Indiana Jones 5: Does the Dial of Destiny Really Exist?

In December 2022, Indiana Jones 5 finally revealed its title: The Dial of Destiny! The trailer also revealed the design of this strange artifact that was central to the plot of the new film. After the Ark of the Alliance, the Sankara Stones, the Holy Grail or the Crystal Skull, this 5th opus of Indy’s adventures presents a new object that will appeal to all desires!

Like its predecessors, Dial of Destiny takes inspiration from the real world and adds a supernatural aura to it. In the movie it is also called Antikythera and was invented by Archimedes himself, the scientist who discovered the famous “thrust”.

As mentioned above, indie intrigue has always been inspired by real legends and beliefs, be it the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail or the Crystal Skull. This Dial of Destiny is also based on a real artifact: the Antikythera Machine. Researchers have made several assumptions about the identity of the real designer of this car.

Therefore, the most likely hypothesis is Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 BC), the father of static mechanics. A disciple of a famous physicist could also have been its inventor, like Hipparchus of Nicaea (-190 to -120), the founder of trigonometry, or Posidonius of Rhodes (135 to 51 BC).

Also called the Antikythera Mechanism, it is considered the first ancient analog computer. The object made it possible to calculate astronomical positions. It is a bronze mechanism consisting of dozens of wheels, united and arranged on several planes. You can read Greek inscriptions on it.

A copy of this device was discovered in 1901 in ruins near the Greek island of Antikythera, located between Kythera and Crete. The ruins of Antikythera were Roman galleys dating back to 1000 BC. 87 years earlier.

“Observations revealed that the ship was a Roman gallery believed to have sunk in a storm over 2,000 years ago, carrying with it numerous amphorae, statues, coins and other miscellaneous items.”explains Journal of Geo.

This machine is the oldest known mechanism. Its fragments are kept in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

Also called “the first computer”, the discovery of this mechanism challenged the historical knowledge of Greek science. The complexity of this device and the meticulous accuracy of its realization is unique in this period (87 BC).

It will take almost a thousand years for mechanisms of the same order to appear. In 1905, the German philologist Albert Rehm was the first to know that it was an astronomical calculator.

“Our work reveals the Antikythera Mechanism as a brilliant design that turns a remarkable piece of engineering into an ingenious device. It challenges all of our preconceptions about the technological capabilities of the ancient Greeks.”A team of researchers from University College London (UCL) writes in the journal scientific reports.

Note that this dial is also reminiscent of a certain alethiometer, a kind of compass that indicates the truth for each question asked. It appears in the Crossroads trilogy by author Philip Pullman.