[areoform]

The mechanism suggests a strong "industrial" base to support it. They had to get the metals from somewhere, find the expert artisans to craft from somewhere else, source the parts, find the tooling etc.

Just as a mass produced pencil isn't just a pencil, it is the capacity to produce the pencil.

They had the capacity to create precision gearing, which suggests a level of mechanical prowess that isn't matched until a century or so before the dawn of the industrial age.

[marcosdumay]

Commercial metalworking stayed around all the time until today. It only increased and improved. (It's made of bronze, it's not like bronze working was lost.)

The tooling may evidence some kind of regression. I really don't know what kind of tooling was needed to create this, although gears by themselves and high precision in a single mechanism do not say much. From the looks of it, this devices requires a lot of theoretical knowledge, but not so much practical one (but that's an uninformed opinion, if you have information, it would be great). The theory was not lost in any way.

[hasmanean]

Don’t forget the fact that the mechanism used a model made by Hipparchus, but after Hellenism the Greeks adopted the Ptolemaic geocentric view of the cosmos with epicycles and stuff.

Epicycles delivered more precision but at the cost of much greater complexity. Ultimately it took Kepler to simplify it even more through his iterative equation though I can’t imagine how to turn that into a mechanical model.

The Antikythera mechanism was possible because of the simplicity of the underlying solar system model that lent itself to easy implementation by gears. It’s much more elegant than even modern methods of computing orbits. That’s the main surprise I find in its design…how much they could simplify it (and not how complex the mechanical construction is).

[nemo]

FWIW, the device is called an 'orrery'. When it was made in Syracuse, it wasn't a product of an industrial base, but was a project made by a certain sort of mathematician and scholar doing cutting edge engineering and applied mathematics. The Antikythera one seems to go back to the traditions from Archimedes' workshop which was amazingly advanced. Archimedes wrote a treatise on building them (now lost, alas). Orrery making in something like Archmedes' tradition continued on for hundreds of years outside Syracuse, esp. in Athens and Alexandria, and we have references to orrery making through the ages. The art of making them was a product of libraries and schools where they were created by scholars as an academic craft, not an industrial production facility.

[nine_k]

It's not that industrial base.

If devices like the antikythera were commonly produced, we'd find more of them, and descriptions of them. This looks like a one-off achievement.

I'd rather say that this maybe more like a Saturn-5 of the day: a top achievement that required extraordinary efforts, and not very reproducible because of that. Most things around and in its production chain were not nearly as advanced.