The shipwreck that produced the Antikythera mechanism was discovered in April 1900 by sponge divers under the command of Dimitrios Kontos, who had taken shelter from a Mediterranean storm in the lee of the small Greek island of Antikythera, north of Crete, on their way home from a sponge-diving expedition off the Tunisian coast. One of his divers, Elias Stadiatis, made a routine inspection of the seabed at the anchorage and surfaced agitatedly with a report of “a heap of dead men and horses.” The crew dropped a second diver, brought up a single bronze arm to verify Stadiatis’s report, and on returning to mainland Greece reported the find to the Greek Antiquities Service. The first state recovery operation began in November 1900 and continued for ten months.
The mechanism — the geared bronze planetary computer that has subsequently dominated the wreck’s reputation — was one of the last items brought up. It was identified as a possible mechanical device by Valerios Stais, the Antiquities Service curator who unpacked the recovered material in May 1902. The wider archaeological community took most of the 20th century to accept that it was what it appeared to be.
The mechanism was not the only thing on the ship. The 1900-1901 recovery operations brought up, in addition to the corroded bronze fragment that would later be identified as the mechanism, an extraordinary assemblage of high-quality late Hellenistic sculpture, luxury goods, and decorative material. Most of it has been on permanent display at the Greek National Archaeological Museum in Athens since 1903.
The Antikythera Youth
The single most prominent recovered sculpture is the Antikythera Youth (Antikythera Ephebe) — a 1.96-metre bronze statue of a naked young man with his right arm extended forward, recovered in fragments and partially reconstructed at the Athens museum in 1903 and again, with substantially improved technique, in 1953. The figure is widely dated to approximately 340-330 BC, in the late classical Greek tradition between Polykleitos and the early Hellenistic schools. The figure’s identity is contested. The right hand was holding something — possibly an apple (in which case the figure is Paris, holding the apple of judgment), possibly a discus, possibly a small spherical object that has not been preserved. The face is unusually individuated for the period and is sometimes treated as an early example of Greek portrait sculpture.
The figure was almost certainly hundreds of years old at the time of the shipwreck. Its appearance on a cargo ship of approximately 60 BC suggests that the ship was carrying recovered antiques — probably looted Greek sculptures being transported west to the Italian luxury market of the late Roman Republic. The cargo’s contents are broadly consistent with the late-Republican Roman fashion for collecting (and routinely stealing) earlier Greek art.
The Antikythera Philosopher
A second major bronze recovered in 1900 is the head of an elderly, bearded, intense-looking man, conventionally called the Antikythera Philosopher since the early 20th century. The head is approximately life-size, dates to approximately 240 BC (on stylistic grounds), and may be a portrait — though of whom is not known. The Philosopher has been variously identified by 20th-century scholars as Bias of Priene, as the Cynic philosopher Antisthenes, as a generic Stoic figure, and as a specific (but unidentifiable) Hellenistic intellectual.
The Philosopher’s body was not recovered. The head was probably attached to a now-lost herm or full-figure bronze, and was probably broken off either at the original Greek site (during the antiquity-collecting raid that supplied the ship’s cargo) or in the wreck itself.
Marble cargo
The 1900 recovery operation also brought up substantial fragments of marble sculpture — far less artistically distinguished than the bronzes, mostly of 1st-century BC Italian-market workshop quality. The Italian-market marbles included multiple Aphrodites, multiple Hercules figures, a particularly degraded Apollo, and several smaller portrait busts and decorative architectural elements. The marble cargo has the appearance of a 1st-century BC Greek workshop’s bulk shipment to a Roman luxury-goods importer — substantially less interesting archaeologically than the looted Greek classics that made up the rest of the cargo, but substantially more commercially representative of late-Hellenistic Greek-Italian art trade.
Glass and jewellery
The cargo also included approximately 50 substantial pieces of Hellenistic glassware (most of which has subsequently been used as a comparative type-collection for dating other late Hellenistic Mediterranean glass finds), a substantial quantity of jewellery (a gold ring with a carved emerald, several silver brooches, a number of bronze appliqués), and several thousand ceramic amphorae of the standard late-Hellenistic Greek wine-and-oil shipping type. The amphorae’s stamps and types have been used to refine the wreck’s date — the conventional 60 BC dating is based on these amphora stamps.
The Cousteau dives
The Antikythera wreck has been re-investigated multiple times since 1900. Jacques Cousteau dived the site in 1953 and again in 1976, in the latter case with substantial Greek government archaeological support. Cousteau’s 1976 expedition recovered additional bronze fragments (including small portions of the Antikythera mechanism that had been missed in 1900), several smaller statues, and substantial additional amphora material.
Greek and international underwater-archaeology teams have re-investigated the site continuously since the early 2010s, using progressively more advanced remotely-operated technology. The 2014-2019 RPM Nautical Foundation campaign, with substantial Greek state archaeological collaboration, recovered approximately 50 additional individual finds, including a complete bronze spear, a marble bull’s head, and several previously unrecognized bronze gears from the mechanism. The 2022 expedition recovered what appears to be a substantial portion of the ship’s hull, preserved by the deep anaerobic seabed conditions of the wreck site.
The total number of objects recovered from the wreck since 1900 is approximately 300. The substantial majority have never been on public display. The Athens National Archaeological Museum’s Antikythera Hall — opened in 2012 — displays approximately a quarter of the recovered material in a single room that runs through the most consequential finds: the Youth, the Philosopher, the major marbles, the glass, the amphorae, and the heavily-reconstructed fragments of the mechanism.
The mechanism is at one end of the hall. It is small, dark green, almost unrecognisable as a manufactured object. Visitors stand in front of it for an average of about ninety seconds, by the museum’s recorded foot-traffic data. The Antikythera Youth is at the other end of the hall. He is approximately two metres tall, polished, and luminous green-bronze. Visitors stand in front of him for an average of about four minutes. He has been on display in Athens for approximately a century and a quarter and has not, in that time, ever been the most famous object in the room.