Ancient Oars on the Wine-Dark Sea, Part 2

on that. It allegedly had like thousands of people manning it.

about it. Once we finished talking about all of the operational war vessels of the ancient world in the Mediterranean.

typically row facing backwards while you paddle facing forwards. We also talked about some prehistoric evidence of the use of wooden paddles for water transport in Stone Age Northern Europe, including one eight to nine thousand year old paddle, and we also talked to some of the pressures leading to the development of different mechanisms for powering watercraft in the ancient Mediterranean, like wind versus human powered propulsion. And we're back with part two to continue the discussion today.

the unpredictable nature of Mediterranean winds. So with all of this we get the establishment of greater trade routes between these various powers, and islands like Crete also become more

and more important given all this traffic. But this also means that you know, especially out of ancient Egypt and out of Ancia in Mesopotamia, again you have the emergence of all these marine trade routes and this ends up spilling over into conflict as well, conflict over these trade routes and around these trade routes, and we get like

a couple of key developments in maritime conflict technology. The first one is pretty obvious and simple, and that is, okay, if you have a ship that can carry cargo, it can also carry troops. And so the first warships were basically just cargo ships carrying armed forces, and we have various accounts of this. Ancient Egyptian record speak of this as far back as twenty four to fifty BCE. That's when the pharaoh Sahure that means he who is close to Ray the god used a cargo fleet to carry

an army to the Levantine coast. This would be the earliest of multiple examples of the ancient Egyptians using seapower to transport troops. These would have been big, lumbering troop movements by sea. So the flip side of the coin here is you would also see the use of sail and or driven rovers, so small faster vessels. They could be used to do things like deliver a message, gather intel, also attack coastal targets or even unprotected vessels.

One of my sources in this that I cided in the last episode is the book The Ancient Mariners by Lionel Cassen, who is one of the one of the key authorities of the twentieth century on ancient Mediterranean sea powers and so forth, and he wrote that these vessels were likely that these rovers, these smaller faster vessels were likely as old as the big cargo ships, but our written records of their usage and conflict only goes back to like the fourteenth century BC. But they're quite telling.

We get this idea of fleets of sea rovers utilized to disrupt cross sea communication and maritime trade, as well as to eventually enforced blockades. Syrian naval units were thus able to disrupt the link between Egypt and Biblos, and you also had full fledged sea powers like the Minoans and then the Mycenians who were able to hold their own and then some against powers like Egypt. It also meant that an age of rich over sea trade largely

entered into an age of like rampant sea rovers. So you know, we see some of the first recorded sea battles during this rough time period we're looking at here, such as Rameses the Third's defeat of an invading fleet of the Sea peoples the Battle of the Delta in eleven seventy five BCE.

particularly active during the thirteenth century BC. There are different ways to look at them, from a confederacy of different seafaring raiders to varying groups of people's displaced by late Bronze Age disturbances. So it's an entire topic undo itself.

But this would have been the second war between the Egyptians and the Sea People's case in his book, wrote that it was very much it seems like a mass migration and not at all like the smaller raids that Egypt had pretty much always had to contend with on their coastal border. It consisted of two main forces working their way down the coast toward Egypt at this point, the main body that moved by land and the accompanying

fleet that largely kept pace along the coast. Now, as far as the actual engagement, the way it is said to have gone down is as follows. So the forces of Egypt had just defeated the forces of the Sea peoples on land in Syria and then rushed back across the sea to Egypt with the Sea People's in pursuit, and in doing so drew their fleet into an ambush

at the mouth of the Nile. And this would have been via an ambush fleet, but also supporting fire from the shore as well, but in both cases to your point, this all very much mirrored a land battle. So you know, people on ships shooting arrows at each other, people on land shooting arrows of the ships, flaming or otherwise boarding actions and so forth. Again, a lot of this is what we gather from ancient Egyptian illustrations of the conflict.

the whole business with Troy. Of course, as we've discussed in the show before, also their caveats about our understanding of the historical aspects of of Troy as opposed to the literary context here. But for the most part, you know, we have this story of a like a Greek alliance taking on the city of Troy, the forces of Greece consisting of you know, experienced marauders and traders, everyone joining

up under the command of Agamemnon. In his book, Cason writes, it's a very well written book and has some nice descriptions. He writes, for once the major cities of Greece for went their traditional pastime of praying on one another and joined hands for a combined operation against Troy. And while it's described as of course a land based siege of a city with no navy, they travel to their destination via ship, and of.

We've kind of gotten to this already, I think. So they had to be fast when it mattered, so they could depend on sails when speed wasn't a necessity, or when the wind was good, which, of course it's worth noting that if the wind is really good, that will propel you rather swiftly. But conditions have to be right, and you could not necessarily count on the Mediterranean winds, especially if conflict was involved. So the sails could easily be stored away in favor of that ore power that

was dependent entirely upon the muscles of your crew. And he points out that the ore power here again in Homeric times, if you will, was provided by the crew of the vessel, which also included the ship's fighting men. So it's interesting. So on one hand, we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that they were not good oarsmen. They were apparently very good oarsman, highly trained, very skilled. There's actually a part in the Odyssey where Alcinous brags

that brags about what great oarsmen his men are. But they were not just dedicated to oarsmen. They also would have been called on to do all these other things as well.

were these ships like? We have few illustrations. We have the descriptions by Homer, including part in the Odyssey where Odysseus builds a new ship, But even a lot of this didn't come together till the twentieth century when we had maritime archaeology to give us some actual evidence to base some of this on other archaeological data, that we could take some of those passages and make better sense

of what they were saying. So Cason contends that the vessels, which he jokingly describes as seagoing greyhounds during this period between thirteen hundred and twelve hundred BC, would have looked essentially like this, long low holes on abruptly rising prow. That's the front of the ship. They had a curved stern, as opposed to the reported build of the sea people's vessels, which were described as having a straight stern. The stern,

of course, is the back of the ship. All right, So at this point we're talking more or less about single level galleys becoming the norm. These would have been single level or vessels powered by around thirty men, and we based a lot of this on like vase paintings, Homeric writings, you know, chronicles from eighth century BC, and so forth that let us know that. Okay, eventually though, the ships begin to vary in size, the number of the oars ends up ranging from twenty to forty or

even fifty. We'll get into that more later. Early on, though, we would have been dealing with a case where most of these vessels would have been privately owned, and they would have engaged in both merchant trade and raiding so as well as you know, carrying armed men to a destination, and there would have been more of this than dedicated fighting. Again, we get into that idea that there's a thin line between between what is piracy and what is some other pursuit,

including actual trade. But as all this heats up, it gets to the point where, okay, a single row of ores is not going to cut it. You're going to need an additional row of ores. And it's interesting getting into this because yeah, we see the birth of the fifty ORed vessels, the penticonters, which might have apparently reflected a major development in the eighth century BCE, according to Fagan and Rancoff, who I scided in the last episode.

That's Brian Fagan and Boris Rhancoff. So the vessels we're talking about here would have featured two levels of rowers, one rowing at the same level is those single row galleys that came before, but then a lower level in the hold working ores through apertures in the hole. So it's interesting. You might imagine that we just built one on top of the other, like an ice cream cone,

but it's not quite the same. It's a little more complicated than that ends up involving like a reworking of the whole itself.

a halfway useful analogy. But these general changes that are going on here, according to Fake and Rohnkoff, they seem to suggest though that fighting capacity was becoming more and more important, and carrying capacity was less of a concern. So yeah, you're you're having to upgrade the design of your vessels in order to emphasize speed and mobility as opposed to just how much stuff you could care, be

that that stuff cargo or troops or something else. However, the length of these vessels does gradually increase, incorporating more and more ores, upward of one hundred. So again everything continues to evolve new forms, and then like stretch the ability of that form, what happens if we added more ores to it and so forth put more ores in. Yeah,

now it's also crucial to mention that. Apparently, as action in the Mediterranean heats up again over this, over years and years, decades and decades, ultimately centuries, sea based trade, piracy, colonization, and more, this kind of eventually ends the days of independently held galleys being like the main brunt of any force out there. So Cason wrote writes about this, saying quote, in these days, there was no one state that had

the naval strengths to police the seas. Every city involved in trade had to maintain its own fleet, not only to protect its merchantmen against the ubiquitous pirates, whose calling now as before, had the status of a recognized profession, but also to repel attacks delivered by commercial rivals, since such attempts were an acknowledged means of discouraging competition.

technology evolves to keep up with that. Now, the pentagonter seemed again that the two leveled org vessels seems to have remained the main warship from the eight through six centuries BCE, But clearly this climate demanded greater innovation, you know, to continue to to you know, to push the boundaries of what's possible. Every conceivable edge is going to count in one of these altercations. And so we see a

couple of things, and they're very interconnected here. One was the increasing importance of the nautical ram, which we'll get to in a bit. But then the other goes in hand in hand with that as well, and that is I think everyone can guess, add a third level of rowers to your vessel optimize. Yeah, add more ores, more humans pulling those ores so that we can have more power.

the whole ship. And these were advanced vehicles that in the last episode we compared to jet fighters of today, ultimately in the long run, too expensive for city states to keep up with. And of course these became just a staple of sea conflict and sea power of the day. The Greeks used these, and then the defeat of the Persians at Salamis in for ADBCE, and they would be a major part of their maritime might. This battle, by the way, I am reminded, is depicted in the twenty

fourteen three hundred sequel. As usual a sequel, there was a sequel. I saw part of it on an airplane, as usual. I am dubious about out looking to a three hundred picture for any kind of historical accuracy. But I don't know. People who have seen the movie write in maybe it has some really good trirem scenes. I mean, I would at least ask that there would be cool

trirem action sequences in that picture. So, as far as we know, with the trirem the third level, the top level would have had the oarsmen rowing through outriggers so as to keep the whole as narrow as possible, while the two lower levels would have rowed through whole apertures. As such, you could power up a vessel with a good one hundred and seventy ores and it would have been as maneuverable as the two level pentdiconter, but ultimately

faster and deadlier. Now where did this innovation come from? Well, according to the author, as I was reading here, Athenian general and historian Thucydides credited to the Corinthian shipwright Menocles in the eighth century, but Fagan and Rankov state that more recent scholarships suggest that the invention hailed from perhaps the Egyptians or the Phoenicians under Persian rule near the

end of the sixth century. Now, as of their writing, there had been zero wrecks of these vessels discovered, duing part to the fact that they would have apparently it's thought have had positive buoyancy of hold. But in any case this was the case, then it's still the case. Now thousands of these ships were built and lost, and apparently truly lost, because we've never found a wreck.

not going to get it one hundred percent correct. You know, nobody has I have seen anybody arguing that the resulting ship is just dead on. It's inevitably incorrect. It cannot possibly be a one for one match for what any given try ream actually was in the ancient world. But the idea is that it would give us like a solid model which we could then run through trials, experiment with, and then have nuanced conversations about where this prototype gets

it wrong. You know, where this recreation gets it wrong, Like Okay, maybe it's it's too heavy and therefore too slow, or maybe you know, it's not tough enough to withstand being rammed and so forth, And so they built this thing. And there are plenty of images of this vessel there are, there's there's footage, there's there have been documentaries, there is.

The resulting craft was thirty six point nine meters or one hundred and twenty one feet one inch in length, powered by two sails, and of course one hundred and seventy oarsmen. And I believe oorsmon is technically considered a gender neutral term because i've and I have seen plenty of photos of the folks that they recruited to power this vessel in these trials, and you see plenty of

female oarsmen on the crew as well. And they did five seasons of trials between nineteen eighty seven and nineteen ninety four.

the bow, ten spears and four archers. But I don't think it actually engaged in any military activity in the late eighties and early nineties, just to be clear on that. But I can't help but think that it would have made for a nice time travel movie.

a lot of findings. There are a lot of these trials, and again a lot of this was about, you know, creating space to then have these more nuanced discussions about what they got wrong right and what they perhaps got wrong. But apparently they found that chiefly a three level war system is viable. Prior to this, some scholars had doubted that it was actually possible to have three levels of oarsmen. They also found that it was both fast and highly maneuverable.

I think with this model they were able to reach maximum more speeds of just under nine knots. But I think there are some discussions about how maybe that was too slow, maybe the vessel was too heavy. Again, there's a lot of back and forth as part of the research surrounding it. But Fagan and Rehnkoff and by the way, Rencoff was a rowing Master professor of ancient history and served as chair of the Trirene Trust that carried out

the Olympus, the Olympia's construction, and those trials. They state that it's now widely accepted that this ship is likely a generally accurate representation of what these ships were like. Again, it seems unlikely that we'd ever know for sure on this without time travel, but it seems generally on the money, or close enough to the money for us to to use it as a means of understanding what these vessels were.

I included a couple of photos here in our outline, and everyone out there can can look these up as well. But yeah, the ship at sea with oars out, sails raised looks absolutely amazing, and there's a peek inside at the folks pulling the oars. Again, it seems like they're having a great time, but it is not spacious.

And again, this may be more nuanced in the film than I remember, and maybe more so in the text, but I seem to think of it as just the Nautilus just goes as fast as it can and just crashes through whatever it's trying to destroy. And so it's easy for me to fall back on that and think, oh, yeah, well ramming speed with a trirem it's just row as fast as possible and hit them with as much velocity as you can muster.

you know, the unicorn of the sea. It has this big spike, and you know, we all know that it grows to a length of forty feet, but imagine it could grow even bigger. It does not grow to a length of forty feet, but imagine it could grow even bigger. And that's what is going on. And now, of course what is revealed later on is that they're being rammed, as you said, by Captain Nemo's submarine and of course, ramming as a weapon does indeed play a major role

in naval warfare. Going back into antiquity, now, you can think of lots of reasons that ships would have always been important in war. As we've talked about. You know, they can move troops, they can move cargo and provisions, they can engage in scouting, they can deliver messages and

so forth. But this age of war, galleys, the naval ships powered by rows of oars, really showed the importance of direct ship to ship combat, and thus the speed, design and maneuverability of the galleys themselves became paramount, and that's what ultimately leads to this extremely optimized design of the trirem. So in ancient naval conflict, as we've already alluded to, there are several different methods you could have of attacking other boats on the water. You could have

archers on your boat. You could come up alongside that boat and shoot at enemy troops or the crew on board. You could have marines armed soldiers like maybe the Greek boats might have some hoplight soldiers that would board enemy boats and try to attack and overwhelm the crew. Or you could attack the physical boat itself. So a major goal of the trirem in ancient warfare was to destroy or more accurately immobilize enemy ships, and the primary method

of doing this was ramming. So before you had the cannon and the torpedo, you had the ram.

They were essentially all engine, but that engine was human bodies and so as such, a weakness of the Trirem in a way was that it would generally have to go ashore each day to meet the needs of its crew for food, supplies and rest. This is not a boat for people to live on at sea for long periods of time. Again, it's all engine and the people are the engine.

of time. It is made for battle, and so a major factor deciding the success of an ancient war galley was the ability of its crew to perform. The corollarya of that is that human exhaustion could mean death. So ancient trirems often would be fitted with sails of some kind. They might have a main mast sail that could be used to save the crew's strength while they're just sort of cruising somewhere, and then would generally not be used for battle. The boat might leave ashore its main mast

sail if contact with the enemy was imminent. The goal of naval combat, this ship to ship combat at the time was to crush or puncture the hull of the enemy vessel to or sometimes alternately, to shear off its ores on one side, either of which would disable it in battle. Now in the modern era, if we think of puncturing the hull of a ship, we think this means the goal is to sink the enemy ship, to

send it to the bottom of the ocean. But that's not necessarily the case in fact, that's usually not the case. In ancient Mediterranean naval combat, the ship, being made of wood and lightly constructed and not full of much else, would usually not sink entirely, but would become a floating wreck which the winner of the battle could later toe away for salvage or for you know, just to show off what you did.

and terrifying place. Yeah, So what was going on with the ramming itself? Well, from what I've been reading, it seems to me that ramming is primarily a maneuvering game. So trirems were built with of course, dedicated ramming mechanisms. So sticking out of the front of the boat there would be a thick reinforced wooden spike that extends from the keel, and that would be capped with a metal covering.

So like an Athenian trirem would would have a wooden extension from the keel just around the water line, maybe right ad or right below the water line, and this would be covered in a bronze sheath. A later and popular Athenian ram design would have like three horizontally aligned fins. These sort of thin fins lined up in rows, and I'll get to the reason for that in a minute. Speed and maneuverability were a crucial part of the battle. In order to perform a successful ram the galley would

need to set up its maneuver correctly. It would need to build up speed so that it could get in position to gain an advantageous angle goal, and it would be trying to come into the other boat's broadside, so

before the actual ramming itself. A major part of ancient Mediterranean naval tactics seem to be focused on getting behind the enemy, getting through the enemy lines, and positioning your coming around and positioning yourself behind the enemy ship, because attacking from the rear made it easier to get the angle you wanted and to make it harder for the enemy ship to attack you.

with it. You're also vulnerable to getting your own hull rammed from the side because you're just sitting there with your broadside exposed to enemy ships, and you can't move.

attack maneuver introduces stresses on the ship's hull integrity. Of course, right Goole calls ramming quote controlled collision and that's that is what it is. You're just crashing into another ship, but you're hoping to do it in a way that hurts the other ship more than it hurts you. Apparently, some scholars have suggested that trirems may have had short use lives, given the risks to their structure, both from being rammed but also from absorbing the shock of delivering a ramming attack.

But Gould says quote trirem rams were blunt with a squared off face, and were intended to pound and shatter the planks in the opposing ship's hull rather than punch a hole through it. So you were trying to damage the target ship's hull in a way that maybe cracks the wood or takes it, or causes damage to a joint or something that ruins its watertight integrity. It will

start to take on water. That's the goal. But you do not want to just punch a hole all the way through and get stuck inside it again for all the reasons we've talked about that that is a risk

to you. So this delicate balance of considerations not only had implications for the design of the RAM and the ship, but also for the crew, because a ramming attack had to be fast enough that the target ship could not escape and fast enough that the impact force would break through the planks of the enemy's hull and make it take on water. But at the same time, it could not be so fast that the impact caused damage to the attacking ship or punched through and got the ram stuck.

So this made me sort of rethink the idea of speed and the triream based on what I'm reading in this book by Gould. Here it seems that top speed was especially important for maneuvering in trying to get behind the enemy and into the advantageous position for a ramming charge, you want to be in the right position and have your enemy in the wrong position. But top speed was not necessarily for ramming itself, because ramming at top speed could have been dangerous to the attacking galley.

absorb the shock of a ramming hit. Like there was a practice of apparently using rope cables wrapped around the ship's hull to help provide strength during a battle. So there could be other things that would reinforce it that we don't fully know about, if that makes sense. But like you were saying, it does go against the idea of the Nautilus trying to just ram into something at top speed, because yeah, if the Nautilus did that, wouldn't it probably actually get stuck in the ship that it hit.

to like punch it into like into warp. That would be crazy, like that would just like atomize both vessels, right, Yeah, he would need to depend on a lesser velocity one that would accomplish whatever the goal is, you know, like I don't know, take out an engine on the enemy vessel as opposed to just destroying everything. Trekkies, I'm depending on you to point out an example where something like

that surely happened. There had to have been some ramming maneuvers at one point or another, and I just am not thinking of them.

bronze ram sheath that is from the ancient world. Maybe we'll come back and talk about that in the next part. But because it has some interesting design features not just for ramming efficiency, but a decorative design features that I thought were interesting. But I just wanted to mention this book because it gets into the idea of ramming speed.

So Fields says that if the target ship is either stationary or moving towards you, and you can hit it within an angle of between twenty and seventy degrees, the attacking boats. Ramming speed only needed to be about three to four knots, so that's not that's not super fast. That's between five point five and seven point five kilometers per hour, and so that's if you're hitting it at

a more oblique angle between twenty and seventy degrees. If you're able to line up something closer to a ninety degree hit, you hit it in the middle of its length. Even less speed is required to break through and make it take on water. That's probably between two to three knots, which is between three point seven and five point five kilometers per hour. There was also research published just this

year about the ramming speeds needed for try rems. This was published by itzac at All in the journal Journal of Archaeological Science Reports in twenty twenty four. The paper is called Damaging a triyream by Ramming the Kinetics, and the main finding was that quote the minimum impact velocity required to break a single plank is one point three to three knot, so this was obviously well within the

capabilities of a trirem. There's really no question that it could easily achieve the speeds needed to cause damage to the opposing ships, and it didn't have to be near top speed to do it. They could go at a quite achievable speed and cause that damage with minimal risk

to the attacking ship. And even on just an intuitive physics level, it kind of makes sense that you wouldn't need that much speed because of course you are hitting a boat at its weak point with your strongest point, and you've got the force of that impact concentrated down not across like the full height of it of the ship's hull, but down into this small impact zone at the tip of the ram.

be very simple and straightforward. But yeah, there's a there's a whole it's a whole engineering problem. To it. There's an there's a there's a there's a military art to it, and involves a discipline and maneuver. It's pretty fascinating, and you can only imagine the mix of uh, you know, actual like combat scenario learning that would be involved in

all of this, as well as experiments and testing. Uh yeah, it's it kind of boggles the mind, gives you a new new respect for what these ancient mariners were up.

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