Golden Records (1977)
You’re probably already familiar with the Golden Records—of which there are two, one aboard each of the Voyager probes, currently traveling through interstellar space. The records were sent in anticipation of the possibility that the crafts could be intercepted by an extraterrestrial intelligence, and so naturally they contain information about earth and humanity, as well as general scientific and mathematical information that an alien intelligence might be able to recognize. My favorite part is the map in the bottom left, which shows the location of our solar system relative to the nearest parsecs (see here for instructions for reading this map), so that the aliens that someday recover the record will be able to visit whatever remains of humanity.
But even if you’re familiar with the Golden Records, you might not be familiar with all of the content they contain. For instance, have you ever listened to this horrifying track titled “Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter?” And, have you ever seen this photo, currently traveling through interstellar space, waiting to be deciphered by alien intelligences?:
Antikythera Mechanism (circa 2nd century BC)
The Antikythera Mechanism, often described as the world’s oldest computer, is a marvel of ancient engineering—a device constructed out of a few dozen bronze gears for the purpose of computing the movements of the sun and moon, and predicting solar eclipses (by the way—in case you haven’t consulted your computing mechanism lately—there will be an eclipse in North America this year).
The remains of the device were recovered from a shipwreck in 1901, but its purpose and complexity weren’t fully understood until computer-aided reconstructions a hundred years later. A device of similar complexity does not exist in the archaeological record until the 14th century, making it quite ahead of its time, but, as far as we can tell, it does not actually provide time travel capabilities.
Whenever I come across something like this I begin to think about how in modern times we create marvelous mechanisms motivated by money—not there’s anything really wrong with that, but the engineer who created the Antikythera Mechanism was motivated by something very different. What was the meaning of the eclipse to him—what meaning so compelling that he undertook this incredible labor? What was it like to be such a person in such an age, enraptured by these cosmic meanings?
K.8538 (circa 7th century BC)
I can’t remember when or where I first became aware of this artifact, but since that day I have had a hard time learning more about it. You will see it referred to by various names, as there is confusion about its origin and contents, but the only official name for it is its identification number in the British Museum (where it is currently housed): K.8538.
It’s a cuneiform star chart, most likely created around the 7th century B.C. (the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, where the object was found, contains tens of thousands of clay tablets dating to that period). What’s so fascinating about is that we can run digital mechanisms—mechanisms like that of Antikythera, only freed from any bronze body—in reverse, to determine the point in time corresponding to the locations of the stars depicted on K.8538. The trouble is I can’t find out for certain whether the night sky depicted on the object is one from around the time it was created (around 7th century B.C.) or a couple thousand years earlier, which would make it quite an incredible object indeed.
Because if you do a Google search for any of this object’s many names, you will be met with results almost unanimously reporting that the tablet depicts the night sky from around 3,000 B.C. The claim is that although the tablet was created in the 7th century B.C., it is actually a copy of observations made by an astronomer over a thousand years earlier. Furthermore, this theory claims that these copied observations include the details of a massive asteroid event that is supposed to have occurred the same night. Some of these accounts of the tablet seem credible: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Say the originators of the theory: “We hypothesize K8538 as being the source for the tales of Genesis (Tower of Babel, the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the parting of the Red Sea, the Egyptian plagues, Exodus).”
This theory has been thoroughly criticized: 1, 2, 3, 4 (as it often goes with Google results, this perspective is available only through the ever useful Reddit comment section). But the criticisms of the theory mostly have to do with the asteroid impact itself, not the date of the night sky depicted. So the impact theory is almost certainly false, but the possibility that the tablet depicts a night sky from 3,000 B.C. is only probably false, so far as I am able to gather from Google sleuthing.
What’s particularly strange about this to me is that there is no dedicated page for, or in fact even any reference to, the object on English Wikipedia. (On instances of Wikipedia in other languages, it appears that there are a couple references to the object, on pages from what I can guess are about magic and witchcraft, but of course I cannot be sure, because I can’t read them—I can only infer from the images.)
The official page for K.8538 on the British Museum Website only calls the object “tablet” (lowercase sic), and while there is no mention of an asteroid impact and it does say that it depicts the night sky of 3-4 January 650 B.C., I did notice that the description section is truncated:
Section of a sphere or instrument for astrological calculations. The flat side is inscribed with mathematical figures and descrip
And the “curator’s comments” section says, “For comment on the interpretation of the text and identification of the constellations see Koch 1989.” Cryptic, if you ask me, but—1989? 1989 was a long time ago in the age of computers. If that’s the horizon of the official knowledge on the tablet, then it almost certainly needs updating. Most of the articles I have been able to find about the tablet say that it was only translated with the aid of computers in 2008.
Nebra Sky Disc (circa 16th century BC)
The Nebra Sky Disc is a bronze disc depicting the sun and the moon and a number of stars, including the Pleiades. It was discovered, along with several other artifacts, by a couple of amateur treasure hunters in Germany using unlicensed metal detectors. They sold off their booty, which probably then changed hands in the black market a few times, until the authorities caught wind of the treasure and recovered it in a police raid. The looters were traced and jailed, but they reduced their sentence through a plea bargain in which they promised to show authorities the site of their discovery, which allowed for the verification of the authenticity of the disc.
Some experts have suggested that the presence of the Pleiades near a crescent moon indicates that the Germanic druids used a rule for synchronizing the solar calendar with the lunar calendar, which is separately recorded in a Babylonian compendium of astronomical knowledge, stating that a leap month should be added when the Pleiades are near a crescent moon in the spring, which happens approximately every three years—a technology very much like our leap day (another astronomical event taking place this year, by the way).
For that and several other reasons, the Nebra Sky Disc has been called “one of the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century.” There’s a replica of it aboard the International Space Station, and one of the people who worked on the Golden Records said that their design was inspired in part by the Nebra Sky Disc.
Phaistos Disc (circa 18th century BC)
The Phaistos Disc is a clay disk, about 6 inches in diameter, inscribed on both sides with glyphs in a spiral pattern. While the exact date of its creation is debated, it is without a doubt incredibly old. It was discovered in the main underground chamber of an ancient Minoan palace, buried under earth, ash, and burnt cow bones.
The symbols on the Phaistos Disc have not been observed anywhere else—it is the only known example of its script. In fact, it bears almost no resemblance to any other known ancient script. This makes it almost impossible to translate. Despite plenty of analysis and countless deciphering attempts, we can only guess at what it says. Suggestions have been made that the disc is a prayer, a game, or a geometric theorem, but there is no particular evidence for any of these.
The inscription consists of 242 instances of 45 unique symbols in a construction that appears non-random: the symbol distribution frequency is a bit Zipf-y, some pairs of symbols are more common than others, the text is divided into “words” and some scholars suggest there is further organization into “paragraphs” or sentences, six individual words occur twice, one three-word sequence appears twice… other interesting statistical properties abound, but perhaps what’s most curious is the way the writing follows a spiral pattern, which means it is meant to be read by turning it, not unlike a record.