In her piece of stuff this week, Ashley discussed the Antikythera Mechanism, an Ancient Greek clockwork computer about the size of a carriage clock (Episode 16). It was able to compute the position of astral bodies at various times and work out the correct time to hold religious festivals like the Olympic Games. In the episode, we wondered why more mechanical devices like this had not been found, or even their parts. While we were recording, I had a half-memory of a Greek mechanical owl, but turns out what I had been thinking of was the owl automaton from the 1981 movie, “Clash of the Titans,” oopsie. I wasn’t completely off the mark though because part of what I was trying to dredge up from my memory-locker was the fact that there is a solid record of the Greeks having mechanical devices and, in particular, automata. I had to investigate! What I found was that it was not just the Greeks, but many other ancient and medieval cultures that had invented automatic machines and robots. Not only that, but there was also the same distinct trend we see today of science fiction eventually becoming science fact.
The story of how automata and mechanical devices crept out of the world of myth and legend and were made real is very old indeed. The word automata is the latinized version of a Greek word meaning “acting on one’s own will,” and the devices I will talk about here seem to do just that. The beginning of the idea of objects being animated by their own will is a bit blurry, as the statues of ancient gods and goddesses are frequently reported to come to life and be able to communicate with their devotees. For example, reports that the female pharaoh, Hatshepsut, communicated with a statue of the god Amun before she sent an expedition to the Land of Incense were not just meant figuratively. There are also a lot of mechanical devices in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey that seem to operate by their own will. When Hera wants gates the open automatically (I imagine like the Starship Enterprise) it was the smith god, Hephaestus, who made it happen: “self-bidden groaned upon their hinges the gates of heaven, which the Hours had in their keeping” (Iliad, Book V, 749). Homer also reports that Hephaestus made twenty tripods that could move about on their own, as well as an intricate system of bellows to deliver just the right amount of air to where it was needed. Homer, of course, was writing about the mechanical technologies of the gods, and we can in all probability consign these automata to the realms of science fiction rather than anything that was actually around in the eighth century BCE – but the idea of the automaton was being established.
Still in the realm of legend, is the giant automaton Talos, which was supposed to have protectively circled the island of Crete three times a day. In the Argonautica, the robot, Talos, was fitted with an off switch, a single bronze nail that held shut a vein that ran from neck to ankle, and when the Argonauts managed to remove the nail, an “ichor ran from him like molten lead.” Aristotle relates a tale of the legendary Daedalus (famous for fashioning wings for his son Icarus) who invented a mechanism using mercury by which a statue of Aphrodite was made to move. For now, one could idly wonder whether the many moving statues of myth in Greece and Egypt were based on some actual experiments with mercury mechanics or whether remained only science fiction.
If we come forward in time a few centuries, there actually were early engineers working with automata. The spectacularly named Hero of Alexandria (fl. 60 CE) has been credited with accomplishing the first formal research into cybernetics. Most of his writings survive in lecture notes, for the classes he taught in mathematics, mechanics, physics, and pneumatics at the Mouseion in Alexandria, which included the city’s famous library. Among Hero’s important inventions which included the first steam engine, the first vending machine, and a rocket-like engine, was a piece of automata whimsy, a water basin surrounded by singing metal birds that went quiet when a mechanical owl turned its head to look at them. Perhaps inspired by the Homeric tale of the mechanical doors that Hephaestus built, Hero of Alexandria built his own. These automatic temple doors operated by applying heat from the altar fires to a closed system. Hero may have built on the work of older Alexandrians. Klesibios (fl. 285-222 BCE) is known as the father of pneumatics, and he built such an accurate water clock that it was nearly 2,000 years before the design was surpassed. A contemporary of Klesibios in Alexanderia (despite his name) was Philo of Byzantium, and he is credited with making the earliest working robot – it was of course a female maid robot that served drinks. When a cup was placed in her hand, the maid-bot poured wine and could even add water. She was powered by the manipulation of air pressure through a series of tubes, pipes, and springs.
The Egyptian and Greek worlds were not the only ones to produce automata. Around 400BCE in China, a philosopher named Lie Yuko wrote about an automaton show that had been presented to King Zhao of the Zhou and his harem in the tenth century BCE. The inventor and showman, Yen Shih, appeared before King Zhao with another man, and when the king asked the identity of the other man, Yen Shih indicated that he was the show. Lie Yuko describes the ensuing spectacle:
It [the automaton] walked with rapid strides, moving its head up and down, so that anyone would have taken it for a live human being. The artificer touched its chin, and it began singing perfectly in tune. He touched its hand and it started painting, keeping perfectly in time. It went through any number of movements that fancy might happen to dictate. The king looking on with his favorite concubine and other intimates of his harem, could hardly persuade himself it was not real (Liezi, Book V).
In the Shu Han period (221-263 CE) a female inventor named Lady Huang (sometimes Huang Yueying) is said to have invented cooking robots. She seems to have been real historical person, appearing in the chronicle, Xiangyang Ji, but the mentions of her automaton appear in folklore, so it is currently unknown whether these robotic cooks were science fiction or science fact, and the same has to be said for Yen Shih’s entertaining automaton from centuries earlier.
Similarly, in India, Hindu epics are full of technological marvels, life-like androids, and flying chariots. One tale tells of a two robots who guarded the relics of Buddha. While it was traditional in many cultures to commission giant statues to stand guard over the very special dead, those commissioned by King Ajatasatura (492-460BCE) were specifically called “Bhuta vahana yanta” or “split movement machines.” Legend said that these robots would stay vigilant until another king came to seize the relics and distribute them among the faithful. That king was Asoka (273-232 BCE), ruler of the massively expanded Mauryan Empire. Asoka became a committed Buddhist after despairing at all the slaughter his empire building had caused. He became peaceable and built many stupas to house the relics of Buddha across the Mauryan empire, and when he heard about the collection that Ajatasatura had left under the guard of automaton he wanted them. In some versions of the tale of the battle between Asoka and the robots, a son of the original engineer helps Asoka find the off-switch, and in another version, the god Visvakarman assisted Asoka with flying arrows that attacked the bolts that held the robots together. These Indian sentry-bots, of course, might be as much science-fiction as Hephaestus’s self-propelled tripods and Star Trek doors, but the idea of automaton at the very least was taking root across Eurasia.
In the Bible, King Solomon is said to have the most spectacular throne (1 kings 10: 18-19), but according to the Targum Sheni, an apocryphal text sometimes known as the expanded Book of Esther, Solomon’s throne was actually an automaton. Solomon was reportedly lifted up the steps of his throne by an elaborate series of automated animals and, when he reached the top, mechanical eagles descended and placed the king in his seat. The strange thing is, that even if this apocryphal account was purely science fiction, the idea of it so impressed a Byzantine emperor of the tenth century CE that he decided to have his own real “Throne of Solomon” made replete with singing birds, roaring lions and moving beasts.
Inheriting similar biblical and classical traditions as the Byzantines, Islamic inventors made some of the most elaborate automata of the pre-modern age. Ismail al-Jazari was born in 1136 in what is now south-central Turkey, and despite the turmoil of the Crusade period designed hundreds of ingenious devices for the Artuqid kings. Al-Jazari also had a passion for documenting his inventions and experiments, and after 25 years of making spectacular stuff he wrote his magnus opus, “The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Machines.” The inventions he detailed in this book included clocks and practical devices that raised water and measured things, but there was also room for whimsy, such as automaton that were musical or dispensed drinks. One of his most famous inventions and the one illustrating this blog, was the iconic elephant water clock, which comes to life every half hour when (among other things) the driver strikes the elephant, a man drops a ball into the mouth of a dragon and the bird that sits atop the device begins to sing. In the West we tend to think that such ingenuity belongs to the period of the Renaissance, and we point for example to the invention that Leonardo da Vinci drew, but few of us know just how much da Vinci himself admired the mechanical genius of al-Jazari.
Today we readily recognize the uncanny ability of science fiction to become science fact, but we may not realize how far back some of these science fictions stretch, let alone appreciate the ability of various artificers in the classical and medieval periods to make these fictions fact. While Homer and the ancient Egyptians may only have been working with myths of automata (at least as far as we currently know) it was too many centuries before the idea of a device seeming to “act on its own will” was actually constructed. Fantastical devices became factual mechanics as engineers in China, India, Greece, ByzJorgeantium and the Islamic world (as well as other places) brought the idea of automata out of the world of myth and along the way invented robotics, cybernetics, pneumatics and a slew of other engineering disciplines. Today, as the robots with artificial intelligence that Isaac Asimov wrote about as science fiction in the 1960s are rapidly being developed and we have to have real world discussions about the “Three Laws of Robotics,” and how to ensure that AI-bots do no harm, it is perhaps a small comfort to know that the process of science fiction becoming science fact is nothing new.
Photo credit: Abu’l Izz Isma-il al’Jazari’s Elephant Clock, from the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Devices, 1206CE. Copyist Farkh ibn ‘Abd al-Latif, 1315CE probably Syria. In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Accessed on December 1, 2013 at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Al-Jazari_Automata_Elephant-Clock_1315.jpg
Jorges Elices, “Medieval Robots? They were just one of this Muslim inventor’s creations,” National Geographic, July 30, 2023. https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2020/08/medieval-robots-they-were-just-one-of-this-muslim-inventors
Adrienne Mayor, “Robots guarded Buddha’s Relics in a Legend of Ancient India,” The Conversation, March 13, 2019. https://theconversation.com/robots-guarded-buddhas-relics-in-a-legend-of-ancient-india-110078
Adrienne mayor, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 2018).
D. Kalligeropoulos and S. Vasileiadou, “The Homeric Automata and Their Implementation,” in S.A. Paipetis (ed) Science and Technology in Homeric Epics. History of Mechanism and Machine Science, vol 6 (Dordecht: Springer, 2008) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8784-4_5
“Advanced Technology of Ancient Chinese Automata,” Ancient Origins, June 4, 2016 https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-technology/advanced-technology-ancient-chinese-automata-006021
Gerard Brett, “The Automata in the Byzantine “Throne of Solomon,” Speculum 29.3 (1954), 477-87.