Pontic Olbia Sardinia gear claimed as Archimedes' lost astronomical machine

November 01, 2026UkraineTechnologyShare

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Key facts

• Around the 1st century BC Cicero wrote about a device attributed to Archimedes.
• In 212 BC the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus captured and sacked Syracuse during the Second Punic War and took two of Archimedes' mechanical spheres to Rome: a solid globe and a mechanical planetarium that reproduced the movements of the Sun, Moon and planets with a single turn.
• In 166 BC the Roman astronomer Gaius Sulpicius Gallus saw the device at the house of Marcellus's family.
• Cicero also described an orrery built by his friend Posidonius, a Stoic philosopher, that accurately tracked the Sun, Moon and five planets.
• Besides the Antikythera mechanism, the only physical evidence cited is a fragmentary 5th or 6th century AD Byzantine geared calendar sundial with a moon disk and gear train, held by the Science Museum in London.
• In 2006 archaeologists pulled a tiny, heavily corroded tooth wheel from the ground at Pontic Olbia in Sardinia.
• Engineer Giovanni Pastore claimed the gear was ancient and belonged to an astronomical machine, most likely the lost mechanical sphere of Archimedes, but the video notes he had no proof for that claim.
• Historian Alexander Jones argues the gear may simply have entered an older archaeological layer later, so its findspot does not establish when or why it was made, and it cannot be confidently identified as part of an astronomical machine.
• No further machines were found at Pontic Olbia after the 2006 discovery, leaving the Antikythera mechanism as the only confirmed example.

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