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A Greek vase painting, dating to about BCE, depicts the death of Talos, an early conception of a robot from Greek myth. Thousands of years before machine learning and self-driving cars became reality, the tales of giant bronze robot Talos, artificial woman Pandora, and their creator, the god Hephaestus, filled the imaginations of people in ancient Greece. Historians usually trace the idea of automata to the Middle Ages, when humans first invented self-moving devices, but the concept of artificial, lifelike creatures dates to the myths and legends from at least about 2, years ago, says Adrienne Mayor, a research scholar in the classics department in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. Mayor, a historian of science, says that the earliest themes of artificial intelligence, robots, and self-moving objects appear in the work of ancient Greek poets Hesiod and Homer, who were alive sometime between and BCE. The story of Talos, which Hesiod first mentioned around BCE, offers one of the earliest conceptions of a robot, Mayor says. The myth describes Talos as a giant bronze man that Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention and blacksmithing, built. Zeus, the king of Greek gods, commissioned Talos to protect the island of Crete from invaders. He marched around the island three times every day and hurled boulders at approaching enemy ships. At his core, the giant had a tube running from his head to one of his feet that carried a mysterious life source of the gods the Greeks called ichor.