IJDOD VII: Indiana Jones and the Siege of Syracuse

SPOILERS for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

As to be expected with a Hollywood movie, particularly one that does not claim to be historical accurate or a biopic, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny takes significant liberties with stories from history.

For just a few examples...

-          an archaeology professor (Harrison Ford) on horseback being chased by Nazis interrupting the Moon Day parade

-          the Antikythera machine being depicted as a time fissure detector (and a specific type of time fissure detector), rather than the analogue computer it was, predicting astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance, as well as keeping track of the four-year cycles, possibly the Olympiad cycle; there is also no evidence that Archimedes built it with the surviving artefact possibly being from years after his death

-          Archimedes (played here by Nasser Memarzia) meeting time travellers and keeping a watch from the 20th century, either by Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) allowing him to keep the one he took from Jurgen Voller’s (Mads Mikkelsen) body when she took the completed Antikythera machine from him, or his retrieval of another from one of the other corpses in the crashed Nazi ‘dragon’.

However, for the purposes of this piece, I am looking specifically at dates and a potential changing of an ‘original’ timeline to one that matches our own... Those in the know might suggest that the timeline has been changed due to Archimedes being still alive when Helena prevents Indiana Jones from not returning to the 20th century with a fearsome right cross – famously, the Greek inventor did not survive the Fall of Syracuse in 212BC, refusing to look up from his calculations when confronted by a pillaging Roman solider. However, it is possible that the time-travelling of Indy, Helena, Voller and the rest has seen to it that history, or at least part of it, was rewritten into what is our recorded history now.

Early in the movie, in his lecture that veers from Assyrian blue-line pattern pottery to Archimedes and his inventions (what exactly was it or the course on?), Dr Jones inquires of his students ‘who has done the reading’? No one. No one has ever done the reading. In his subsequent spoon-feeding, Dr Jones mentions the Siege of Syracuse by the Roman general Marcellus in 213BC during the Second Punic War, which is chronologically correct.

However, when Indy arrives in the past above the on-going siege in the Nazi ‘dragon’, he tells Voller that they have arrived in 214BC, with a Roman assault on Syracuse underway. This is incorrect as the Roman blockade, siege and assaults of Syracuse took place between 213-212BC. This second dating is possibly a script or actor error that made it through the editing process, but it could also highlight how something from the ‘original’ timeline of the Indiana Jones universe has been or is about to be changed to come into line with our ‘altered’ timeline.

It could be that Jones in his two utterances places the Siege of Syracuse of his ‘original’ timeline in 214-213BC, with Archimedes killed during the final assault by Roman forces in 213BC.

We can see the change happening with Helena highlighting that the arrival of the Nazi ‘dragon’ in the skies above Syracuse, spewing projectiles from the trigger-happy Klaber (Boyd Holbrook), and then crashing in a large explosion, “just scared off the entire Roman Navy,” which can be seen retreating in the background. This all suggests that the Roman siege of Syracuse has been broken, with the city not in Roman hands and Archimedes still alive. However, the dates given by Jones could suggest that the capture of the city had merely been postponed, possibly to 212BC, when it actually happened in our timeline.

Indeed, in the course of the assault on Syracuse, we can see that Jones, Shaw and the Nazis were chronologically destined to appear above Sicily and affect the battle, particularly if we assume that the Romans were going to succeed at this point without the 20th century intervention. This is because when the Nazi ‘dragon’ arrives in the late third century BC, we are shown that Archimedes has not yet finished the ‘Dial of Destiny’. Had he died during this depicted Roman assault, Archimedes would obviously not have completed it (admittedly, his students could have finished it had they survived), preventing Jones, Shaw and Voller from having their adventure to find it in the 20th century.

This all means that Indiana Jones and the Nazis had to go back in time in order to prevent the Romans capturing Syracuse and possibly killing Archimedes in 214 BC, giving him that extra year or more to complete the ‘Dial of Destiny’, organise his elaborate burial (something which the Romans would have to have played a part in, seen with the Dial being guarded by centurions), have the ‘propellored Phoenix’ depicted on his tomb, and set the treasure hunt of how to find his final resting place, closing the causality loop of allowing Indiana Jones and the Nazis to then find and use the ‘Dial of Destiny’ to travel back in time...

I’ve gone cross-eyed...