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on either side of the throne, while birds, resting on the trees that surrounded the
throne, began to sing harmoniously. Subsequently, the lions, in perfect synchrony
with the various moments of the ceremony, departed from their starting position and
then returned back to it; both lions and birds gave up singing at the end of the
ceremony [6-7].
A very similar ritual is also described by the bishop Liutprand of Cremona (920-
972), in his Antapodosis, a report about his stay at the court of Byzantium as an am-
bassador of Berengarius II (900-966), who was eager to be accredited as king of Italy
by the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire; Liutprand was formally received by
Constantinus Porphyrogenitus, in 949, and stayed for some time in the city, taking
part in court ceremonies [8-9].
The presence of a tree near a king's throne [10] dates back to the Sumeric epic of
Gilgamesh; a golden plate tree and a golden vine are also cited in Herodotus' Histo-
ries (VII, 27), as a gift to the Persian emperor Darius by the king of Lydia, Pythius,
grandson of the renown Croesus [11-12]. Singing birds are likely to have been in-
spired by Hero's and Philo's Pneumatics (respectively, I, 4; I, 5; I, 16; and 61, for
instance), exactly as it had happened in the Arabic world, but, given such lack of
technical Byzantine sources, one could also suppose that the Byzantine engineers
were inspired by Arabic designs or models possibly seen in Baghdad. The reference
to such a device by the Sicilian poet Ibn Hamdis, who lived during the 11 th century,
could support the hypothesis of the spreading of such automaton design [13].
Concerning the lions, an iconographic source for the Byzantine engineers could
have been the throne of Solomon, as described in the Bible (Kings, I, x, 18-20),
though no reference is here made to any motion.
These automata show perfectly how the intellectual resources of the Byzantines (in
this case, their competence in the fields of mechanical engineering) could be used as
instrumentum regni , and they also demonstrate the effort that was made both in the
imitation of nature, and in showing the emperor as a God's epiphany.
Automata descriptions within the Byzantine Empire are also present in many literary
works written in order to entertain the audience: romances, and allegorical poems [14].
3 Dark and Middle Ages
After the great season of Hellenistic engineering and during all the early medieval
centuries in the Eastern Roman Empire or in the territories under Arabic domination,
the sources related to automata decrease dramatically and are limited in Europe to
secondary references, and to romances. No designs or technical descriptions are avail-
able, at least until the 13 th century.
3.1 Dark Ages
Anyway, secondary sources can testify the existence of mechanical precision devices,
demonstrating that even in Roman-barbarian kingdoms the technical skills required
for such objects were not completely lost.
For instance, in Cassiodorus' Variae, the official correspondence of the Os-
trogothic court in Ravenna, a letter (XLV, 6) addressed to the philosopher Boethius is
preserved; Theodoric says that the Burgundian king has repeatedly asked him for a
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