It is not merely for Athene's established and celebrated accomplishments that we honor her name in this website, but for an invention that has remained unknown until very recently:

Here you see irrefutable evidence of this fact: an image of Athene holding what is clearly a laptop in her left hand, as if to demonstrate how light it is.

We cannot see the computer screen from this angle, and thus we do not know which operating system Athene chose to use, or which browser.

Sadly, no direct written reference to the laptop has survived. However, one of the most famous stories told about Athene suggests strongly why it is no other evidence of her invention has come down to us. The story involves her response to a hubristic challenge by the mortal Arachne to a weaving contest. It is surely no accident that the goddess turned Arachne into a spider and doomed her to weave a web for the rest of eternity, as a punishment for her temerity. Notice the subtle hint in the word "web"—just waiting to be decoded!

So often in Greek mythological tales, real events are transmogrified into puzzling, but subtly related, narratives. We remain convinced that this is precisely what happened in the case of Arachne's fate. Some specialists have argued that the real-life background to this tale concerns the growing competition between Athens (supported by Athene) and Lydia (linked with Arachne) over the manufacture and export of textiles that were in great demand and thus important to both peoples' economic security.

In our view that is mere speculation, not based on the solid evidence we have adduced. Here is one of those cases, not infrequent, where outsiders can take a fresh, unbiased view of the facts that have puzzled specialists. We are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that this tale about Arachne contains echoes of a fierce conflict over which operating system and browser were to become standard in the Aegean. Perhaps the Lydians sought an advantage by bundling their operating system and browser in one package? Perhaps both rivals were attempting to do the same thing, seeking what Athene rejected as an unfair advantage. So she reported their behavior to Mount Olympus.

No doubt exasperated by this constant squabbling, Zeus and the other gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus confirmed Athene's decision to delay the introduction of computer technology among mortals. Athene's punishment of Arachne thus accounts for the computer illiteracy that spread in the Aegean, throughout the Roman Empire, and subsequently the rest of the world for two whole millennia. Presumably, the goddess also inflicted amnesia upon those mortals aware of the laptop's existence, so that no mortal would be able to create a computer until the Olympian sentence had been fully served.

Clearly, what we need to do now is apply for a federal grant, and private foundation funds, to conduct a thorough, multi-year research project in order to arrive at a detailed history of these still murky events. Given the implications of Athene's creation of the laptop (and still unknown operating system and browser) for intellectual property rights and the new global economy, we must bring into the project a wide variety of specialists. These should include experts in Greek history and culture, mythology (not only Greek, but also the myths of other cultures), computer technology, and the legal profession, as well as financial and economic gurus.

There is no time to lose. We have already detected signs that some well-placed people in the United States may have suspected the truth about the origins of the laptop, and possibly also of the desktop—and of course various software programs.

For instance, we note that Bill Gates went out of his way to purchase the Bettmann Archive through the Corbis Corporation, a privately held digital media company that he founded in 1989. It is surely not stretching the evidence too far to suggest that Gates bought the whole archive of 16 million images only in order to acquire the rights to this one historically important image of the goddess Athene with her previously unknown invention.

It is worth noting too that Time magazine—with its customary eye for ironical nuance—called the purchase of the Bettmann Archive by Bill Gates "a marriage made in heaven"! It would have been more accurate to say, "a deal made on Mount Olympus."

We have no doubt that Bill Gates will issue a special news release sometime soon announcing yet another endorsement: the ancient Greek gods and goddesses used WINDOWS 95 and communicated among one another, and perhaps to favored mortals, using Internet Explorer, even if only in beta form (notice again Gates' use of the Greek letter 'beta'—another playful hint at the Olympian connection?). We would not be at all surprised if Microsoft named its much-anticipated upgrade to Windows 95 "OLYMPUS" rather than the rather bland, unimaginative name Windows 98.

An obvious strategy suggests itself: We should appeal for funds to initiate our project from such Microsoft rivals as Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Apple, and others.

If you feel you have any pertinent evidence to offer in the matter of the early introduction and withdrawal of the laptop computer by the goddess Athene, please contact us. We would be particularly interested to have input on a puzzling problem: Why did Athene create the laptop before the desktop? Alternatively, might we find evidence—hidden again in ancient myths—that the desktop already existed before the single surviving portrait of Athene, only to be withdrawn because of Arachne's temerity? Meantime, watch this space for further updates.

 Form for responses here.