Machine Room of the Gods

134 On Oxos, Evros and Pharmaka Metallica: An Ancient Greek Perspective on Biotechnology for ‘New’ Pharmaceuticals (Fifth to Third Century bce)

Effie Photos-Jones

142 SPHAIRA

146 Sphaira: The World as Sphere

Vinzenz Brinkmann

156 A Statue of the Goddess of the Hunt as a Static Planetarium?

Vinzenz Brinkmann, Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann

168 ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM

174 The Astonishing Antikythera Mechanism: Decoding an Ancient Greek Calculating Machine

Tony Freeth

202 ARABIC-ISLAMIC CULTURAL SPHERE AND ASIA

214 The Golden Age of the Sciences in the Heyday of Islam, Including the Timurid Renaissance: A Brief Introduction

Vinzenz Brinkmann

220 The Translation of Greek Heritage and the Development of Scientific Language in Arabic

Roshdi Rashed

230 Automata in the Islamic World (Eighth to Thirteenth Century)

Martina Müller-Wiener

242 Knowledge in Ancient Asia: A Brief Insight

Vinzenz Brinkmann

246 EUROPEAN MODERN ERA

252 The Measuring of the World During the Modern Era in Europe and Its Dependence on Antiquity and the Arab-Islamic Cultural Sphere: A Brief Excursus

Vinzenz Brinkmann

Marble statue of the goddess Athena, Roman replica of a Greek bronze original by the sculptor Myron, marble, 1st cent. ce Athena was the god-

dess of the arts and sciences and thus directly personifies the Greek concept techne, which refers to art and technology in equal measure. (Cat. no. 029)

How Our Future Was Invented: An Introduction to the Frankfurt Exhibition Machine Room of the Gods

Vinzenz Brinkmann

Clearly, we have some catching up to do. The importance of the natural sciences (exact sciences) and technology (engineering) for art has obviously been known to people of all eras … except in the twentieth century. Right up to the final years of the nineteenth century, there were pioneering publications on the history of the natural sciences and their significance for art. No one was bothered by the close relationship of technology and aesthetics, which was instead regarded as a matter of course, for example, in the ancient Orient, ancient Greece, and in the Golden Age of Islam. The Greek word techne and the Arabic word ṣināʿa are close to each other and unite both aspects seamlessly.

In the twentieth century, techne, which had always been understood as a unity, was wrongly split up. It is now time to close this rift in order to do justice to art and its history.

The German art historian Horst Bredekamp has not been the only one to call for this path to reconciliation, but he did so forty years ago in the context of an activity at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung.1 In 2012, he underscored his conviction: ‘With regard to the history of technology, the same thing holds as for the history of art: in isolation, disciplines must sharpen their contours, but if they remain in it, they will atrophy as if in solitary confinement.’ 2

Whereas Bredekamp’s reflections mark a coup that remains limited to the modern era in Europe and more specifically to the aspect of the cabinet of curiosities (‘Kunstkammer’), the Frankfurt exhibition project Machine Room of the Gods spans a broader arc and is aware that, given the necessary brevity, this more comprehensive view is not possible without omissions and simplifications.

Under the title Aristoteles: Lehrer des Abendlandes (Aristotle: Teacher of the Occident), Munich-based publishing house C . H . Beck issued an important publication on the life and works of the Greek philosopher and natural scientist.3 Its subtitle, ‘teacher of the occident’ is laden with pathos and curtails the global significance of Aristotle, someone who was influ-

nant colour is artificial pigment Egyptian blue, which was manufactured in a complex chemical process.

(Cat. no. 013)

(Cat. no. 008)

4 Lid of the sarcophagus of the Amun priestess Takait, wood with stucco and paint, Egypt, 13th cent. bce The winged goddess Nut is depicted in the centre. She is asking for eternal life and acceptance between the stars. The domi-

3 Figure of Ptah-SokarOsiris with rich painting, wood, Egypt, Late Period. The statue shows a merging of the creator god Ptah with the Memphite necropolis god Sokar and the otherworldly ruler Osiris.

enced by the thinking and research of the ancient Orient and who in his turn, particularly as a natural scientist, had an extraordinary, centuries-long impact, especially on the Arab and Persian cultural spheres. In the Christian West, which was somewhat hostile to science, the enlightened and scientific side of Aristotle was downplayed enormously, and as late as the thirteenth century professors at the Sorbonne who taught this side of Aristotle were condemned and excommunicated (the so-called Condemnations of Paris).4

The case of Aristotle is cause for reflection and perhaps adds lustre to the thesis that the intellectual achievements of ancient Greece are not so much a ‘European heritage’ as they are part of the Oriental world and are to be understood as a ‘global heritage’ on whose foundations that world was build and which, after the decline of the ancient Greek world, were absorbed by Arab-Islamic scholarship and forcefully pursued.

With its work on three aspects – that is, (a) fictive technology in ancient myth, (b) the international history of science across five millennia, and (c) mechanical animation in ancient, Islamic, and European art – the Frankfurt exhibition embeds into the existing collection of the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, which also covers a history of five millennia, and profits from the resulting dialogues that necessarily resulted.

A polychrome statuette in Frankfurt shows Ptah (fig. 3), the Memphite god of creation and precursor to Hephaestus and Vulcan; the important sarcophagus lids of Takait (fig. 4), on the other hand, reveal rich remnants of ‘Egyptian blue’, an extraordinarily successful product of Egyptian chemical research.

The famous Roman marble copy of the Athena by the bronze sculptor Myron, who was renowned not only for his formal achievements but also for developing a special alloy, depicts the goddess, who more than anyone else in Greek mythology stood for enlightenment, research, art and technology, at the moment she is discarding the diaulos, a technologically complex double-reed musical instrument that she had designed herself (fig. 2).

The Liebieghaus collection contains the only surviving large-format portrait of Alexander the Great, which was produced in a Greek workshop (fig. 5). It comes from Egypt, was made from local alabaster and shows a personality whose efforts to gain power profited from science in general and from his teacher Aristotle in particular. In this spirit, soon after Alexander’s burial in the city he had founded, the epochal research institution ‘Library

‘The Machine Room of the Gods’ at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt

of Alexandria’ was established. The historical figure of Alexander the Great was a positive narrative reference that permeated the collective memories of both Western and Eastern cultural spheres (Arabic: al-Iskandar al-kebir, Turkish: Büyük İskender).

As the German Pope Benedict XVI , a proven scholar of religion, aptly describes, the young Christian faith drew on the ethical convictions of the Greek thinkers. The great Fathers of the Church, who were sometimes familiar with pre-Christian philosophers and intellectuals, and of whom the Liebieghaus possesses impressive late medieval ‘portraits’ (fig. 6), found themselves in serious conflict. Augustine of Hippo (353–430 ce), for example, who before his change in faith had been devoted to the writings of the Roman legal scholar and historian Cicero (106–43 bce) and the Roman Neoplatonist Plotinus (205–270 ce), strove for a concept of truth and a concept of time while expressing decidedly anti-Judaist and anti-Semitic views (Tractatus adversus Judaeos), calling Jews ‘sinners’ and ‘stirred-up filth’ in his writings and advocating an anti-corporeal sexual ethic and eternal punishment in hell, thus laying the foundations for the ‘doctrine of original sin’ and the ‘doctrine of purgatory’.

The European medieval department of the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung contains a spectacular marble portrait of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (fig. 225). His efforts to get closer to the Arab world through language and research illustrate the cultural and intellectual gap between the late period of the Golden Age in the Arab-Islamic sphere and Europe, which closed itself off from free thinking for centuries.

With the weakening of the Byzantine Empire and Arab Andalusia knowledge of antiquity and Islam increasingly penetrated the Christian West. In the fifteenth century, the Italian Renaissance sought a direct connection to Greek antiquity. For example, the sculptor Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, known as Antico (1460–1528), presented his view of the ancient image of the god Apollo in the form of a bronze statuette now in the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt (fig. 7).

Antico’s contemporary Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) had been trained only as a painter but nevertheless strove to ‘re-enact’ the kind of polymath we encounter in antiquity and Islam. If we consider that Leonardo was concerned with outward appearances, it becomes understandable why many of his ‘technical drawings’, with which he included no explanatory texts, cannot be implemented. Rather, these images should be seen as conceptual designs that go far beyond what was feasible in his day. It sometimes seems as if, within his own lifetime, he wanted to catch up on all the scientific knowledge of antiquity and Islam for himself personally and

Portrait

Alexander

Great, Egyptian alabaster, Egypt, 150–50 bce. As a child, Alexander was perhaps taught by Aristotle, the most important Greek polymath. Alexander created a great

empire reaching from the Indus to the Adriatic coast. This was also achieved through the willingness to incorporate the numerous cultures of the empire’s territory.

(Cat. no. 031)

6 Portrait of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 ce), limewood, Worms, 1489–96. Augustine was one of the four great Church Fathers of Western Christianity. His writings, which document

his search for the truth but also report on original sin and belie his anti-Semitic attitude, were intended to serve as guidelines for the faithful.

(Cat. no. 072)

5

of

the

Apollo of Belvedere, Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, Italy, 1497–98, H. 41.3 cm, W. 22 cm, Frankfurt am Main, Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, inv. no. 1286. This bronze

statuette – partially gilded with silver inlay in the eyes – is, like with other versions, modelled on an ancient marble sculpture, the famous Apollo of the Vatican Belvedere.

for a laggardly Europe which had fallen behind, and to develop further practical, in some cases visionary, scientific applications. For example, his diaries include a technical drawing of an automotive vehicle,5 which can be regarded as a simplified variant of the ancient automatic theatre of Hero of Alexandria, which even included axes set at ninety-degree angles that changed automatically.

A few years ago, the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung made the spectacular acquisition of a portrait bust of the polymath Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) by the Parisian sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1818) (fig. 8). In the tradition of Greek philosophy, Rousseau illuminated the role of humans in society and is now considered to have paved the way for the French Revolution, which opened up new latitude for the rational, scientific understanding of the world in the spirit of antiquity, of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad as an example of the Golden Age of Islam, and of the Italian Renaissance.

Current Activities

The exhibition Machine Room of the Gods: How Our Future Was Invented has benefited extraordinarily – thanks to the willingness of numerous colleagues and artists to collaborate – from the latest scientific and artistic achievements in the field of the history of science. Only thus was it possible to exhibit in Frankfurt the spectacular results of the French excavations of the Domus Aurea, Nero’s extravagant Roman palace complex with its large and luxurious banquet hall, which was driven by a rediscovered enormous mechanism like a kind of revolving stage under an artificial starry firmament. Only thus was it possible to bring to life in our exhibition the mechanical miracles described in detail by the Greek writer Hero. These include the completely automatic theatre which presents a tragic tale in several acts with lighting and sound effects, and the jet-propelled carousel of figures that presumably operates with cinema-like visual effects. Thrillingly, two extraordinarily detailed bronze statues of a child hunting a partridge could be tentatively reconstructed as elements of such a cinematographic zoetrope.

The contribution on the Antikythera Mechanism can be considered a world premiere; it was curated by Tony Freeth himself, and three rooms are dedicated to it. Research on this highly complex apparatus was advanced in recent months, so that the full understanding thus achieved can now be demonstrated for the first time on the basis of an elaborate multimedia presentation.

Bronze bust of JeanJacques Rousseau, Jean-Antoine Houdon, France, 1780. The scholar Rousseau (1712–78) argued that

the decline of man he diagnosed was based on the ‘progress’ of civilisation and technology. (Cat. no. 083)

Thanks to the enormous achievements of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science under the direction of the late Fuat Sezgin, the Liebieghaus is able to display various models and reconstructions of scientific instruments illustrating the fabulous advances in research made during Islam’s Golden Age. These achievements are shown in the rooms of the Liebieghaus, where sculptures from the European Middle Ages are set up in order to evoke a dialogue between the somewhat anti-scientific Christian world and the more pro-scientific Islamic world.

A work by Jeff Koons titled Apollo Kithara represents another premiere, which on the one hand very deliberately takes up specific aspects of the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung’s research into the polychromy of statues of antiquity, while on the other hand also offers a contemporary response to the longing of antiquity and of Islam to breathe life into sculpture through robotic movement. Koons and the research team of the Liebieghaus changed ideas on this last aspect as well.

The Narrative and the Exhibition Graphics Realised by the Atelier Markgraph

Against the background of the matrix described above, the most important elements of the exhibition concept emerge: loans from Frankfurt, Germany, Italy, France, Greece, the United States, and so on, represent the substance of the narrative strand.

But it is the dense interweaving of graphic art and multimedia components, developed by the Atelier Markgraph of Frankfurt, that really connects the isolated strands, clarifies the interdependencies, and sharpens the eye for the theses developed in the exhibition.

1 Bredekamp 1993 and Bredekamp 1982, pp. 507–59.

Bredekamp evades the question of the extent to which the European Renaissance and the European Baroque took into account the writings of Philo of Byzantium and Hero of Alexandria. That enables him to construct an antithesis between static

antique sculpture and animated automata that probably never existed in that form.

2 Bredekamp 2012, p. 104.

3 Flashar 2015.

4 Grabher 2015.

5 Codex Atlanticus fol. 812r (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana).

EGYPT AND MESOPOTAMIA

The Egyptian scholar Imhotep, bronze statue, ca. 600 bce. Imhotep was a highranking official under Pharaoh Djoser (r. ca. 2592– ca. 2566 bce)

and master builder of the pyramid complex of Sakkara. His scientific and technological abilities were so highly regarded that he was worshipped as a god in

the Late Period of ancient Egypt. (Cat. no. 014)

The Egyptian god Ptah, bronze, 722–650 bce. Ptah was the Egyptian equivalent of the Greek god Hephaestus. He was originally the city god of Memphis,

Egypt, but he came to be worshipped well outside the city as well.

(Cat. no. 006)

Egyptian statuette of the ibis-headed god Thoth, faience, 400–200 bce. Thoth was the god of knowledge and of scribes. His planet was the moon;

his sacred animals were the baboon and the ibis. (Cat. no. 004)

Bilingual lexical cuneiform tablet with Sumerian and Akkadian entries, late 1st mill. bce. This clay tablet is from Late Period Babylonia and demon-

strates the efforts of scientists to document the languages of Mesopotamia, which had died out in the meanwhile. In the left column, the text has an-

cient Sumerian terms and in the right column the corresponding terms in the Akkadian spoken at the time. (Cat. no. 003)

Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563, oil on oak, H. 114 cm, W. 155 cm, Vienna, KHM -Museumsverband, inv. no. 1026.

Techno-science in Mesopotamian Myth and Imagination

Shiyanthi Thavapalan

Material Riddles and the Making of Heroes

Invention and making are processes that are intimately linked to people’s experiences in the world and to their imagination. One of the earliest reflections on the nature of ingenuity and the relevance of technology to human beings that we have from ancient Mesopotamia comes from the Sumerian myth Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. 1 The poem is set in a glorious and distant past – at the time when history begins. The titular king, Enmerkar, builds the first city, Uruk. His nemesis is the unnamed lord of the mountainous kingdom of Aratta, situated somewhere to the east. In order to win the goddess Inanna’s favour and to prove the superiority of their respective cities, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta engage in a series of challenges which take the form of unsolvable material riddles. How can Enmerkar transport grain to Aratta in open nets? How will he produce a sceptre out of no known material? How can he make a dog appear in a colour never seen before? The crafty hero of Uruk finds a solution to each riddle, proving the genius of technology and craftsmanship: not only can they provide solutions to seemingly impossible scenarios, they also enable human beings to become the creators of things that have no natural prototype. This strive to invent – to create that which surpasses anything yet in existence – is a motif that is reflected again and again in literature but also in the historical inscriptions of Babylonian and Assyrian kings of later periods.

Knowledge In Situ: Plans and Practice

Today, Mesopotamia is well known for being the birthplace of writing and for having produced the earliest works pertaining to pharmacology, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, cartography, and other sciences. And yet, there is still so much to be discovered about how scholarly and practical traditions worked together. How was the ziggurat of Babylon, for example, designed? Inspired by the myth in the biblical Book of Genesis and

THE GREEK MYTHS

The return of the god Hephaestus to Olympus, depicted on an ancient vessel from the Etruscan city Caere, 525 bce Hephaestus is shown

with crippled feet. These unhealable injuries were the result of a fall from Olympus.

(Cat. no. 018)

The return of the god Hephaestus to Olympus, depicted on an Athenian vessel from the period around 450–400 bce. The injured Hephaestus is

seen in the middle being supported.

(Cat. no. 019)

Thetis receiving the new weapons for Achilles in the workshop of Hephaestus, fresco from Casa IX , 1, 7 in Pompeii, 1st cent. ce. Hephaestus, the god of artisans and smithery, forms

armour from gold, the divine and everlasting material. He is wearing the pileus, the characteristic headgear of artisans. An assistant at his feet is decorating the helmet. In the battle for Troy,

Achilles had lent his weapons to Patroclus. Hector kills Patroclus and keeps Achilles’ armor. Thetis, Achilles’ mother, commissions new weapons from Hephaist and visits the workshop. On the

painting, at the edge of the shield, you can see signs of the zodiac as they are described in Homer.

(Cat. no. 020)

Death of the giant robot Talos, red-figure krater, made in Athens, ca. 450–400 bce, Montesarchio, Museo Archeologico Nazionale del Sannio Caudino.

Roman statue of Icarus, marble, 1st cent. ce. This figure depicts the son of the brilliant mythical inventor Daedalus being fitted with the flying apparatus designed by his

father. Father and son are able to escape imprisonment on Crete, but Icarus flies too close to the sun and plunges to his death.

(Cat. no. 028)

35 The Minoan Labyrinth on a silver coin from Knossos, 200–76 bce The Minotaur, born of Queen Pasiphae’s union with the Cretan bull, lived in the laby-

rinth designed by Daedalus on the Greek island of Crete.

(Cat. no. 025)

37 Prometheus forms man, Roman gem, 1st cent. bce. Prometheus, depicted seated, attaches a right arm to a human skeleton. This image embodies the idea that the human

36

Minos (?), the mythical King of Crete, on a silver coin from Knossos, 200–76 bce. Minos commissioned the genius Daedalus to build the labyrinth in which to lock up the Minotaur, the destruc-

tive bull-man hybrid. While the beast was imprisoned, the sons and daughters of the city of Athens were sacrificed and thrown before the Minotaur to feed it.

(Cat. no. 025)

being is assembled like a machine.

(Cat. no. 022)

Prometheus chained in the Caucasus, Laconian black-figure bowl, ca. 560–550 bce. In part because Prometheus was the first to give fire to human beings, he was pun-

ished by Zeus. His punishment was to be chained to a mountain, and an eagle arrived by daily and ate his liver, which always grew back. (Cat. no. 023)

facial features tell of great pain, and his unkempt hair shows that he has been in this predicament for a long time.

(Cat. no. 024)

Roman statue of the Titan Prometheus, who was chained to the rocks of the Caucasus Mountains by the blacksmith god Hephaestus, marble, early 2nd cent. ce. His

40

Roman statue of Ixion, who was punished for his offences by being attached to a wheelshaped spaceship by the blacksmith god Hephaestus to wander

eternally through space, marble, early 2nd cent. ce.

(Cat. no. 021)

41

Wall painting showing the punishment of Ixion, fresco on the east wall of the socalled Ixion Room of the Casa dei Vettii in Pompeii, 1st cent. ce.

Daedalus presenting Pasiphae with the wooden cow, fresco on the north wall of the so-called Ixion Room of the Casa dei Vettii in Pompeii, 1st cent. ce.

Dionysus observing the sleeping Ariadne on Naxos, fresco on the south wall of the so-called Ixion Room of the Casa dei Vettii in Pompeii, 1st cent. ce.

(Cat.

194 Bowl with calligraphic border from Nishapur (now Iran), clay, 10th cent. Such vessels often had mottos. The motto on this bowl reads ‘Generosity is one of the qualities of the residents of paradise –Well-being…’

no. 058)

195 Large bowl with green slip and black glaze, Periphery of Amol (now Iran), 11th cent. (Cat. no. 059)

196 Bowl from Kashan (now Iran), early 13th cent. The inside base of this delicately worked bowl is decorated with a gazelle and a bird (partridge?). There are calligraphic inscriptions (naskh script) on the central and outer fields. (Cat. no. 060)

197 Bowl from Kashan (now Iran), early 13th cent. This bowl with translucent blue glaze is decorated on the inside base with a rosette as well as three bands with vines and calligraphic writing (naskh script). (Cat. no. 061)

200

Tile in lustre technique, Kashan (now Iran), late 13th cent. (Cat. no. 064)

198 + 199

Tiles in lustre technique, Kashan (now Iran), late 13th cent. Vines surround writing of passages from the Quran. The inscription is worked in relief and coloured blue. (Cat. no. 063, 062)

Replica of the famous goblet clepsydra designed by the engineer and automata specialist al-Jazarī (12th–early 13th cent.), Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, Frankfurt am Main,

1990–2003. The exactly measured, conically tapered vessel ensures a precise outflow of water, which in turn triggers the rotation of the scribe figure and his pointer. The complex scale of the hours

on the upper side makes it possible to show the hours of the sun, the length of which famously vary by season and have a different value every day. (Cat. no. 071)

202

Replica of the ‘Scale of Wisdom’ designed by al-Khāzinī (12th cent.), model from the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, Frankfurt am Main 1990–2003. The

scale, whose beams hung from silk threads, was extraordinarily precise – comparable to a modern gold scale –thanks to its sophisticated construction.

(Cat. no. 049)

203

Historical depiction of the famous Elephant Clock by al-Jazarī, copy by Farrukh ibn ‘Abd al-Latif, paper, 1315. The clock, driven by a complex hydraulic lever mechanism inside the elephant,

signalled forty-eight intervals of thirty minutes and thus marked a day of twenty-four hours. A ‘scribe’ on the elephant’s back moved his pen around a circular scale. Another figure in the tower raised

the arm, while a metal sphere rolled into the maw of a snake tipping downward; the lever-like snake lifted the mechanism inside the elephant again. (Cat. no. 070)