People and scholars have been fascinated by automata starting from Antiquity: automata have often been related to the idea of creation, suggesting that man could build another artificial being, by means of his competence and knowledge, forcing or imitating natural laws. This study covers automata history ranging from the Antiquity to the Renaissance, due to the strong interdependence of design and content, recurring during the considered centuries. It also aims to outline, in the framework of memetics, the evolution of the mechanical devices called automata from the ancient world to the 16th century CE, on the basis of a collection and historical analysis of literary and technical sources on the subject, both in Eastern and Western traditions. The first step was to collect sources (now searchable in our online data base at http://www.cyberprof.it/automata); in this way we could represent automata appearance and behavior thanks to UML diagrams and we identified features and characteristics of the automata included in our sources data base. The use of UML enabled an easier classification of the individual automata, considered as instances of more general classes (manlike, animal, musical instrument,…); and of their specific behavior traits (allomemes), represented as methods of the class or of the instance. In a binary table we represented the presence/absence of specific traits for each automata instance. From the binary table we built the distance matrix among the automata with the Minkowski algorithm (P=0). As a last step, thanks to a technique already used in the context of memetic studies in the field of archeology by Sartika (Tracing Cultural Evolution Through Memetics. WPF2004, Bandung Fe Institute) and by Bloom (The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History. 1995, New York), an automaton phylomemetic tree has been drawn with the UPGMA (Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean) method, assuming mutation rate as constant. Some relevant considerations arose from the tree analysis; first of all, independence from historical background: in any tree branch we consider, we can find associated automata belonging to different periods, as branches are neither chronologically nor culturally ordered. Secondly, the idea of automaton appears to evolve more rapidly than the technical implementation possibilities, at least in the considered period.