Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny's Truly Crazy Final Act Is Based On Actual History
"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" is finally out, wrapping up the story of Dr. Henry Jones Jr. in a nice bow with a blazingly fun old school adventure. As with every "Indiana Jones" movie, there is a big MacGuffin that's half-historical treasure and half-magical artifact. After three MacGuffins deeply ingrained in religion, this time we get something else, an artifact that's more about science (of some sort) — the titular dial of destiny, also called the Antikythera. The artifact is a lost relic created by mathematician Archimedes in ancient times, but also serves as a compass to track down fissures in time that allow you to travel through time.
At the end of "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," our heroes and the Nazi villains travel back in time to the third century BC, as they land in the middle of the Roman siege on the city of Syracuse. It's quite a wild sequence, and audiences may be surprised to learn that despite the time travel and more unbelievable elements of this adventure, the Antikythera and the siege of Syracuse actually come from real history.
A gentleman and a scholar
Let's start with the artifact, shall we? The real Antikythera is believed to be a hand-powered orrery — a model of the Solar System that shows the positions of the planets and moons and predicts their movements. It is described as the first analog computer, but the mechanism's true purpose and its inner-workings continue to baffle scientists.
If you don't know who he was, Archimedes was a Greek engineer, mathematician, inventor, and astronomer from the ancient city of Syracuse, in what is now Sicily. To avoid giving a whole lecture, Archimedes was considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, and a brilliant mind. One of his inventions, the Archimedes screw, continues to be used today to pump water, while his contributions to mathematics, like calculating the area of a circle to the volume of a sphere and were influential in the Renaissance once his surviving work was rediscovered.
Though it is believed that Archimedes did not build the Antikythera, he very much existed and could have created the designs and work that eventually led to the device. Archimedes also aided his home city by creating weapons of war that aided against the invaders from the Roman Republic in 213 and 212 BC. Arguably his best known contribution n battle was his idea for a heat ray (it may or may not have actually worked) that used mirrors to redirect sunlight to incoming ships and burn them down.
Archimedes died during the siege of Syracuse by the Roman Republic in 212 BC, where it is said that the mathematician was so focused on his work that he ignored orders to leave the town and was killed by a Roman soldier who did not recognize the mathematician, despite direct orders not to kill him.
War, war never changes.
As for the siege of Syracuse, it was part of the larger Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome. During that war, Syracuse became an important battlefield due to its historic alliance with Rome and its growing closeness to Carthaginian leaders. Fearing a shifting alliance, Rome attacked.
The siege was notable for how prominent inventions and devices were in the fight, including Archimides' own catapults and the Claw of Archimedes, which could lift ships out of the sea. Even the Roman's own devices, like floating siege towers, were not enough to break through the defenses. Though the Syracusans initially drove the Romans away, the invading army eventually conquered the city by using a religious festival as a distraction to sneak in undetected.
But if you believe the events of "Dial of Destiny" as fact, then something else of note happened during the siege. It was here that a massive dragon-like creature disrupted the fight. In reality, the dragon was a Nazi plane that crashed on the shores of Syracuse after catapults shot it down. What did the ancient Greeks and Romans do with future technology like the machine guns? Unfortunately, the movie doesn't go down that rabbit hole, but Archimedes does get himself a nice watch from the future.
"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" is playing in theaters everywhere now.