One thing I love about writing is the research—I expect to learn something when I read, even for fun, and it’s those details that make the settings come alive. Since Submerged Hopes is about an archaeologist, the work includes references to certain artifacts, which are based—like the sex pots—in real life. One of these is the world’s earliest analog computer, the Antikythera mechanism.

The Antikythera mechanism is a hand-held orrery, a representation of the solar system which could be used to predict moon phases, the positions of planets, eclipses, etc. It could also predict the dates of the Olympic games decades in advance. It’s named for the Greek island where it was discovered in 1901, just northwest of Crete, where my novel is based.

At that time, a crew of Greek sponge divers and fishermen found themselves becalmed, and passed the time in anchorage there, diving for sponges. One diver went down and signaled in a panic to be pulled up. He described heaps of rotting corpses and horses strewn on the seabed. The captain assumed he was suffering confusion from nitrogen narcosis, and descended himself. He surfaced again with a bronze arm, and they spent the remainder of the time bringing up artifacts.

The device was unprepossessing in appearance: a lump of bronze and wood fused together, and was chucked to the side in favor of a huge number of statues, jewelry, and other treasures thought destined for Rome for a wealthy collector or perhaps a Triumph for Julius Caesar. A year later, an archaeologist discovered a five-inch gear embedded in the piece, which subsequently broke into three pieces. Since then, 82 fragments have been identified, including 37 gears.

It was able to predict the positions of the planets, Zodiac signs, the sun, eclipses, the moon’s eccentric orbit, decades ahead of time, down to the time of day. The knowledge was lost in antiquity, and nothing to rival it was seen until the fourteenth century!

The wreck itself yielded a huge number of statues and other treasures, as well as the only “war dolphin,” a 220-pound lead ball tipped with an iron spike, which would have been dropped from a yardarm through the hull of an enemy’s ship, and a 2,000-year-old skeleton, well preserved enough that DNA analysis might be possible.

You can read more about the mechanism and the wreck here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism                                                      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_wreck