Learning more?

[Antoninus]

I am and always have been fascinated by ancient mechanical devices.

From the Antikythera mechanism to the inventions of Archimedies and Ctesibius its all terribly fascinating however I just cant seem to find any reall source of knowleage or information aside from small pieces in random books or on Wikipedia.

I just cant find anything real substantial on ancient mechanical devices.

Personally I think the greatest tradgedy the world has ever known in it's entire history was the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria

[Zibblsnrt]

What bugs me most about Alexandria's destruction (other than the fact that Caesar was stupid enough to fight a battle near it in the first place)? Some of the catalogues and indices survived.

I could almost handle the whole thing being lost. Having a fraction of the specific listings of what's lost, knowing those are themselves incomplete? That makes the whole thing suck rather more.

I'd heard in a few places that it took European civilization until around the year 1500 to finally recover or re-publish as much knowledge as had been lost in the Library.

[Toby Stimpson]

It would be interesting to see how far western and eastern civilizations would be if that knowledge had remaind intact long enough for Gutenberg's press to be created. I mean imagine what our culture would be like if that 1 library survived. Its sad though to think, even now, if we had a massive power cut, the internet which would be our modern day equivalent of the Great library would also be gone as well... and knowledge soon withers and dies within a few generations.

[Ben Gruagach]

Two books that I can recommend on this topic are L. Sprague de Camp's "The Ancient Engineers" and Peter James & Nick Thorpe's "Ancient Inventions."

"Ancient Inventions" in particular is pretty good and covers a lot of interesting technology from ancient times.

Edited to add: And there's also Henry Hodges' "Technology in the Ancient World."