Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries (27 page)

three presents to demonstrate his
love, one of which was the giant bronze
automaton Talos. In another version
of the tale, the giant was forged by
Hephaestus and the Cyclopes and
given to Minos, king of Crete. According to yet another myth, Talos was the
son of Cris and father of Phaestos, or
he was Minos's brother. Others have
said that he was in fact a bull, probably identical to the Cretan Minotaur
in the Labyrinth. According to the ancient writer Apollodorus of Rhodes's Argonautica he may have been the
last of a generation of men of bronze,
originally sprung from the ash trees
and who survived to the age of the
demigods.

Talos, or Talus, in the ancient
Cretan dialect means sun, and in Crete
the god Zeus was also given the same
name, Zeus Tallaios. Talos was the
guardian of the island of Crete, and
made a circuit of the island's coast
three times daily, to prevent an enemy
invasion, and also to stop the inhabitants from leaving without Minos's permission. He also traveled thrice yearly
to the villages of Crete, carrying with
him bronze tablets on which were inscribed Minos's sacred laws, and was
responsible for these laws being
obeyed in the country. Talos was said
to hurl enormous boulders and other
debris at approaching enemy vessels
so that they would not land on the island. If the enemy got through this initial bombardment, the bronze giant
would leap into a fire until he glowed
red-hot, and would then clasp the
strangers in his burning embrace as
they landed on the island. It was also
said that Talos was once in the possession of the Sardinians, and that
when they refused to hand over the
brazen man to Minos, Talos leapt into
a fire, clasping them to his breast and
killing them with their mouths open.
From this incident, apparently, comes
the expression sardonic laugh, which
is applied to those who laugh at their
own or others' troubles.

Jason and the Argonauts encountered Talos as they approached Crete
on their way home from obtaining the
Golden Fleece. The giant kept their
boat, the Argo, at bay by hurling great

boulders towards it, which he had broken off from the cliffs. Medea, the
witch accompanying Jason, helped
them escape Talos's destructive blows
by using her magic. It is recorded that
Talos had a single red vein covered by
a thin skin running from his neck to
his heel, bound shut by a bronze nail.
This nail sealed in the divine ichor (an
oily substance often referred to as the
blood of the gods), which enabled his
metal limbs to move. This was the one
vulnerable spot on his body. In the
Argonautica, Medea bewitched the giant with a hostile gaze and invoked the
Keres (spirits of death) with songs and
prayers. As Talos was attempting to
hurl boulders to repel these wailing
spirits, he accidentally grazed his
ankle on a sharp stone at a spot where
his vulnerable vein lay concealed. He
collapsed to the ground with a great
crash, causing the divine ichor to gush
out like molten lead. In another version, Medea enchanted the bronze man
and deceived him into thinking that
she would give him a secret potion to
make him immortal if he would let her
stop on the island. Talos agreed and
drank the potion, which immediately
put him to sleep. Medea went to him
in his sleep and pulled the plug from
his ankle, whereupon he died.

Others believed that the Argonaut
Poeas (father of Philoctetes, who was
to fight in the Trojan War) pierced the
giant's vein with an arrow. After
Talos's death, the Argo was able to land
safely on Crete. Coins depicting Talos,
dating from the fourth to the third centuries B.c. have been found in the Cretan
city of Phaistos. A late fifth-century A.D.
red-figure krater (vase) shows the
Dioskouroi (hero-gods Castor and Polydeukes) catching the dying Talos,
as Medea, in Oriental dress, stands
at the side in front of the Argo, holding an embroidered sack (presumably
containing her magic potions and
drugs).

There are various ways to interpret the myth of the giant bronze man
of Crete. The story certainly has overtones of the very similar fate of Achilles during the Trojan War, and perhaps
they had the same source. A political
interpretation would suggest that
Talos represented the Minoan fleet
armed with metal weapons. When the
mainland Greeks from the Argo defeated Talos, the power of Crete vanished and the control of the Greek
world was transferred to the mainland.
Or perhaps the harbors of Crete were
infested with pirates and Talos represented the Minoan guard against pirates in the form of three watches
which sent out patrols. The poet Robert Graves has suggested that Talos's
single vein belongs to the mystery of
early bronze casting by the cire-perdue
(lost wax) method, which involves the
sculptor producing a model in clay that
is then coated with wax. This model is
then covered with a perforated clay
mold. When heated, the mold will lose
the wax (hence the name of the
method) as it runs out of the holes in
the plaster. The metal in liquid form
is then poured into the space formerly
occupied by the wax.

A religious/ritual interpretation
has been suggested by the discovery
of Minoan seal stones dating from c.
1500 B.C., showing a goddess or priestess paddling a boat to seaside shrines,
indicating a similar divine circumnavigation of the island to that of the bronze
giant. As Talos is the Cretan word for

the sun, Robert Graves has suggested
that he would, as the sun, have circled
Crete originally only once a day. And
because Talos, a bronze image of the
sun, was also called Taurus (the bull)
and the Cretan year was divided into
three seasons, his thrice-yearly visit
to the villages could have been a royal
progress of the Sun King, wearing his
ritual bull mask.

Another theory is that Talos represents the first fully operational robot in history. It has been calculated
that if Talos could circuit Crete three
times a day, it would mean that he had
an average speed of 155 miles per hour.
Proponents of this view point out that
when the giant was wounded in the
ankle, what poured out seems similar
to molten lead. In general, the Greeks
were fascinated with automata of all
kinds, often using them in theater productions and religious ceremonies.
There is some history of ancient robotics, albeit in primitive form. In 350 B.C.
the brilliant Greek mathematician
Archytas built a mechanical bird,
dubbed The Pigeon, that was propelled
by steam. It was one of histories earliest studies of flight, as well as possibly the first model airplane. In 322 B.C.
the Greek philosopher Aristotle, perhaps foreseeing the development of
robots, wrote "If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could
do the work that befits it...then there
would be no need either of apprentices
for the master workers or of slaves for
the lords." In the late third century B.C.
the Greek inventor and physicist
Ctesibius of Alexandria designed water clocks with movable figures on
them, which kept more accurate time
than any clock invented until the 17th
century.

More than 1,600 years later, around
the year A.D. 1495, Leonardo da Vinci
designed (and perhaps even built) a
mechanical armored knight, probably
the first humanoid robot in history.
The machinery inside da Vinci's robot,
a cable-and-pulley-driven artificial
man, was designed to create the illusion that a real person was inside. This
robot could sit up, wave its arms, and
move its head while opening and closing an anatomically correct jaw. It may
even have emitted sounds to the accompaniment of automated musical instruments, such as drums. In fact, there
were quite a few inventors in medieval
times who built machines similar to
this to entertain royalty. Da Vinci's robot was dressed in a typical, late-15th
century German-Italian suit of armor.
From da Vinci's designs, it appears that
all the joints moved in unison, powered
and controlled by a mechanical, ana-
logue-programable controller located
within the chest. The legs were powered separately by an external crank
assembly driving the cable, which was

connected to important locations in
the ankle, knee, and hip.

In 2005, the Biochemical Engineering Faculty at the University of Connecticut began a recreation of the basic
structure of da Vinci's original robot.
Their design will incorporate 21st century technology including "vision,
speech recognition, and voice command, computer-integrated movements, and a more advanced body
structure." The robot will also possess
a mobile neck and have the capacity
to follow moving objects with its eyes.
The recreation will operate in two
modes, one which will respond to computer commands and the other to spoken commands. Da Vinci's original
pulleys and gears will be utilized in
conjunction with muscle models to
imitate natural human movements.

It all seems a very long way from
ancient Greece. Nevertheless, even
though Talos was probably a figure of
myth, the giant bronze man of Crete
was perhaps the prototype of all modern robots.

Copyright untraceable.

The Baghdad Battery in the Baghdad Museum.

Some researchers have seen in ancient Egyptian wall carvings or in ancient texts evidence for ancient
electricity. Though these claims generally lack physical proof, there is one
particular ancient artifact that is believed by some scientists to be an example of an electrical power source.
Despite its plain appearance, this
small, undecorated jar may change the
accepted view of the history of scientific discovery.

The object, thought to be a 2,000year-old electric battery, was found in
1936 by workers moving earth for a

new railway in the area of Khujut Rabu,
southeast of Baghdad. The battery appears to have been unearthed in a tomb
of the Parthian period (247 B.C.-A.D.
228). When found, it consisted of a 13
centimeter tall oval jar of bright yellow clay, inside of which were a rolled
up copper sheet, an iron rod, and some
fragments of asphalt. The asphalt had
been used to seal the top and bottom
of the copper cylinder, as well as to
hold the iron rod in place in the center of the cylinder. The use of an asphalt sealing indicated that the object
had once contained liquid of some sort, as is also suggested by traces of corrosion on the copper tube, which was
probably caused by an acidic agent,
perhaps vinegar or wine. Similar artifacts were found in the nearby cities
of Seleucia (where the jar contained
papyrus rolls) and Ctesiphon (where
it contained rolled bronze sheets).

In 1938, German archaeologist
Wilhelm Konig, then director of the
Baghdad Museum Laboratory, came
upon the strange object, or a series of
objects (accounts differ) in a box in the
museum basement. After a close examination, he realized that the artifact closely resembles a Galvanic cell,
or modern electrical battery. Konig
subsequently published a paper suggesting that the object was an ancient
battery, possibly used for electroplating (transferring a thin film of gold or
silver from one surface to another) gold
onto silver objects. He also theorized
that several batteries could have been
attached to each other to increase
their output. The most conservative
date for the battery is now thought to
be somewhere between 250 B.C. and A.D.
640, but the first known electric battery, the Voltaic pile, was not invented
by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta
until 1800. So if this was a primitive
battery, where did the ancient
Parthians acquire the knowledge
to assemble it, and how did it work?
After reading Konig's paper, Willard
F.M. Gray, an engineer at the General
Electric High Voltage Laboratory in
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, decided to
construct and test a replica of the ancient battery. When he filled the clay
jar with grape juice, vinegar, or copper sulphate solution, he found that it
generated about one and a half to two
volts of electricity.