motivation for divine astronomical models must have come from the complex Graeco-Babylonian astronomy in Hellenistic times, there seemed little to support the conjecture.

The astrolabe, it is true, was mentioned by Ptolemy and might well have been invented, in principle at least, by Hipparchus in the second century b. This is, however, a mechanically very simple device, though mathematically most ingenious.

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It consists merely of a special circular star-map that may be suitably revolved to show where the stars are at any time. What was needed as supporting data was some highly complex mechanical device from antiquity, preferably full of gear wheels and obviously constituting a precursor of the clock. But when one examines Greek mechanical devices critically in a hunt for clockwork, all the ingenuity and appearance of complexity seem to evaporate.

Almost our only sources for description of machinery are the writings of Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria, Vitruvius. For all the evidence of the use of gear wheels in simple pairs, there appeared not a single example of anything that we would regard as a complex machine. Perhaps the best is the taximeter or hodometer described by both Hero and Vitruvius, but this employed only pairs of gears in tandem to provide a very high ratio for speed reduction. It was a counter that indicated miles traveled by recording the number of revolutions made by a peg on the axle of a carriage or of a special paddle wheel hung over the side of a boat.

If this is the beginning of all clockwork, it is not very glorious, and frankly I hoped for something better, though at my ears was the solemn Judgment of the classicists that the Greeks were not interested in these degrading mechanic occupations. There are good authorities for this attitude, and it may be a reasonable consequence of the existence of slavery, as has often been noted. Thus the Greeks appeared to be interested in mechanics only for what mental gymnastics it could afford and preferred to pass silently over as much as possible of the low, everyday technology.

There was ground for hope, however, because Hero of Alexandria shows in his book on the Automaton Theater and in his Hydrostatics a certain schoolboy delight in ingenious trick devices. Though none of these devices uses anything mechanically more advanced than simple levers, strings, and, in a few odd instances, gears, here was the right attitude. This, however, in such weak form, could not be all there was to show for the great days of Greece.

At this point the winds of chance blew me to haven at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, in the company of a number of fine classicists, epigraphers, and archaeologists, as well as physicists and other scientists. In their company it seemed to be natural to bring out of cold storage the one piece of material evidence in this field. It had been considered exciting by all researchers but had hitherto been rejected by all because of difficulties so overpowering that it seemed hopeless to consider it anything but an oddity that we might some day approach when further material came to light.

This evidence was an object brought to the surface in the first and unexpected discovery in underwater archaeology in During that year, Greek sponge divers, driven by storm to anchor near the tiny island of Antikythera, below Kythera in the south of the Peloponnesus, came upon the wreck of a treasure ship.

Later research has shown that the ship, loaded with bronze and marble statues and other art objects, must have been wrecked about 65 b. Among the surviving art objects and the unrecognizable lumps of corroded bronze and pock-marked marble, there was one pitiably formless lump not noticed particularly when it was first hauled from the sea. Some time later, while drying out, it split into pieces, and the archaeologists on the job immediately recognized it as being of the greatest importance.

Within the lump were the remains of bronze plates to which adhered the remnants of many complicated gear wheels and engraved scales. Some of the plates were marked with barely recognizable inscriptions written in Greek characters of the first century b. Unfortunately, the effect of two thousand years of underwater decomposition was so great that debris from the corroded exterior hid nearly all of the internal detail of inscription and mechanical construction. In the absence of vital evidence, the available information was published; only rather uncertain and tentative speculation was possible about the nature of the device.

In the main, the experts agreed that we had here an important relic of a complex geared astronomical machine, but opinions differed about its analysis and any relation it might have to the astrolabe or to a sort of planetarium that Archimedes is said to have made. Several efforts were made by scholars during the first half of this century, but the matter remained inconclusive and had to stay that way until the painstakingly slow labors of the museum technicians had cleaned away enough debris from the fragments of bronze so that more inscription could be seen and more gear wheels measured.

With my new interest in astronomical machinery, and the facilities and help of the Institute at my disposal, I carefully re-examined a set of new photographs of the fragments which had kindly been provided for me a few years before by the Director of the National Archaeological Museum at Athens. Although a considerable cleaning of the fragments had been effected since the last publication of data, and the lettering and gearwork both seemed much clearer than before, they were not clear enough to make it possible to solve the three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of fitting frag ments together by relying on the photographs alone, and it was obvious that I would need to handle the fragments in order to get any further.

A grant from the American Philosophical Society made it possible for me to visit Athens that summer, and through capricious and fortunate circumstances, the assistance was available there of George Stamires, an epigrapher friend from the Institute, who helped me by masterly readings of the difficult inscriptions. The museum authorities were most cooperative, and it proved a none too arduous task to sketch all the interconnections and details of the wheels within the mechanism, measure everything that could be measured, and photograph every aspect of every little fragment.

So armed, I returned eventually to Princeton and to the jigsaw puzzle. Little by little the pieces fitted together until there resulted a fair idea of the nature and purpose of the machine and of the main character of the inscriptions with which it was covered. The original Antikythera mechanism must have borne remarkable resemblance to a good modern me-. It consisted of a wooden frame which supported metal plates front and back, each plate having quite complicated dials with pointers moving around them.

The whole device was about as large as a thick folio encyclopedia volume. Inside the box formed by frame and plates was a mechanism of gear wheels, some twenty of them at least, arranged in a non-obvious way and including differential gears and a crown wheel, the whole lot being mounted on an internal bronze plate. A shaft ran into the box from the side, and when this was turned all the pointers moved over their dials at various speeds.

The dial plates were protected by bronze doors hinged to them, and dials and doors carried the long inscriptions which described how the machine was to be operated. It appears that this was indeed designed as a computing machine that could work out and exhibit the motions of the sun and moon and probably also the planets. Exactly how it did it is not clear, but the evidence thus far suggests that it was quite different from all other planetary models. It was not like the more familiar planetarium or orrery, which shows the planets moving around at their various speeds, but much more like a mechanization of the purely arithmetical Babylonian methods.

One just read the dials in accordance with the instructions, and legends on the dials indicated which astronomical phenomena would be happening at any particular time. The antiquarian detail of this investigation proved particularly exciting. It was possible from the calendar inscribed on one of the dials to deduce the possibility that the mechanism had been constructed in 87 b. Thus it seems likely that it was not more than thirty years old, certainly no antique, when put aboard the ship.

Almost certain too is the evidence that this was no navigating device used on board ship, as once had been thought; it was, rather, a valuable art object taken, like the rest of the treasure, as booty or as merchandise. More important was the observation that certain technical details of the construction—the shape of the gear teeth and the general character of the design of gear trains— showed significantly close affinity with the series of medieval Islamic and European proto-clocks, the specimens of astrolabes and equatoria, that had already been attested.

Clearly the Greek machine must be neither a freak nor an isolated specimen. It is the first specimen in the line and the hoary primeval ancestor of all clocks, calculating machines, and other abstruse fine mechanical devices. The existence of this most complex Antikythera mechanism necessarily changes all our ideas about the nature of Greek high technology.

We no longer need believe the expressions of a distaste for manual labor but may regard them merely as a very human personal preference of those philosophers whose tastes were otherwise inclined. Hero and Vitruvius should be looked upon as chance survivors that may not by any means be as representative as hitherto assumed. The problem, in essence, seems rather like that of the little green men who might come from space in a. Perhaps, considering the Parthenon, we might grant them ruins of a few buildings in academic gothic and a sprinkling of Frank Lloyd Wright.

But this, notwithstanding, is what we habitually do for ancient civilization. Greek writers did not have the tradition of writing about their machines and sciences unless such writings could constitute a monument of thought? Whatever the reason for the unexpected volte-face after centuries of classical scholarship, we must live with it. In its narrowest implications at least, within the field of clockwork and origins of high technology, the picture now makes much better sense and presents less anomaly.

No longer do we need seek some historical reason for the fact that the Chinese built their great clocktowers while the Greeks with more scientific advance in astronomical theory did so little mechanically. The reasonable and expected balance has been found, but the price paid for it must be an antedating of the problem.

An object so incredibly complex as the Antikythera mechanism cannot possibly have been the first of its line.. More probably its existence lends substance to the bare information we have from Cicero and others about a planetary model made by Archimedes. If true, this is assuredly near the source of the Hellenistic trail that stands at the entrance to the world of scientific machinery.

With three lucky occasions reported, there remains one half-gust of fortune to tell. In , while I was working on the medieval texts dealing with Islamic clocks and machines in this series, a footnote in a modem book revealed to me that one of these clocks still survived some years ago in its original setting, in a high room in the minaret of Karaouyin University mosque in the city of Fez in Morocco. Being at that time in Washington, I happened to meet one of the ministers from the Moroccan Embassy and mentioned the matter to him.

In due time, there arrived a set of photographs of this room and full permission to be one of the first of the unbelievers to be permitted to have access to it and to study its contents. To my surprise, the photographs showed that the old clock appeared to be quite intact in its original state from the fourteenth century. It even indicated the same hour as the other timepieces in the collection! It is, in fact, the oldest working clock in the world.

Furthermore, its design, never completely described in print or by any travelers, appeared to be in keeping with everything belonging to a conservative tradition of astronomical water clocks harking back to Hellenistic times, possibly prior to the Antikythera mechanism.

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