For over a century since its discovery in an ancient shipwreck, the exact function of the Antikythera Mechanism—named after the southern Greek island off which it was found—was a tantalizing puzzle.

From a few words deciphered on the twisted, corroded fragments of bronze gears and plates, experts guessed it was an astronomical instrument. But much more remained hidden out of sight.

After more than a decade's efforts using cutting-edge scanning equipment, an international team of scientists has now read about 3,500 characters of explanatory text—a quarter of the original—in the innards of the 2,100-year-old remains.

They say it was a kind of philosopher's guide to the galaxy, and perhaps the world's oldest mechanical computer.

"Now we have texts that you can actually read as ancient Greek, what we had before was like something on the radio with a lot of static," said team member Alexander Jones, a professor of the history of ancient science at New York University.

"It's a lot of detail for us because it comes from a period from which we know very little about Greek astronomy and essentially nothing about the technology, except what we gather from here," he said. "So these very small texts are a very big thing for us."

The team says the mechanism was a calendar of the sun and the moon that showed the phases of the moon, the position of the sun and the moon in the zodiac, the position of the planets, and predicted eclipses. Nothing of the sort was known to be made for well over 1,000 years.

"It was not a research tool, something that an astronomer would use to do computations, or even an astrologer to do prognostications, but something that you would use to teach about the cosmos and our place in the cosmos," Jones said. "It's like a textbook of astronomy as it was understood then, which connected the movements of the sky and the planets with the lives of the ancient Greeks and their environment."

"I would see it as more something that might be a philosopher's instructional device."

The letters—some just 1.2 millimeters (1/20 of an inch) tall—were engraved on the inside covers and visible front and back sections of the mechanism, which originally had the rough dimensions of an office box-file, was encased in wood and operated with a hand-crank.

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A Forestry Professor who apparently loves to pseydo-analyses the origins of ancient statues based on podiatric criteria sent an e-mail to the press woman in charge for the communication of the excavations in ancient tomb of Amphipolis; Yes, we have such a position here: press office of Amphipolis tomb excavations… In an laughable effort to solve the mystery of the Amphipolis tomb origin the professor sat down and developed a theory of his own.

In his e-mail Professor Pavlos Eythimiou claimed that “the tomb of Amphipolis is definitely Greek because the feet of Caryatids are Greek.”

His theory was that a “Greek foot has a longer second toe” and therefore “any foot with longer second toe has Greek genes.”

Furthermore he claimed that “Greek feet” are a matter of genetics and that there have been attempts to hide this …breathtaking reality and replace the patriotic “Greek foot” term by some scientific word from osteology.