Discovered: Ancient Computer that Predicts Eclipses
FREE Documentary reveals how old world astronomers deciphered the celestials
The Bible teaches that God created the Sun, Moon, and Stars as luminaries in the firmament of heaven to give light to the Earth and to appoint days and years, times and seasons.
Before NASA, ancient civilizations studied the celestials to discover their courses and secrets. From there, they learned to reckon time, navigate the seas, plant crops, tell of omens, and plan festivities. Even the Hebrews set aside solemn feast days that corresponded to the phases of the Moon.
Much of the scholarly work of mapping the celestials was painstakingly recorded by Babylonian astronomers, who had discovered after centuries of study, the regular pattern of the eclipses, down the their color.
The most ancient observations of which we are in possession, that are sufficiently accurate to be employed in astronomical calculations, are those made at Babylon about 719 years before the Christian era, of three eclipses of the moon.1
Predicting eclipses is not difficult once one understands the motion and movement of the regular cycles of the celestials. These observations have been recorded for us and can be used with good precision.
Tables of the places of the sun and moon, of eclipses, and of kindred phenomena, have existed for thousands of years, and were formed independently of each other, by the Chaldean, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hindoo, Chinese, and other ancient astronomers.2
How did they independently create these tables? They looked up and recorded what they saw. After many years, they found the patterns that God built into the universe.
At least 50 years before the birth of Christ, an ancient astronomer, possibly Archimedes, created a mechanical device that reproduced the courses of the celestials in a working model of the sun, moon, stars, and wandering stars.
Around 100 years ago, sponge divers found this device in the Aegean Sea, near the Greek island of Antikythera.
It took a precision mathematician, astronomer, and craftsman to place all the celestial knowledge of the Ancients into a box not much larger than a laptop. This device could predict moon phases, the movement of the wandering stars, and eclipses down to the minute — including the colors that would be seen.
This, my friend, is information that God provided for us to study, learn, and know. Sadly, we’ve forgotten much of the wisdom and knowledge of the ancients. Yet, it is all there waiting to be rediscovered for those with an interest.
The Antikythera Mechanism was fashioned after the observations of the sky over centuries. Ancient astronomers discovered complex but repeatable patterns in the night sky. These patterns in the stars, moon, and constellations are constant reminders of God’s faithful provision to help us ascertain the days and years, times and seasons.
Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so. Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
Genesis 1:14-19
If you’d like to learn more about the Antikythera [ante KIH tha ruh] Mechanism, I highly recommend this under 60-minute documentary that tells the story of how scientists unravelled the mystery of the ancient computer that could see into the future as it were, even predicting eclipses.
Note: The creators of this video do not present the information from a biblical perspective, but it is fascinating none-the-less to discover the precision of the celestials as observed and recorded by the ancients.
Watch The Antikythera Mechanism here.
Quoted from “Lectures on Natural Philosophy,” p. 370. By Professor Partington as found in Samuel Rowbotham’s Zetetic Astronomy, p125.
Samuel Rowbotham, Zetetic Astronomy, p126.