Amazing Archaeology

[Svensson]

Hi Wick.

I have an educated guess.

I could be entirely wrong, but the first thing I thought of was a gizmo for separating seeds.

Have you ever tried to harvest a large amount of lettuce seeds or spinach seeds?

Once the plant is dried, one strategy some of the American tribes used was to crumble the dried plants and set them into a sort of bowl or 'gold mining' pan. One begins with a heap of chaff and tiny stalks and straws, with the tiny seeds mixed among them.

Instead of the painful task of picking out the seeds one-at-a-time, if one shakes and swirls the pan and blows into it, the dried chaff becomes air-born. Done correctly, the straws and stems blow away, leaving the heavier and non-aerodynamic seeds in the bottom of the pan.

I suspect that the Egyptian inventor was trying to create something along these lines. It is obviously meant to spin on a center rod, and it has three areas where one can grip the wheel. The 'fins' are meant to create an updraft as it rotates.

Whether it would work or not I cannot say, but it could conceivably separate tiny seeds from the chaff when they are dropped into the spinning plate.

yes, it could be something like this although the fins are not angled to provide uplift. So it could be something like a mixer/butter-churner like what was suggested by Abby. The fact that there are no other examples or wall reliefs shows this object probably means it was a prototype that didn't work as expected and was subsequently discarded. The fact that it was created from stone and not wood or clay hints as this being designed to work with liquids or corrosive materials. But clearly, it was made by someone with pleny of time on his hands....

Cheers.

[Joshua Rogan]

Most of you must have heard of this device.
Antikythera Mechanism



Not as old as Sabu's Disc, but fascinating all the same.

Just sit through this video and see what they came up with when the mechanism was xrayed.
https://youtu.be/BoS75-0BRWo

For anyone interested, you might enjoy Clickspring's series showing their painstaking recreation of this device. This is the latest video;

https://youtu.be/iBRCL090PxA