> As a point of conjecture few/nobody would have thought the Greeks made something as complex as the Antikytheria mechanism unless it was discovered and studied extensively for a century.
Well.. nobody except those who were willing to believe Cicero wasn't spinning a science fiction yarn when he described a very similar device and attributed it to Archimedes. But to your point, it seems like people didn't take it seriously until one was found. It makes you wonder what other things have been written of but not taken seriously because they sound too fantastic.
What we know about history is inevitably constrained by the evidence we find.
As for fantastic descriptions, what would future archaeologists think of scifi novels? Should they accept them as factual?
When I browse used bookstores, I often find novels stuffed into the history section. They aren't there maliciously, it's just that the titles on the books sound like plausible history books. Sometimes it's even harder to distinguish a novel from an actual account, though modern fiction seems to put "a novel" somewhere on the cover in small print.
Much of what we think we know from history is known to us only because somebody claimed it in writing, and it seems plausible enough so we have no particular reason to believe they made it up. As far as I'm aware we haven't dug up any ancient Greek polybolos ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybolos) But they were described in ancient writings and the premise seems plausible, so we believe such polybolos existed and put it into our modern history books. The Antikythera mechanism evidently failed the implicit plausibility test, so we didn't believe it until we found one. Or maybe the written mentions of it simply failed to attract much notice so the plausibility was never given much thought in the first place.
Well.. nobody except those who were willing to believe Cicero wasn't spinning a science fiction yarn when he described a very similar device and attributed it to Archimedes. But to your point, it seems like people didn't take it seriously until one was found. It makes you wonder what other things have been written of but not taken seriously because they sound too fantastic.