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Athens Owns a 2,000-Year-Old Computer That Nobody Noticed for a Year

Greece has about 120 million olive trees.

The population is roughly 10.4 million. That works out at eleven or twelve trees per Greek. Around 450,000 families depend on olive oil as a primary or secondary source of income. Olive oil accounts for about 9% of the value of the country's entire agricultural output, 2–3% of all its exports, and 20% of its food exports.

Now for the statistic everybody repeats, which is where this gets interesting.

You will read constantly that Greeks consume more olive oil per person than anyone on Earth — usually given as 20 litres a year, sometimes 24. More than five gallons each. It is a wonderful figure and it is everywhere.

The International Olive Council, which is the body that actually measures this, put Greek per capita consumption at 9.3 kilograms in its March 2025 statistics. The European Commission had it at 17.9 kg back in 2011/12. A Greek specialist olive oil publication estimates just over seven litres for the 2025–26 crop year — two litres less than two years earlier — and says plainly that Greeks may no longer use more olive oil per person than anyone else, whatever they did in the past.

So the honest version is: Greece is still first or near it, the number is falling fast, and the figure in wide circulation is roughly two to three times the current measured one.

For scale, Americans consume around one litre a year. Even the deflated Greek figure is seven times that.

The clock: Athens has previous experience of a famous object taking a long time to be read correctly.

In 1900, sponge divers found a Roman shipwreck off Antikythera. Among the bronzes they raised was a corroded lump, which sat ignored for about a year until, in May 1902, the archaeologist Valerios Stais noticed a gear wheel inside it.

It turned out to be a geared astronomical computer built around 150–100 BC. It took until 2005, and CT scanning, to reveal thousands of Greek characters hidden inside the corrosion — effectively an instruction manual, unread for two thousand years.

Athens is not a city that rushes to a final figure.

In 1900, sponge divers from the island of Symi were on their way to North Africa when a storm forced them to shelter off Antikythera, a rocky islet between Crete and the Peloponnese. They went down to look around and found a Roman-era shipwreck at about 45 metres, scattered with bronze and marble statues.

The Greek government organised a salvage. Over the next year it recovered spectacular things — the Antikythera Ephebe, the Philosopher's Head, amphorae, jewellery, glass — and all of it went to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Also recovered was a corroded lump of bronze roughly the size of a large book. Nobody looked at it closely. It sat in a corner of the museum.

On 17 May 1902, the archaeologist Valerios Stais noticed that the lump had dried out and split, and that there was a toothed gear wheel inside it.

The Antikythera mechanism was built around 150–100 BC. It is a hand-cranked bronze calculator, and it is the oldest known analogue computer on Earth. It tracked the sun and moon, reproduced the Moon's irregular motion using an off-centre gear and a pin, predicted solar and lunar eclipses through the Saros cycle, ran the 19-year Metonic calendar, showed the positions of the five planets known in antiquity, and counted down the four-year cycle of the Panhellenic games, the Olympics among them.

Only about a third of it survives, now in 82 fragments, including 30 corroded gearwheels. The largest gear had 223 teeth, each one filed by hand.

Nothing of comparable mechanical complexity would appear anywhere on Earth for roughly 1,400 years.

And there was one more thing inside. When high-resolution CT scanning was applied in 2005, it revealed thousands of tiny Greek characters engraved among the gears — an instruction manual, written into the bronze, unread for two thousand years.

The clock: you are currently using a device that tells you the time in cities around the world, tracks sunrise and sunset, and follows the phase of the moon.

So did that one. It was made of bronze, it fitted in a wooden box, you turned it with a handle, and it went down with a merchant ship two thousand years ago and lay on the seabed until some sponge divers got caught in bad weather.

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