Original subtitles

- [Narrator] Athens, a city of passion

and philosophy and at its heart,

a museum with secrets dark and strange.

Ancient high technology,

sacred transcendental visions,

a scourge of the seas and a descent

into the lair of a monster.

Secrets hidden in plain sight

inside the National Archeological Museum of Athens.

(anxious music)

The legacy of the Athenians

is literally rock solid.

Proclaimed by the ancient limestone

of the Acropolis.

The world would be a very different place

without Athens' contribution to philosophy,

drama, and democracy.

But in 480 B.C., this legacy was nearly erased.

The Persian empire set out to destroy the city

and this too, is written in stone.

The inscription is lengthy

but the gist is simple.

Abandon the city.

Women and children flee,

all men to the oars.

It speaks of fear and also

of Athens' secret weapon.

The tablet is known

as the Decree of Themistocles.

- Themistocles, I think,

is the most interesting person in Greek history,

uh, and, uh, probably the most foresighted.

- [Narrator] Themistocles realized

that the Persian Empire

was eager to capture Greece.

They had tried before and he was sure

they would try again.

Unlike Persia, Athens was a democracy.

In the public forum, Themistocles advocated

for a new weapon.

- He was fairly skillful politician

but he was definitely a statesman

in terms of building up Athens with the fleet.

- [Narrator] Themistocles convinced

his fellow citizens to pay for 200 warships

just like this full-sized replica.

The design is called a trireme

named for its three banks of oars.

They powered the trireme's primary weapon,

a bronze tipped battering ram.

Themistocles suspected the fleet

would have to be built quickly.

The Persian king Xerxes was determined

to defeat the stubborn city states.

- So they amass this huge army

and a fleet to go with it.

Most of the Greek city states

had already either given up

and gone over to the Persian side

or just submitted in every way they could.

- [Narrator] When the Persians attacked

at Thermopylae, a few brave Greeks

led by the Spartans dared to face them.

The museum has arrows from this famous battle,

which cut down the Spartan soldiers

to the last man.

When Xerxes marched into Athens,

he set the city alight.

But thanks to Themistocles' decree,

the people were gone.

The Greek leaders now argued

about what to do next.

- The leader of Sparta says to Themistocles,

"You don't have the right to talk.

"You don't have a city anymore.

"Look, Athens is burning."

And Themistocles said,

"But I have 200 ships.

"And those ships are going

"to give me back Athens city."

- [Narrator] The 200 triremes were ready for battle.

But would they be a match

for 1,000 Persian warships?

Themistocles needed to even the odds.

In a sea south of Athens,

there is a narrow passage of water

called the Strait of Salamis.

A tight squeeze for the Persian fleet

but a potential opportunity for the Athenians.

Themistocles sent an agent to Xerxes' camp

with orders to lie to the Persian king

claiming that the Greek navy was about

to escape through the Strait of Salamis.

Xerxes took the bait.

At sunrise, the legendary battle began.

- Where we are standing, Xerxes,

the king of kings, the ruler of Persia,

was following the battle.

You have 250,000 men

on about 1,000 ships

so it's an enormous battle.

When the Persian ships started maneuvering,

they were so large

that one started colliding with the next.

At no moment could the Persians

use all their ships.

- [Narrator] Persians sailed to the Strait of Salamis

right where the Athenians wanted them.

- The Greek triremes were smaller

than the Persian but they were faster

and had a better maneuverability.

- [Narrator] You may think that Athens' secret weapon

was the trireme's battering ram.

But battering rams are only as powerful

as the muscle behind them.

This trireme replica has

a theoretical top speed of nine knots.

That's the velocity required

to break through a thick wooden hull.

The Greeks will lose the battle

if they can't reach ramming speed.

- The Greek rowers were free men.

They look toward the southeast

and they see their town burning.

Those are free citizens who are fighting

for their homes.

- [Narrator] We know the free Athenians rode

well enough because history records a defeat

that cost the Persians dearly.

The battered Persian fleet sailed away,

never to return.

And king Xerxes beat a nasty retreat,

his empire put to shame by a democratic city.

Athens' legacy would live on.

Her secret weapon was freedom.

And what of Themistocles?

Hailed as a hero, a few years later,

many feared his growing influence.

Some even plotted against him.

- The Athenians had a system whereby

they not only allotted or elected officials

but they could unelect them.

And they had a yearly opportunity

to get rid of somebody.

They brought with them an ostracon,

which is the Greek word for a broken piece of pottery,

and on that broken piece of pottery

they scratched the name of the person

they thought was a problem.

The man with the most votes lost

and he was exiled for 10 years

and that was thought to calm down

any anti-democratic leanings he might have.

- [Narrator] Themistocles' fate

would be decided by a free vote.

Free, but not necessarily fair.

Recently, researchers discovered

that on all of these ostraca,

the name Themistocles is written in the same hand.

The vote was rigged.

- It's either discouraging or encouraging

to know that dirty politics

go right back to fifth century Athens

and it's kind of the equivalent

of the hanging chads in Florida

to tell George Bush get elected.

- [Narrator] When the votes were counted,

Themistocles was banished from the very city

he had saved.

Even a democracy strong enough

to defeat an empire

can be tarnished by those

who would subvert it from within.

Next on Museum Secrets,

the man behind the golden mask.

When one enters the National

Archeological Museum of Athens,

the first challenge is separating

legend and reality.

This is the statue of a real man

while this woman never was.

Sometimes it's easy to spot a myth

and sometimes, not so much.

And then there is this delicately tooled face

of the finest gold.

Where he fits on the scale

from legend to real is a museum secret.

For the moment, we'll call him

what the museum calls him,

the Mask of Agamemnon.

3,000 years ago, the poet Homer wrote of Agamemnon

in his saga of the Trojan war.

After the Trojans are fooled

by a gift horse filled with Greek soldiers,

King Agamemnon leads the Greeks

to a glorious and bloody victory.

But by the 19th century, most scholars agreed

that Homer's tales were fiction.

One of the few dissenters

was a German businessman and amateur archeologist

named Heinrich Schliemann.

- He believed firmly in Homer

and then he pursued his dream

to uncover the world of the Homeric epics.

- [Narrator] Schliemann predicted

the real city of Troy

would be found in Turkey.

He was right.

His discovery astounded the world.

But as he dug deep for Trojan artifacts,

he destroyed more recent layers.

Archeologists were horrified.

Then he made off with Trojan gold

after using it to dress his wife up

as Helen of Troy.

- In February 1874, Schliemann

actually proceeded to use

the same illegal stratagem

that he had used at Troy in 1870.

That is, without notifying the Greek authorities,

he came out to Mycenae allegedly for survey

but truly, in reality, to excavate.

- [Narrator] Schliemann went to Mycenae to prove

that the hero of the Trojan war

was just as real as Troy itself.

Mycenae is where Homer said

King Agamemnon ruled.

- We are now approaching the main gate

of the citadel of Mycenae built

in the middle of the 13th century.

It's one of the few landmarks that remained

standing throughout Mycenae's history

and became its trademark of course.

- [Narrator] Within sight of the famous gate,

in the Mycenaen graveyard, Schliemann believed

he would find the remains of Agamemnon.

- So now we're inside grave circle A.

The grave circle that Schliemann discovered in 1876.

All the shaft graves were maximum depth

about four meters.

They built the burial chamber

at the bottom of the shaft

and in some cases then, they would post

a funeral stele to mark the spot.

- [Narrator] These grave markers,

now in the museum,

hinted at treasure underground.

Schliemann began to dig.

- Whenever he saw a later wall then

he just demolished it as he did at Troy.

He demolished it and went down

to the prehistoric levels if he recognized them.

- [Narrator] Horrified by Schliemann's methods,

the Greek government assigned him a minder

named Panagiotis Stamatakis.

- Stamatakis of course had different instructions

and came from a different school of archeology

or from a school of archeology, full stop,

try to oppose that and next morning

he would arrive at the site

and the wall or the building gone.

Stamatakis had to accept insult upon insult.

Schliemann treated the man with utter contempt.

He described him as an insignificant,

poor government clerk who's bent

on impeding Mr. Schliemann's pioneering researches

for the greater glory of Greece.

- [Narrator] Before long, as at Troy,

Schliemann's unorthodox methods

produced stunning results.

- [Iphiyenia] There is a bull's head wrought in silver

and plated with gold.

There is the golden lion head,

golden masks, precious rings and objects,

one after the other.

- [Narrator] Then Schliemann announced

he had found the death mask of Agamemnon.

Not an artist's depiction of a legend

but the real face of a real man.

- In ecstasy, he said, he lifted

the gold mask and kissed it.

- [Narrator] Schliemann received acclaim

for proving Homer's Agamemnon

was fact, not fiction.

The mask took pride of place at the museum

amid other treasures of Mycenae

but for some modern scholars,

the mask of Agamemnon has become

the focal point of doubt.

They ask, why does it look

so different from the other masks?

Why is it the only mask with facial hair?

And some notice that the mustache resembles

a style popular among Schliemann's contemporaries,

19th century Germans.

Scholarly papers began to use words like fraud.

But then, as the reality's scale tipped

from real to legend, to fake,

a researcher discovered the unpublished diaries

of Schliemann's minder, Panagiotis Stamatakis.

A man with no reason

to bolster Schliemann's reputation,

he says he watched as Schliemann

unearthed a mask of gold,

more beautiful than all the others.

- Stamatakis' diaries offer us an eye witness

which we don't have until now.

We know now that he was there,

he saw the mask and he described it.

So there is no way that this is a forgery.

- [Narrator] Today, researchers believe

the mask is actually 300 years too old

to belong to Agamemnon.

With his reckless methods,

Schliemann had dug up the wrong king.

But that's not the end of the story.

This is Schliemann's home in Athens.

It's decorated with the symbol

that has become synonymous with evil.

The swastika is an ancient design

that Schliemann noticed on artifacts

he found in Troy.

After his discovery, some influential Germans

came to believe that the Trojans were a white race

that was the source of the German bloodline.

Homer's legend of the Trojan war

became mixed up with bits of history.

It was through Schliemann that the swastika

made its way to the National Socialist Party

and his belief that Agamemnon was a real man

who led his people to victory

became part of the Nazi mythology.

And so our tale ends with a caution.

Bad things can happen

when legends are tangled up with history.

Up next, the secret of the labyrinth.

Some of the treasures

in the National Archeological Museum

are best seen at night.

In the dark, one may discover

terrifying creatures.

Like this one.

Half man, half bull, all monster.

This is the original genetically modified

super villain, the Minotaur.

He lurked in a dark labyrinth

below the palace of kind Minos.

All who tried to slay him got lost in the maze.

The Minotaur vanquished them

and consigned them to the pit of his stomach.

But then came a hero named Theseus

whose clever girlfriend Ariadne

made him bring along a ball of thread.

Theseus killed the Minotaur

and followed the thread

back into the light.

Of course, the Minotaur and his labyrinth

are just a dark fantasy.

Or are they?

In 1900, on the Island of Crete,

archeologists unearthed this vast ruin.

This complex maze of passage ways

reveals an ancient culture

with a fascination for bulls.

- When the Minoan civilization was uncovered,

one of the things they did find

were scenes of an elaborate form of bull fighting

where acrobats, young men and women,

would taunt and jump over the back

of a charging bull.

And I don't know if you've ever seen

a Portuguese bull fight but that's

how they used to do it in Portugal as well.

- [Narrator] Amid the ruins, archeologists

also found evidence of a religious cult

that worshiped bulls as a powerful deity.

So while Minoans bated bulls,

they also feared them.

We know now that the ruin

is a palace, not a maze.

But it certainly looks like one.

- Was so complex and so big

particularly for that time

in this part of the world

that it may have given rise to the concept,

the idea of the labyrinth.

- [Narrator] Certain ancient maps pinpoint

a labyrinth just 60 kilometers away.

And if you think it might be worth finding out

if the labyrinth is really here,

you are not alone.

- A labyrinth goes back a long way,

it goes back to basically

almost before Greek sources.

- [Narrator] Archeologist Sandy McGillivray

intends to find the labyrinth

and unlock its secrets.

McGillivray has made contact with a man

who claims to know just what he's looking for,

local guide Michelle Fournier.

(speak French)

- At the beginning it was natural

and afterwards it was used as a quarry.

This is what is now the labyrinth.

This place is a new one.

It has been built by the Germans.

- [Narrator] In World War two,

when the Nazis occupied Crete,

they enlarged the natural cave system

to store munitions.

- In '62, four young people from the Messara

went inside to take some bombs.

But made an explosion inside

and they died inside in this place.

So as you see--

- [Narrator] Today, with the permission

of the Greek Ministry of Culture,

McGillivray plans to enter the deadly caves.

He is the first archeologist to do so

in more than 50 years.

- [Michelle] This is the entrance here.

So this is the entrance.

- [Narrator] The way in was once much larger

but the Nazis sealed the entrance

with explosives before their retreat.

- [Michelle] Here we are.

- [Narrator] Like the legendary Theseus,

McGillivray and his guide descend

into the labyrinth without a map.

The stability of the tunnel is unknown.

- [Sandy] Oh my God, this is wild.

- [Narrator] Unlike Theseus, McGillivray

didn't bring a ball of Ariadne's thread,

but he will feel the presence of a monster

just the same.

- [Sandy] What?

- [Michelle] This place is where the Germans

were stocking munitions

and we have still some bombs here.

- [Sandy] That's insane.

- [Narrator] How many of these Nazi shells are live?

McGillivray and his guide don't stick around

to find out.

They venture deeper into the labyrinth

where their lights reveal this.

Threads on the tunnel floor.

Recently, someone else has been down here

recreating the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Why would anyone other than an archeologist

risk his life to come here?

- We are in the room which is called trapeza.

It is the end of the labyrinth.

Many people come now to pray.

They say here in this place

there is a strange energy.

There're many inscriptions on the walls

from different moments of history.

You have here some swastika from the Germany.

But you have also some things

which are from the Middle Ages.

We don't know exactly what it is at the moment.

- It's like a coat of arms.

- Yes, yes.

But this is your work.

You have to help everybody to understand.

- [Sandy] It could be a crusader shield.

It's kind of a metaphorical thing, the labyrinth.

The labyrinth is a place where you go in,

encounter some kind of half divine,

half human aspect, defeat it or not,

and emerge victorious or not.

- There're here, in my mind,

the roots of humanity.

Because everybody doesn't know it

but everybody is in a labyrinth.

It is labyrinth and he asks to find

the way out.

- [Narrator] And before we do

we must all enter the darkness

to brave our own monsters.

Up next, the secret of stopping an arrow.

The National Archeological Museum of Athens

has no shortage of heroes,

but only one of these tough guys

took on the entire world.

Alexander the Great.

In the fourth century B.C.,

he inspired fear in his enemies.

In his legions he inspired loyalty.

In graduate student Scott Bartell

he inspired something else.

- I was and still am obsessed with Alexander the Great.

Just, you know, anything about him,

I want to know about it.

There's this very famous mosaic

that was found in Pompey of Alexander

on his horse wearing this certain type of armor

and I wanted one.

You know, I wanted what Alexander wore.

And so, you know, I just started looking into it,

you know, looking into every possible source

that I could find, you know,

from very amateur historians

to the well-known ones.

- [Narrator] Hollywood epics depict

Greek warriors wearing armor of bronze,

including this hunky Alexander.

But when Scott and his professor Greg Aldrete

probed deeper, they uncovered something

quite different.

- People referred to it either as the lino thorax

or just simply linen armor.

- [Narrator] Alexander wore armor made of linen?

That just sounds wrong.

And if the ancients did have some kind of linen armor,

why isn't it in the museum?

- We have about 750 images of this armor in art,

but the problem is none of them have survived

till today because they're made of linen.

- [Narrator] So most of the available evidence

is from images like this one,

on a tombstone of a Greek soldier.

His armor looks like it might be made of cloth

but that doesn't prove anything.

Scott and Greg wanted to find out

if linen armor would really work.

They started by sourcing the same raw,

unprocessed flax that weavers used

in Alexander's time.

- This is a drop spindle

that I've got attached to flax

and I am spinning this into thread

and this is what the ancient Greeks would have used.

So we wanted to sort of replicate

all the ancient practices

to get the most authentic linen

that we could get.

- [Narrator] The team wove thread into cloth.

They were well aware that one layer

would afford no protection.

What about many layers glued together?

The ancient Greeks might have thought of that.

But did they have a glue

that would do the job?

- Glues, we eventually settled

on two types of glue that everybody

in ancient world would have access to.

One made out of rabbit skins,

rabbits were everywhere,

and one made out of flax seeds.

We're gonna lay the other layer on top

and press them.

Built up layers by laminating them together,

so by gluing them together.

And that's what forms armor.

- [Narrator] They made bronze arrow heads too,

of the precise weight and dimensions

employed by Alexander's legions and his adversaries.

Today, Greg and Scott and some fellow students

will take the armor and arrows out of the lab.

In a few moments, they'll know

whether their theory is sound

or has holes in it.

- What we're setting up here is we have a test patch

of our laminated layers of linen.

And fortunately, the laws of physics

are the same now as they were 2,000 years ago.

So if we shoot an arrow with a certain force

at something, at a certain material,

we know it will go through or it won't.

That's a good hit.

Let's measure it.

We actually had no idea.

We had the same doubts as a lot of people

that, you know, would fabric really protect you

from a serious arrow attack

and we were quite surprised.

All right.

So, with this one,

got the penetration there.

Not that much.

Trick to the lino thorax is when an arrow hits it,

because it's fabric, because it's a little bit soft,

the whole thing flexes and so the entire surface

of your armor absorbs the energy

of that incoming arrow.

- [Narrator] For comparison they will fire

several arrows at a sheet of bronze

the same thickness as this ancient metal breastplate.

The team assumes the arrow will bounce off the bronze.

The result is shocking.

In repeated tests, the arrow goes right through.

- The difference is that the linen suit of armor

would have only weighed one third

the weight of the bronze armor.

Nobody wants to wear bronze armor

in the hot Mediterranean sun,

it bakes you, whereas linen stays cool.

- [Narrator] At Scott's insistence,

there will be one final test.

In addition to the test patches,

he has constructed a complete linen breastplate.

And if you think the vivid colors

are creative license, they are not.

On this soldier's tombstone,

ultraviolet light reveals that bright colors

were all the rage in ancient armor.

We are not sure if Scott is putting on

a helmet for extra protection

or because of his obsession

with Alexander the Great.

It may be a little of both.

Greg takes aim at Scott

from point blank range.

- How does that feel?

- [Scott] I didn't feel anything.

How far did it go in?

- Uh, enough.

- [Scott] Enough?

- And so we know that Alexander himself,

I mean, one of the greatest conquerors

of the entire ancient world,

chose to wear this sort of armor.

- It was highly effective.

It would stop pretty much any arrow attack

that you would encounter on an ancient battlefield.

- [Narrator] So Hollywood warriors

may look great in bronze,

but they wouldn't last long

on a real battlefield.

- [Greg] By physically making something,

having it in three dimensions

to feel its weight, to experience how it moves,

can tell you information

that maybe is lacking in the ancient sources.

- Can run faster, you can run

for greater distances,

sneak up on the enemy.

This is, you know, sort of one of his greatest

strengths is that he just surprises his enemy.

So they think he's gonna arrive, you know,

in a week and he gets there in three days.

- [Greg] I'm tempted to think that this kind of armor

does partly at least explain his success.

- I never really doubted it.

I always had confidence in it.

You know, I thought if Alexander wore it,

you know, he certainly knew something about warfare,

this stuff had to work out.

- [Narrator] And that's why history's

greatest tough guy trusted linen

with his life.

Up next, a secret to kill for.

The ancient Athenians cared so much

about our next museum secret,

they slaughtered innocents to protect it.

It is a secret lost to history

and yet, there're still

a few remaining shards of truth

waiting to be put together.

This restored tablet is just one piece

of a larger puzzle.

It shows men and women with torches and vessels

on their way out of Athens

to the religious sanctuary of Eleusis.

Every year for a thousand years

Athenians came here to take part

in a celebration.

- The celebrators would come here

and gather in this courtyard.

They would have performed dances along the way.

- [Narrator] We know that Plato danced here

and Pythagoras

along with the who's who of ancient Greece.

- You could see here where the natural bedrock

was carved away in order to accommodate

lots and lots of visitors.

It's here that we can begin

to think about what actually happened

when people were initiated.

- [Narrator] The initiation was the secret part

of the Eleusinian mysteries.

You either participated fully

or you didn't come near.

- We know, for example, of two teenagers

who were caught trying to spy

on the ceremony and they were punished

as a result by being thrown off of a cliff.

- [Narrator] What went on here?

What was so important that Athenians

were willing to kill to keep the secret?

Some believe the mysteries involved dark rituals.

Some whisper of orgies.

But little is known for certain except this.

Priests gave the initiates

a kind of mead called kykeon.

(speaks Greek)

- [Narrator] Neurologist Dimitris Kountouris believes

kykeon was made with a local strain of barley

which can be infected by a fungus called ergot.

Ergot is a natural psychedelic,

a precursor of LSD.

(speaks Greek)

- [Narrator] Local people today still make

a beer with hallucinogenic properties.

The doctor conducts research

to test their brain patterns

and record their experiences.

(Dimitris speaks Greek)

- [Narrator] Initiates claimed they experienced

fear followed by elation

and then lost their fear of death.

But could a simple drink be the cause?

Today, in the rainforests of Peru,

shamans and their acolytes drink

another plant-based psychedelic

called ayahuasca, the vine of the soul.

The drink takes seekers on a journey

that can include frightening sensations.

For others, feelings of overwhelming joy.

Through closed eyes, many report

visions of a divine mystery.

The shamans value ayahuasca

the way the Athenians valued kykeon.

(speaks Greek)

- [Narrator] But under the influence of kykeon,

did the Greeks close their eyes

and see their gods?

In the darkness of the sanctuary,

did they see anything at all?

This stone depicts the experience

of a blind initiate.

The light that filled his mind

during the Eleusinian mysteries.

The Greek philosophers and mathematicians

make breakthroughs simply because they were smart

or did they learn to think outside the box

with the help of the Eleusinian mysteries?

A state sanctioned,

mind-blowing experience.

Up next, the secrets of ancient high technology.

Our final museum secret begins

not with a historic conqueror or a legendary king,

but with a deep sea dive in 1901

near the island of Antikythera

in the Aegean Sea.

- One of them dived down,

probably to look for sponges, and came up

in a few minutes, absolutely terrified,

the story goes, gabbling, they had seen

a huge pile of dead naked women on the sea bed.

So the captain of the boat goes down himself

and realizes that these aren't naked women,

it's a pile of statutes.

- [Narrator] They can be seen in the museum today.

Bronzes of men and women and marble deities

corroded by the sea.

Researchers believe the statues were on a cargo ship

that sank in the first century B.C.

Tribute to a Roman Emperor from his vassal states

which then included Greece.

Along with the exquisite statuary,

the divers recovered this.

Its corrosion clings tight,

obscuring form and purpose.

The secret is, what is it?

- It's been under the sea for 2,000 years

and it shows.

It's corroded, you've got all of these

sort of layers of limestone

that have built up on it.

Inside, it's like the inside

of a clock or a watch.

You see these very modern looking gear wheels

with their pointed teeth.

You can see tiny letters of ancient Greek

inscribed on it.

Sort of cramps, lines of lettering, pointers.

Things that should not have been

on something from ancient Greece.

- [Narrator] Many historians believe

the Greeks lacked the machines to make it.

Some people thought its origins

must be extraterrestrial.

The enigmatic artifact was named

the Antikythera mechanism.

One man took practical steps

to find out what it was and how it worked.

Michael Wright was a curator

of the Science Museum in London.

To better understand the mechanism

he decided to build an exact model.

The work would consume him

for the next 40 years.

In 1987, he was allowed to X-ray the original.

He captured images of discrete slices

that revealed details never seen before.

- It's very small to contain

as much detail as it does

and the more you look at it

the more detail you see in it.

You can even see the maker's

setting out marks in places.

It's almost as though you can see

his fingerprints on it.

There is relatively little difference

between the hand tools of the present day

and the hand tools that survived

from Hellenistic times.

The part that everybody wonders about

is the cutting of gear teeth.

People seem to imagine that making a gear wheel

must involve some sort of clever machinery

but it's not true.

I just use a file to cut the teeth.

The gear wheels produced that way

are perceptively less even than gear wheels

cut by machine but they're good enough.

- [Narrator] Wright duplicated

every surviving cog and gear,

then used them to extrapolate

the missing parts.

After years of effort,

he created a complete working replica.

- We know the form of the dial plate itself

because we've got this quarter of it roughly,

with an inner ring marked into 360 degrees

for the zodiac.

You see how the phase of the moon changes.

I say this instrument was, uh,

essentially a portable planetarium.

- Well, the heavens would have been

incredibly important to anybody

living in ancient times.

We look at clockwork and think,

you know, we can make clocks or we can,

um, we can make steam engines,

we can build things to do work.

That's the way we think about technology.

But for the Greeks it was much more

about knowledge, about wonder,

about getting closer to the gods.

- [Narrator] Watching the sky night after night,

the Greeks noticed that the planets

sometimes slowed down

and even moved backwards.

With their Earth centered view of the universe,

the explained these motions

as circles within circles.

- That's got pointers for the five planets,

Mercury, Venus, Mars,

Jupiter and Saturn as well.

When the sun comes opposite the planet,

in this case Mars,

the planet should go retrograde.

Mars is going forward still at the moment.

The sun comes around, Mars has stopped.

That's what we call first station.

And then it goes backwards, retrograde motion.

- [Narrator] The mechanism's interlocking cogs

predict the motions of the planets

with near perfect accuracy

and its predictive power doesn't stop there.

On the back plate of the mechanism,

a double spiral provides accurate predictions

of the eclipses of sun and moon.

An ancient mechanism pulled from the deep

reveals the depth of the early Greek technology.

- It does make a difference to our perception

of the civilization of that time

and I'm very happy that we

have that better insight.

- [Narrator] Even though the Greeks did not discover

the true map of the solar system,

their Antikythera mechanism

makes accurate predictions anyway.

Surely, this is a testament

to a brilliant civilization.

Even when they had it wrong,

they got it right.

- I think what the Antikythera mechanism

tells us is, how much we don't know

about the ancient world and it just makes you wonder

what else is there, you know, what else

is languishing in the shipwreck

at the bottom of the sea.

- [Narrator] For every mystery we reveal,

far more must remain unspoken.

Secrets of the human spirit

and of the human heart,

hidden in plain sight

at the National Archeological Museum of Athens.