The antikythera mechanism. Thoughts?

We really know very little about what this thing is, but we know a few things with relative confidence.

1. We know it was found in the Mediterranean off a Greek island.
2. We know almost every society at this time didn't have to knowledge to perform this type of advanced star tracking/prediction
3. We know it's a unique artefact

All of these things suggest that either it was sent from somewhere else as highly prized cargo, or that these things were everywhere in Greece and none survived for some reason. You decide which is more probable.

Perhaps how literate you think the ancient population was is wrong, they weren't all tribal and there are many things lost to time that we can't get back look at Ötzi for example, an ancient man who traveled and traded. How could he trade without the merchants in the town having literacy, how could they keep their accounts? In my opinion something quick and easy like clay or a small stone to chip lines into and dispose of once used. Of course trade is a broad term exists on many levels but for accounting to take place you must have literate men. The ancient peoples had scrolls, paintings, weapons, armor and schematics for weapons and creating casts to forge said weapons; and even perhaps similar building techniques from all the circular structures we see that they've built, though admittedly a circle seems just a natural human thing to make.
The things our ancient ancestors have accomplished go far beyond what we naively believe today.

go back to /x/

we actually know almost all of its inner workings

You raise very good points and all of them are true, however true for relatively simple technology where the interpreters would have some root understanding of how it's supposed to work.
With something this complex there is no way to decipher the technical jargon for concepts that didn't exist to them.
For example this is the very earliest example of gears and gear teeth by thousands of years. Yes it's possible for them to reverse engineer it, but first they would actually have to discover and conceptualize what a gear even is and how it works. People who have NEVER seen or made one before, and that's just a single thing. They would have conceptualize dozens of entirely new technologies that they have never even thought of before, in fact there's no evidence that ANYONE thought of besides the creators of this mechanism for thousands of years.
That's just to understand how it works, let alone learn the manufacturing techniques to recreate a new one.
So then you must question, if they were capable of reverse engineer it, then why did gears etc still not show up in the technological record?
WE do, but everyone else when it was manufactured had never even thought about using gears, and continued to not think of or use them all the way up til the industrial revolution.

Are there other cool mysterious topics you can type about?

Theres the one about the ancient screw and pipe system like that of cable wiring?

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Check out Clickspring on youtube. He is building an Antikythera device using as close to the technology of the time (Ancient Greece/Rome). He talks a lot about what it was for.

lmfao

Sorry user, I'm at the tail end of a 30hour schizo bender and the voices are just about to let me sleep I think, but they when I saw this thread they forced me up to write up a proper response.
I know a bit about Archimedes screw and it's certainly interesting (Baghdad battery is also noteworthy), but it doesn't break the continuity of technology/ideas like the antikythera mechanism does, there is some parental route of ideas you can follow that maintains a continuous thread. These other technologies could be and were developed over time for new uses.
When some artifact is found that breaks this continuity, the most important thing to ask yourself is WHY the tech never got further developed. If you try to fill in the blanks like some anons ITT are doing and run with the Kurzgesagt mindset that ancient humans were just as smart and could figure anything out that we could - and yes they were as smart - you still need to ask, if they COULD decipher how gears and all the other stuff in the mechanism worked, then why didn't they use it to create weapons, industrial machines, new and better tech? How did gear technology jump straight from extremely basic chariot wheels to a full blown analogue computer with nothing more practical like weapons in between, or even after?
Archimedes DID use his engineering knowledge to build incredible weapons. He worked for many different military forces as a seige engineer and built some truly crazy shit (pic rel).

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And the answer to why it didn't get developed into weapons comes back to Because the Antikythera mechanism was one of a kind and extremely valuable, as were it's manufacturers to an ever larger extent. Because these things were't mass produced and plans couldn't just be spread everywhere. Building a single one may have taken multiple cumulative lifetimes of the smartest people living at the time. You can't just go back to the factory and get the workers to make a new one.