The world's first computer, which is about 2,000 years old, wasn't just used by ancient Greeks to chart the movement of the sun, moon and planets. It was also a fortune telling device, say researchers.
It was retrieved from a shipwreck discovered off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, but a decades-long study has only now announced new results.
"It confirms that the mechanism displayed planets as well as showing the position of the sun and the moon in the sky," said Mike Edmunds, an astrophysics professor from the University of Cardiff in Wales who is part of the research project team.
The calculator could add, multiply, divide and subtract. It was also able to align the number of lunar months with years and display where the sun and the moon were in the zodiac.
"The texts were meant to help the viewer to understand what was the meaning of all the different points and dials, what it would teach them about the cosmos that they lived in ... and about how, through cycles of time this related to their lives," said Alexander Jones, a history professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York.
It did contain certain imperfections, but yielded a clear snapshot of the astronomical knowledge at the time, said Jones.
"If you looked in the sky you would still see the body that the mechanism was showing, roughly, in the place of the mechanism, but it would not be very exact."
But it is unclear what happened for that technology to have been lost. Its mechanical complexity would be unrivalled for at least another 1,000 years until the appearance of medieval clocks in European cathedrals.
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