Ancient Oars on the Wine-Dark Sea, Part 3

you typically face backwards when you row. We talked about archaeological evidence of Mesolithic wooden paddles found in northern Europe. We talked about some of the pressures leading to the development of different power mechanisms for ancient boats, wind powered sails versus human powered or We discussed the different designs of war galleys in the ancient Mediterranean and the considerations that led to increasing concentration of rowers and oars put

more oars in. Starting with single level galleys, the penteconter and its evolving forms, and eventually the famous trirem, which had three levels of oarsmen and was the dominant weapon of the navies of the Mediterranean Empires for hundreds of years.

We also talked about experimental modern attempts to create replicas of ancient Greek trirems, such as the Olympias project built in the nineteen eighties, and we talked about the primary battle tactics of the trirem, the main weapon of which was the ram used for ramming and cracking the hull of the opposing ships. Oh and of course, back in part one, we talked about Ptolemy, the fourth of Egypt's gigantic ancient war boat, which we are going to come back to today.

might find on a vase or something. So these ships were made out of wood, and they, according to some sources we talked about last time, they generally did not sink when damaged in battle. They might kind of dip in the water and become immobilized and they could be towed away afterwards, or if they did sink, the wooden parts mostly decomposed over time. Yeah.

reading a bit by Mark C. Davies. Really long title to this, but I guess I have to read the whole of an investigation into the absence of ancient Greek trirems in the archaeological record and a study of the battlefield deposition at the site of the Battle of Agati's off the Agatti Islands, to determine whether this example could direct future exploration for evidence of ancient Greek sea battles.

of the wreckage might have survived the sinking. But he also outlines the predominant theory as well, that we already touched on the trirems had positive buoyancy, particularly during battle, because if you had anything heavy in there, you had equipment or ballast, you'd throw that out and then when defeated, they would not have been sunk like we've been saying, but they would have been left flooded and floundering. Thus they again, they tended to be dragged back to port.

They tended to be harvested for wood. But Davies, for his part, stresses that there is disagreement about how much equipment and or ballast a trirem would carry, so it's not something we can be one certain on. So there remains at least some scholarly disagreement and discussion on this matter. Right.

bronze rams in archaeological collections today. So I was reading about one particular bronze ram from the ancient world in a source in a book called War at Sea, A Shipwrecked History from Antiquity to the Cold War, by James P. Delgado, Oxford University Press, twenty nineteen. And the section of this book I was reading concerns a ram called the Athlete ram.

This is a bronze ram filled with wooden timbers, which was discovered by an archaeologist named Yehoshua Ramone in nineteen eighty while he was snorkeling off the coast of a town called Athlet, which is near the Israeli city of Haifa. Apparently, nothing else of real archaeological significance was found in the bay, so it wasn't part of a broader shipwreck that anybody found. We just have the broken off ram with the bronze sheath on the outside and a wooden protrusion from the

prow of the boat inside. After being recovered from the sea, this object was subject to extensive study, so a few things we know about it. It is thought, though this is not certain, that the ancient warship it belonged to was wrecked and then drifted close to the shore, and then was broken apart and disintegrated somehow. They don't say how, but maybe it was rocked in the waves or hit against the rocks or something, but somehow it came apart.

So the ram, with its heavy metal sheath, sank to the ocean floor, and there it was preserved, and the rest of the boat, the wooden elements, disintegrated over time.

The ram by itself, according to Delgado, weighs about five hundred kilograms or about eleven hundred pounds, and the bronze on it is an alloy of about ninety percent copper and ten percent ten Now I found some slightly different figures about the weight I was reading about also at the website of the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, where the object is kept, and they say about its way that the bronze casting is four hundred and sixty five kilograms,

and then together with the wood inside. When it was discovered, it was six hundred kilograms, that's about a third of the weight of a typical mid sized car. It originally had sixteen timbers from the ship's frame protruding into the cast bronze fitting, and those timbers were extracted by an

American nautical archaeologist and named J. Richard Stepfi. Now the metal part of the ram is preserved at that museum, the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, but Stephi went on to publish important work on the Athlete Ram, which led him to conclude that these rams and the ships that bore them were carefully engineered to distribute the force of an impact into the sturdy bottom of the ship's hull, so that the ship itself could absorbed the shock of

a ramming impact in battle without damaging itself in the process. There is a quote from Stephie given in this book. That is quote, the entire bottom of the ship was essentially the weapon, so not just the bronze ram, but you should think of the ship itself as the weapon. Another place, another source I was reading in the last episode compared the try Rems hull to an arrow. It's designed to hit and absorb the shock and deliver that punch at its tip.

out a ramming maneuver. And that balance that you need to strike is being able to ram an enemy boat and crack its hull, causing it to take on water without damaging your own warship through impact stress and without punching a hole through the enemy's hull and getting your ram stuck, which was also bad for the attacking ship because getting stuck means you are immobilized and vulnerable to

being hit on the on the broadside yourself. And this ties into something we talked about in the last episode that ramming speed was not necessarily top speed for these galleys because ramming another ship at maximum speed was dangerous to the attacking ship for the previously mentioned reasons. Instead, you wanted to hit another ship with your prow on their broadside within an acceptable angle of attack at just

the right speed. And to illustrate the forces in play with combat based on ramming stepfi, the archaeologist used the analogy of trying to knock down a brick wall with a wheeled vehicle. So he said, you know, if you drive a motorcycle into a brick wall at one hundred kilometers per hour, you might knock down the bricks, but the motorcycle itself is going to be destroyed in the process.

But if you are driving an eighteen wheeler loaded with heavy cargo into a brick wall, you can limit the risk to yourself because you only need a relatively low speed with a vehicle that heavy. The example given is like an eighteen wheeler full of cargo going at ten kilometers per hour. You can knock the wall down and maybe not damage your own truck too much in the process.

And of course, the reason the larger vehicle can knock down the wall at a lower speed is that the greater mass of the truck results in greater kinetic energy and that's converted into force upon impact. So there was a tradeoff with these warships. A heavier ship could do

more damage with a ramming attack at lower speeds. And I remember last time, one of the books I was reading had an estimate of a required ramming speed only around two to four knots, depending on various factors like the angle of attack, and that's between three point seven and seven point five kilometers per hour, so it didn't

have to be going amazingly fast. But on the other hand, a heavier ship was harder to maneuver, and so it's harder to get behind the enemy, get to where you need to be, and to outflank the enemy in terms of the ramming approach. So there was an impetus to make the ship lighter and more nimble so that it could maneuver better in battle, but also heavier so that

it could deliver these attacks at lower speed. Now, if we're thinking about a trirem or any ancient war glley that executes a ramming maneuver as an arrow, of course, a very important thing about an arrow is the arrow head sort of the war head that delivers the force

of the attack. On one hand, if you want to maximize your damage causing potential, you could have a ram shaped like a tusk or a tooth, something that narrows down to a point at its tip, and that of course really concentrates your impact force over the smallest surface area and would be really good at punching a hole in enemy vessels. You would make sure that when you hit them it punches through and they take on water. But again that comes at risk to the attacking vessel.

Once again, with a spike, you're likely to punch through and then get stuck, which means there is a good chance you're dead as well. So the popular Greek design for a bronze ram sheath was actually not a spike, but it was shaped with three narrow horizontal fins in a kind of rectangular box shape, and this shape delivered

the ship's punch in a relatively small surface area. A. Delgado says that it's less than half of a square meter, and it was especially effective at cracking the enemy ship's planks and making it take on water without stabbing through. So you have to think of this as like they're kind of trying to design the perfect bronze hammer. They want a surface texture that will deliver force, well, that will really really concentrate that impact force and damage the

enemy hull but never get stuck. And for some reason, this three find design seemed to work very well, so they stuck with it for hundreds of years.

According to the National Maritime Museum, the idea was once that it was made using the sand casting method with a hinged mold, but more recently scholars think that it was likely made using the lost wax method, which is itself a fascinating process that we could talk about at length. Sometimes. It's probably come up on the podcast before years ago, but anyway, it's worth looking up videos of how the

lost wax method works. It's very interesting. Especially I found a cool video of like a small sort of statuette of a humanoid figure being made with a lost wax method. In short, it involves making a wax replica of the final metal item you want, and then tightly encasing that within plaster or clay with these channels running out of the mold, and then you pour the molten bronze into it. The wax melts and escapes into voids created for the process, and so the bronze replaces the wax mold.

So it looks a very steampunk and suggests some kind of horrific automaton. But coming back to the athletic ram. Of course, a good question is when and where does this come from. We have a few data points here. Delgado cites a date range between two four and one sixty four BCE, and this is based mostly on a collection of symbols encoded on the bronze ram. So it has these designs on its symbols on the surface. What would these be, Well, according to the National Maritime Museum,

they are first of all Poseidon's trident. Of course, Poseidon was the Greek god of the sea and of storms and earthquakes, and his trident was commonly used as a metonym for his powers. Like the trident is Poseidon's power that has some relationship to the power of the sea or power over the sea. So you can see why sailors might include that on a vessel for a kind of magical protection. Second symbol is a helmet with a star overhead, sort of a it's sort of a half

egg shape of a helmet. It's got a star over the top of it. Rob I've got a close up of this for you to see. Here. This helmet is apparently a symbol of the Dioscuri, meaning the sons of Zeus. These are the twins Castor and Pollux, who were commonly said to wield power over storms at sea and to

give hope to shipwrecked seamen. There's some version of the story where they have these like special horses given to them by Poseidon that gallop over the waves and allow them to rescue sailors lost at sea.

appears on coins minted in Cyprus during this period. So if this is correct, the galley probably would have belonged to the fleet of either Ptolemy the fifth Epiphanes or

Ptolemy the sixth Philometer. However, they also mentioned that radiocarbon dating of the wood that was initially embedded inside the bronze ram gave an estimate of four hundred BCE plus or minus one hundred and thirty years, So the estimate based the radio carbon estimate based on the wood is a little bit older than the estimate based on the symbols.

be lost near Athlete. Murray feels it was a smaller warship based on the Levantine coast that may have been lost in a storm or during an unrecorded naval skirmish during Dynastics struggles for control of Phoenicia. But ultimately we're probably never going to know with certainty where and when exactly this ram came from or how the ship that it belonged to was destroyed. But we've got some good guesses here.

and I guess this. I mean, this is true of any archaeological endeavor, but they're a finite number of data points, and a lot of the scholarship it seems to be about like connecting all of those lines and trying to sort of triangulate a problem truth based on it.

development of fours, fives, and polyrems. So Brian Fagan and Boris Rhankoff in their section on these ships in the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, they point to Syracuse in Sicily as being the main place where this innovation is chiefly sighted. The innovation here does not entail the addition of a fourth and fifth level to a galley. Though we talked previously about how it's like you start with one level and then the next evolution is you

do two levels and then you got three levels. Well we're not doing that anymore at this point, no fourth and fifth levels. Historians have worked this out over time. Instead, what it constitutes is more men to each or.

So also I'm imagining that, you know, fresh water has to be stored aboard so that these people can drink while they're exerting themselves like this, So like that's another consideration.

hold on to. And we see this skewed a little bit with some advancements, so Fagan and Rancoff point out we get the quin Creams, which were still three level vessels, but with two men to an ore on the top level. Two to an ore in the middle, and then one to an ore on that bottom level again you know, more or less down in the hole where you can't expand too much. So this would have meant a rowing crew of roughly three hundred people. And of course all

this comes, all this power comes at a trade off. Well, obviously again you have to take care of these human beings that are powering your vessel, if for no other reason out of self interest, because they are what makes the ship. They were what makes the ship move. But also by souping up the vessel like this, it wouldn't have actually been as fast as the Trirem but the additional enabled these ships to carry more troops as well as ultimately the latest catapult technology. Hum.

by matters in the west. Still, more and more larger ships were built and were ultimately incorporated into that fleet as time passed. So we're getting bigger vessels, and you know, the age of the trirem of trirem dominance is kind of fading out and rankoff indicate that these new ships impacted how warfare at sea was conducted, and that quote boarding tactics gradually came to be used alongside and even

instead of ramming. So ramming doesn't go away, but it's kind of like everything became very ramming intensive, and then things kind of began to diversify a little bit with these bigger ships.

on massive galleys sevens, eights, nines, and tens. And this of course required increasing number of oarsmen, but allowed the transport of more troops, more artillery, and siege equipment like towers and some of the biggest chunkers in this area, they point out, were reportedly built to besiege coastal city walls. So I guess you could almost think of these as

like a full mobile aquatic siege craft, you know. And also sometimes you would utilize a big vessel like this to break through harbor chains.

major factor was apparently the dwindling supply of skilled rowers. Again, you've got human power at the heart of this, and they were increasingly in short supply and would become rather difficult. For example, the Romans later on to source. So ships were getting bigger, navies were getting bigger, but you still needed someone to row these things.

even more physically demanding in these cases. But it also apparently meant that only the man at the tip of the loom needed to be skilled, so the inner oarsmen in such a setup they could be just muscle power following his lead, and i a power one of these naval powers lacked for skilled oarsmen, they could potentially double down on these new designs, so you could, yeah, we

only have so many skilled oarsmen to utilize. Okay, well we can focus on spreading them around around on these ships and then depend on just unskilled brute forced labor to help them, and these would become the standard long sweep galleys with multiple rowers that would apparently become the standard in the into the sixteenth and eighteenth century CE. In the mediterrane Now, Casein points out that this arms

race what he calls the Age of Titans. This corresponds with the death of Alexander the Great three twenty three BCE and the shattering of his vast empire into competing states, including as we discussed in the first episode, Tallmac Egypt. And my understanding is that this growth period wasn't just about growing out of and away from the Triyream, but also a kind of flexibility and the sorts of ships that a navy might build and use. So the age

of the Trirem was one of a kind of bottleneck perfection. Again, they think of him as kind of like jet fighters and with just as much expense and skill tied up in their use. And now we're dealing with an age where ship production in naval size is only going up, and of course something has to give, and it eventually does. But the arms race of the Titans continued, and the culmination of this arms race was, of course a vessel we kicked off with in episode one, the massive Tessaranka

terraces the forty of Ptolemy the Fourth. So, just to refresh, the Tessaranka terrace was the massive war vessel of Ptolemy the fourth, Philopater, lover of his father. His rule lasted from two twenty one to two o four BCE.

seen as a period of decline for the Ptolemys. So getting back into this question, is is this in fact just a huge spruce goose on the sea. Is this just a complete illogical vessel that with the only possible purpose being a show of might to say, look at us. It's basically a big floating parade float for the military. Or is it something that had some degree of function.

So looking at what Cason has to say about it, he does follow the basic logic that the Tesla Aca Terras was either a king's plaything or a misguided experiment. You know, how big of a war boat can we make? But he stresses that the mere concept of a massive twin hold catamaran war vessel, because that's what it was. It was like a twin hold catamaran, big flat top, kind of like an aircraft carrier for the ancient world, the ancient Mediterranean. This mere concept wasn't out, it didn't

come out of out of nowhere. He speculates that tallow me in the Fourth's grandfather tollow me the second, So we know that he had a pair of thirties and these may have also been twin hold catamaran vessels, and he cites another likely twin holed galley one built by another Alexander successor, and that's Lissimachus, king of Thrace. Cason writes that these, he calls him super dreadnoughts, would have been the flag flying command vessel of the large navies

in the days of the Ptolemys. One of Ptolemy the first chief rivals, by the way, was Antigonus the One Eyed, who ruled over Macedonia, and his son Demetrius, the first Poliocets, the sieger of Cities, was in many ways the instigator of this super galley arms race between the post Alexander states, as his name implies, Demetrius was heavy into siege craft. He was a total nerd for siege engines, and so he was really into the idea of mounting them on

galleys as well. And the emphasis, curiously here seems to have been not just about like bringing siege equipment to a destination to lay out a siege, but also on ship to ship warfare and genua. Yeah, so you would actually have these ships firing at each other, needing to carry the weight of these catapults and these towers. You know, so you can have you know, the height advantage, but potentially and you would need bigger ships with presumably wider

decks to make this possible. M and so the twin holed catamaran design would be what they ended up exploiting. Like you can how wide can you conceivably make the hole? Well, okay, you can do you can, I guess conceive when we make it this wide? Or you could just have two holes and you could have a deck covering both of them. Everyone knows what a camaran is. I assume if if not, go out to your local lake and look for the lounge craft of the pontoon boats, and you get the basic idea.

Lighter craft, trirems and quadrarine still maneuvered for position and the chance for an effective blow with the ram, but larger units, all of which had massive reinforced snouts, were not afraid to meet each other prow to prow, and this often resulted in close packed meles in which the marines on the decks hurling javelins are thrusting with special long spears. Decided the issue. To aid in this sort

of fighting, turrets were added to the ship's armament. These were movable, wooden affairs that could be quickly set up at bow and stern when a vessel went into action, and their height gave sharpshooters a chance to fire down on the enemy's decks.

Like we talked about how we had battles at sea essentially being like battles on land, except on boats, and then we get into the age of sort of dog fighting trirems, and now we're kind of back to an even to a combination of both, but an even more exaggerated feeling of some sort of a land battle happening out on the water with towers and so forth.

of the other super galleys that preceded it. So I suppose one could imagine possible examples of this from far more recent history, like what if you only had the spruce goose to try and understand what functional airplanes looked like in the years leading up to it, that sort of thing. But I think this is also interesting because it kind of potentially puts the Tessaronka Terris in context.

It's not like an outrageous design perhaps that comes out of nowhere, but like the grotesque leveling up of a design that was already functional.

much that is comparable to it. So catamarans have been used and are still used around the world, but not giant war galleys like this. And again, even though we have reconstructed a hypothetical trirem nobody has attempted to, as far as I know, to reconstruct the Tessaronka terrace. It's just too big, And obviously, I think you can make a strong case that the efforts involved would be more useful elsewhere in the pursuit of our understanding of ancient

nautical engineering and practices. But he stresses that, Okay, the ship was clearly very expensive, and it would have required

a lot of skilled labor to operate. But we might see it as a practical warship in addition to a flagship to celebrate or insist upon the naval might of Ptolemy the Fourth, but one still at the very edge of what was deemed effective and necessary in a time of almost delear competition over ship size, and it would certainly become a white elephant, he says during the following

age of decline. So I don't know. I feel like I'm obviously I'm no expert on this, and I bow to the experts who have written on this topic over the years and continue to write about it. So I don't know if Chafin is pushing too far into the possibility that it was a practical warship. I do still like the idea of seeing it not as this grotesque monster that comes out of nowhere, but it is the final known extension of a technological evolution that favored super

galleys for a while. And you know, this is kind of like the evolutionary dead end for that particular growth pattern. Yeah, now I want to touch briefly on sort of like the end of the age of the galley. And again we're dealing with ultimately a long trajectory of history here, and you see various things survive and so forth. But Fagan and Rankoff stress that by the latter part of the second century BCE, the age of the polyren was over.

So Rome's first major fleet, constructed during the First Punic War, that's against the Carthage, was based largely on copying wreckage of a Carthaginian five, and they also used some larger ships,

but mainly depended on fives. They write that by the first century CE, the quote mostly unemployed imperial fleet consisted of fives, fours, and threes and even smaller two level vessels, and the bigger vessels well, based on descriptions, the bigger vessels depended on a single level of rowers above the deck, and it seems that in time, the secret of the trirem and other three level ships was just simply lost.

The last report of trirems being used occurs during the Roman Civil War of three twenty four C, and by the fifth century CE, Greek historian Zosimus tells us that the art of building them was just truly lost, so nobody knew how to build a triorem anymore. We seem seemingly we didn't have any examples of them in full anymore, and it's left for us as an enduring mystery for centuries and centuries to come. But I guess one of the crazy parts about all of this is that we

could conceivably change at any moment. I mean, people continue to keep a lookout for for this sort of thing. Uh uh. Marine Maritime archaeology has had tremendous technological strides over the years and even in recent years, so it's not impossible that we will find more evidence of trirens and have just some new evidence to introduce into that that limited data set to try and figure out exactly what everything consisted of.

that would be great. I feel like that's slim possibility, but just in case, putting the call out there for that also right in with any examples of Trirem warfare

and games and films and so forth. I was looking around, and I should have thought of this earlier, but some of the warships space vessels in Warhammer forty thousand have this kind of ram looking structure on the bottom of them, like they clearly kind of pas earn the design a little bit after Trirems, and not unsurprisingly, it looks like there are rules for these ships ramming each other in like the old Battlefleet Gothic game and so forth. So that would make sense when you have a game.

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