History is one of the coolest subjects you didn't pay attention to enough in school because it's constantly changing. Yes, things that happened in the past are still quite the mystery to us in the 21st century, with our iPads and our baggy pants. And to show how history — or at least our understanding of it — is evolving from week to week, two news stories popped up that you're going to want to hear about.
I mean, I thought they were interesting, I'm just assigning that feeling onto you because I like to be inclusive. You're my friend.
First off is the infamous "Antikythera mechanism," an elaborate first/second-century BCE machine made with gears that was discovered in a shipwreck off the coast of Antikythera, Greece. In the years since its discovery in 1901, a lot of theories have been put forth about its purpose. It's certainly lost technology of the ancients, but suggestions have ranged from the outlandish (ancient aliens, lost civilizations) to the more prosaic (it was probably used to tell time and predict astrological events like comets).
It was also the key MacGuffin in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, where it was the key to time travel. Good film, better than expected. Has Antonio Banderas; he was a cat in Shrek.
The latest news comes from a pair of Argentinian physicists, Esteban Szigety and Gustavo Arenas. Using their combined powers of physics (ie, simulations), they came to the conclusion that … it didn't work all that well, if it did work at all. The thing would have jammed to the point of being unusable every couple of months. Indiana Jones would be lost in time! Mads Mikkelsen and his weird plan would succeed!
To quote from the paper verbatim: "However, the occurrence of jamming and disengagement events limits the size of tolerable errors: excessive eccentricity or significant errors in tooth distribution would either cause the mechanism to stop completely due to jamming or introduce critical desynchronization among the indicators, potentially leading to the total failure of some indicators due to disengagement." In layman's terms, manufacturing defects in the teeth of the gears or the placement of the gears would have made this a very expensive hunk of clicking, whirring garbage.
They do give the caveat that they're dealing with a very incomplete data set (the thing is not complete), using materials that were sitting, warping on the bottom of the ocean for 2 millennia and had actually changed chemical composition in all those intervening years. They didn't throw a bucket of cold water on all of our ancient alien hopes and dreams, but they more or less did pump the cold water into the bucket and indicated it was within arms' reach.
Since the Antikythera mechanism is the only one of its kind to be found, it doesn't rule out that this was a prototype that some wealthy sailor agreed to "take for a spin" on one of their voyages. We've all been upsold on some sketchy tech that promised us the moon but failed to deliver much of anything (workshopping my "Antikythera mechanism = ancient NFTs" script now). Still, all evidence points to this being expensive and complicated, and to summarize the paper's authors, "For this thing to be made with such care, it had to have done something."
Going from the sea to the ground, the second news article that digs into the past deals with the famed Bayeux Tapestry, a Medieval embroidered depiction of the Norman conquest of England in 1066 CE. I've seen it in Bayeux. It's absolutely gorgeous, like reading a huge embroidered comic strip. Knights and battles and comets — it's really something. And well, it has penises.
Lots of penises. More penises than perhaps previously thought.
In 2018, George Garnett, professor at St. Hughes in Oxford, came out in front of the whole world and said, definitively, that there are 93 penises on the Bayeux Tapestry. 88 of them are horse penises. Five of them are not. They're just general dudes hanging dong in 1066. And that's how things were until April 2025, when Tapestry scholar Dr. Christopher Monk was like, "Aha! I found number 94!"
To which Garnett countered no you didn't, that's a sword or a knife sticking out of that man's tights. Not a penis. I counted all the penises and there are 93.
So now we're in this era of Bayeux Tapestry limbo where it is a penis if you want it to be and it isn't a penis if you don't want it to be — like if you're George Garnett's friend or something, and you want to keep him from getting mad at you.
It's funny for two reasons (three if you just think that penises swinging in the English breezes are funny). For one, there is a school of thought that this tapestry was sewn and embroidered by nuns. So you have a lot of repressed nuns working on this and making the conscious decision to include this guy:
And this horse:
Secondly, this was meant to be displayed to members of the clergy, perhaps as part of a celebration. So you have a bunch of uptight clerics, also repressed for many of the same reasons as the nuns, walking past these little cartoons of naked men (and women, there are two naked women in the margins) and having to pretend that they're not there. Or that they do see them and have to justify them to their clerical friends. "Oh, that's just a … a … representation of an Aesop fable. In our military conquest banner."
There was no TV when this was made. Most people couldn't read. So you can bet that this tapestry was studied from every which angle just because there wasn't all that much else to do back then, other than chores. Everyone saw the penises and no one felt like commenting much on it until 2018 when Garnett just blurted out what everyone had been thinking since the 11th century. 93 slabs of ham.
But wait, it gets slightly better. In 1885 a team of Victorian embroiderers took it upon themselves to make a replica of the tapestry and REMOVED THE MALE GENITALS. They also shrunk the horse wangs significantly. So if people were only familiar with the reproduction, like say, if they never went to France to see the original (like I did in 2015, I love to brag about that), they'd have zero clue that anything was literally and figuratively standing out right in front of their faces.
In the end, we may never solve the debate of the "Sixth Beatle," as I'm dubbing it. It adds a little mystery to the whole thing, which is nice. I'm going to end on this really nice photo of Bayeaux Cathedral that I took in 2015 because, as I have mentioned before, I really did go there and it's neat.
