Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm.
Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday, so we're going into the vault for an older episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is part two of our series about the oor powered galleys and warships of the ancient Mediterranean. This one originally published on August twenty second, twenty twenty four.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our series on the or powered galleys of the ancient world. Now, if you haven't heard part one yet, you might want to go listen to that first. But in the previous episode we talked about Ptolemy, the fourth of Egypt's great or,
which allegedly was built in the third century BCE. We have no physical remains, only historical descriptions, but Rob, what were some good details on that It allegedly had like thousands of people manning it.
Yeah, it's just an unreasonable amount of ores and oars men, but would have been essentially an ancient world aircraft carrier, though of course not for aircraft, but for at least troops, if not maybe siege equipment. The general consensus has often been that this was not a practical war vessel, but
just a way of showing off. So we talked a little bit about that, and my intention is to eventually come back to it and look at some more scholarship about it once we finished talking about all of the operational war vessels of the ancient world in the.
Mediterranean, yes, we will have to return to the big one. But also last time we talked about the difference between paddling and rowing, and thus the difference between paddles and ores. You paddle with paddle and you row with an ore, the main difference being that an ore is locked or pinned to the boat's hull itself some way, and you
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 about 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.
Yeah, as we started getting into in the last episode, the ancient Mediterranean was this vast inland sea ringed by coastal lands that boasted various powerful and established civilizations as well as emergent powers coastal cultures largely contained to this inland sea. Means to travel and exploit these waters, but the development of wind power was a huge game changer, allowing for greater use of the sea for transportation despite
the unpredictable nature of Mediterranean wins. 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 ancient Mesopotamia. You know 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
is far back is 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.
A theme I've noticed before, which is that sometimes the line between naval warfare and piracy is quite thin.
Yes, yeah, absolutely depends on his who's doing the analysis and we'll have more examples of that as we go here. One of my sources in this that I cided in the last episode is the book The a 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 BCE, 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 he 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 oversea 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 BCEE.
Now, an interesting thing about this particular battle is that I've read it described in some sources as being not that different from a land battle, just taking place on top of the water.
Yeah, and you get that from the Egyptian illustrations of the battle, the way that it ends up rolling out. So a couple of basics on the way this went down. Now, on the subject of the Sea Peoples, much has been hypothesized about who they were and where they came from. But they definitely invaded Eastern and Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, and Egypt toward the end of the Bronze Age, and
we're particularly active ing the thirteenth century BC. There are different ways to look at them, from a confederacy of different seafaring raiders, two 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 at the ships, flaming or otherwise boarding actions and so forth. Again, a lot of this just this is what we gather from ancient Egyptian illustrations of the conflict.
Yes, there's one quite famous illustration of this battle that is busy to look at.
Yeah, the only thing that's instantly clear is which one is the pharaoh. You can figure that out pretty easily.
He's the big one.
The end result here is that it's a total Egyptian victory over the sea. People's you know, not wiping them out, but defeating them enough to where they have to retreat and are apparently unable to reach so far south again as to attempt at the conquest of Egypt now elsewhere in the Mediterranean more or less around the same time, and as related in the Iliad, you have, of course the whole business with Troy of course, as as we've discussed in the show before, also their caveats about our
understanding of the historical aspects 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 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 past time of preying 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 traveled to their destination via ship.
And of course the ships play a major role in the narrative of the Iliad. You know, there's like the famous passage where there's like the listing of all the ships and the warriors brought with them.
Yeah, yeah, there's a The works of Homer, you know, are actually a key point in trying to understand like what these ships were and how they functioned. Okays In points out that ancient freighters, as the Mycenians would have used, typically traversed by sail alone. They were roomy and slow ships built exclusively for war. However, it had to be galleys.
We've kind of gotten to this already, I think. So they had to be fast when it mattered, so they could depend on sales when speed wasn't a necessity, or when the wind was good, which, of course, you know, it's worth noting that if the wind is really good, that will propel you rather swiftly, but can have to be right, and you could not necessarily count on the Mediterranean wins, especially if conflict was involved, So the sales 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 oarsmen, 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. Okay, so there was a careful balance apparently in play to how hard you would push your rowers, because if you were planning on, you know, making an amphibious landing, an amphibious invasion on the other end of your journey. They need to be able to get up
and go and do that. So I was trying to imagine, like what would be comparison with It would be kind of like if an NFL team had to potentially row to I don't know, the Super Bowl and then play the game when they got there.
Yeah, they've got to run to the game or something.
Yeah, So the author here he contends that, yeah, basically these folks would rather sail than row, and they would depend on sailing as often as possible. But again, there are going to be certain conditions where it's just going to make sense and make all the difference to get everybody pushing those oars or pulling those oars. Now, what were these ships like? We have few illustrations. We have the descriptions by Homer, including a 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 have 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 sea going greyhounds during this period between thirteen hundred and twelve hundred BC, would have looked essentially like this, long low holes on abruptly rising prowl. That's the front of the ship, and 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, chronicles from a 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 at sea. 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 development in the eighth century BCE according to Fagan and Rancoff, who I sided in the
last episode. That's Brian Fagan and Boris Rancoff. 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 hull. 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 hull itself.
Now, on one hand, I would imagine, okay, you're adding more ores, more rowers. That gives your boat more power, you can achieve greater speeds. But from what I understand, splitting the operators of the vessel the power in the rowers into multiple levels also has other implications for the design and construction of the vessel.
Yeah. Yeah, And I found this really interesting as well, because it wasn't simply that you could have more ores per vessel and therefore more power. In fact, in many cases you'd have vessels with the same number of ores that a single level craft would have boasted. But since you can spread them out across two levels, that means you can make the craft itself shorter. So you had the ability to make not only a faster vessel, but this is key, a more maneuverable one. Ah.
Right, So a shorter vessel will have less drag in the water and will be able to turn more easily, and I guess probably also have less weight per unit of rowing space.
Yeah. I don't know if there's an actual decent comparison to be made to buses, but I couldn't help. But think about like the difference between like a double decker bus and one of those giant buses where they're like joined together with this bendi part in the middle, because I guess both of them can be difficult to maneuver in their own way. But I don't know, maybe it's
the halfway useful analogy. But these general changes that are going on here, according to Fake and Runkoff, 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 carry, be
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.
Literal corporate raiders.
Exactly. Yeah, so it's dangerous out there. And yeah, any stresses that the building up of nay these and the perfecting of these different maritime war technologies in the ancient world, all this one hand in hand with the planning, the planting of colonies, the opening up of new trade routes between these various city states, and so forth. So yeah, it's just it gets more and more dangerous. And uh,
the the maritime 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 eighth through six centuries BCE. But clearly this climate demanded greater innovation, you know, to continue to 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 uh so we see a couple of things, and they're very
interconnected here. One was the increasing importance of the nautical ram, which 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 at a third level of rowers to your vessel optimize. Yeah, you add more ores, more humans pulling those oars so that we can have more power.
So the name of the try Rem comes from three levels of rowers.
That's right, the try Rem. It's basically like we've been describing. It's the Pentaconter with a third level added. But make no mistake, this edition really did apparently push the engineering limits of the ancient world, and according to what I've been reading, could easily be considered the most advanced vehicle of the age. So it wasn't just let's strap another row of oars up there. It wasn't. It involved redesigning
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 seem power see Power.
Of the day.
The Greeks use these, and then the defeat of the Persians at Salamis in four AD BCE, 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 usually a sequel, there was a sequel. I saw part of it on an airplane as usual. I am dubious about 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 hole 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 oars and it would have been as maneuverable as the two level pentdiconter, but ultimately
faster and deadly. 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 scholarship suggests 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, due in 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.
Now by never found a wreck, Rob, you mean never found a substantially intact direct But we do have pieces, right.
We have pieces, we have we have various other bits and pieces, you know, we have literary and historic writings. And there were also some remains of the sea harbor sheds at Piraeus near Athens that were also helpful in trying to piece together exactly what a trirem was.
But if somebody's trying to build a replica replica of an ancient Greek trirem in the modern world, it is an exercise involving some amount of speculation and interpretation. You don't just have like one you can copy.
Right right, And this was the endeavor in the creation of the Olympias in the mid nineteen eighties, where you had a bunch of experts come together and build what I've seen referred to as a floating hypothesis. Let's take everything we know about what a trirem probably was, you know what we know about ancient construction techniques and so forth, and let's build one with the under understanding that we're we're not going to get it one hundred percent correct.
You know, nobody, nobody has u 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 trireham 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, uh, you know, it's not tough enough to withstand being rammed and so forth, and so they they built this thing, and there's there
are plenty of images of this vessel. There are there, there's there's footage, there's there have been documentaries, U there was. 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 oarsmen 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, so.
I guess some people got really good at rowing.
Yeah. I mean, you can imagine where there would have been a huge sense of camaraderie in this. If you were a rowing enthusiast or and or you know, an ancient maritime warfare enthusiast, you know you'd want to get in there, cram into this vessel with all these people and start pulling these oars.
Oh does it look fairly cozy?
It looks like there is a sense of camaraderie. And the photos that I was looking at, you know, it's a very nice day in the Mediterranean, so there is a certain vacation he feel to these photos. But also it is a lot of people crammed into and above the whole of a vessel, pulling oars and having to do so in a skilled and determined fashion. I've read that the Olympias boasted an armament of the vessel is still round it, but it has a bronze ram on
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.
Right. Wait, you mean the replica and its krew gets sent to the past and they have to fight their way through through I don't know, battles in the fifth century BCE or a bunch of try Reams from the fifth century BCE come to now and threaten all of our modern navies and only a Tryream can fight them back.
I think both concepts could work, and I think a comedy would perhaps work well, you know, you could have this almost almost kind of like the Odyssey or something, right, except it's having to return home from the future or something. Anyway, the key findings from the Olympus trials, and there are
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 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 Rencoff, 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 look these up as well. But yeah, the ship at sea with oars out sales 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.
Also, I see there's a multi level seating with people next to each other. I guess that's to get the different angles of the ores in play, so a lot of people are sort of head level with their neighbors' butts.
Yeah. Yeah, when we're talking about three levels, don't think of it like an apartment building. There's a there's like a clear dividing point between first floor, second floor, third floor. No, it's all it's all crammed in there, and it's all part. It's not like an ice cream cone scoop scenario. It's all incorporated into the design, and that design is ultimately a large part of it is about powering that ram That's right.
So, Rob, you asked me to take a look at ramming and ramming maneuvers for this episode, and this was a lot more interesting and complex than I expected. I was just thinking, yeah, you know what, how complex can it be? You're just trying to run into each other. But no, it's a delicate dance.
Yeah, I have to admit that it was more complex than I was expecting as well, And I think part of it is that I watched twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, the nineteen fifty four adaptation a lot as a kid, in which, of course the fictional submarine the Nautilus rams enemy ships or enemies perceived enemies of Captain Nemo.
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 triream, it's just row as fast as possible and hit them with as much velocity as you can muster.
It's been a while since I've read twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, but I recall a plotline early in the book where somebody, maybe it's a Professor Aronnax or one of his rifles, proposes that all of the ships that are mysteriously sinking around the world. This is like the inciting incident or phenomena phenomenon that begins the story that they are being attacked by a gigantic narwhale. It's like,
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 maneuver ability 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 hoplite 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.
The ancient mariners' rights no longer was a sea battle, simply a match in which ships closed and the marines on each side fought it out, a sort of land fight transferred to shipboard, as in Ramsey's successful attack on the Sea Raiders. The ram changed all that. It shifted the emphasis to the men that manned the oars.
That's right, the boat is the weapon, and the target of the attack is the other boat. And so the way you wheeld the weapon is to guide and power the boat. That's right.
And in this you end up depending on a highly skilled rowing crew that could, in Case's words, respond instantly and accurately to command.
They had to be on the same page, They had to act fast, with great strength and power, and they had to all know what they were doing at the same time synchronization. So, picking up again on your analogy earlier, rob of the Trireme as kind of like a jet fighter of its time. It was a highly optimized vessel. It was stripped down to maximize rowing power. Generally, on a Trirem there were no living quarters on these boats. 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.
Yeah, And you can see this when you look at the modern photos of that reconstruction, Like there's just not a lot of a parent room in there, so you can't imagine how a meal would potentially work on there, or how you would handle anything like a shift change or sleeping and so forth.
There are accounts of people doing it, like there's one famous account in the ancient world of a trirem that was sent out after another one to try to overtake it to countermand the orders it had been given, and so allegedly like the rowers like worked in shifts so they could row all night and one slept while the other road, And so there are stories that this kind of thing could be done in the extreme, but generally this is not a vessel to live on for extended
periods 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 corollary of that is that human exhaustion could mean death, So ancient trirems often would be fitted with sales 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 like 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.
Yeah in case In points out that there would often be a capture of the enemy's ship's ram as a trophy. This is apparently common practice, though again you can recognize the challenges involved. You know it would have to be It would have to be a matter of capturing the whole vessel and not just all right, we punctured them. Now everyone go get that ram.
Hit right, Oh right, I mean it would still be full of hostile enemy troops and all that. So like, there's some more there's some more work to be done here.
Yeah. And one thing that case mentioned is that the whole like grappling and boarding actions that never completely goes away. But this ramming, this becomes like the key attack method. This becomes like the main focus of the ship design.
Yeah. So some ancient sources that refer to rammed ships describe what happens to them not as sinking, but as a word that translates to dipping. They would dip, so I think the idea is they would become flooded and useless. But because again they're wooden and lightly built, they don't sink to the bottom, so they're just like sitting there. You can imagine the physical aftermath in the area of an ancient naval would be a like a fascinating 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 and 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, 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 seemed 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.
That's right, it's got to in order for a ship that you're facing from behind to turn around and potential we come back and face you, it would have to expose its entire side to your ramming force.
Exactly. Yes. Another very important consideration is not getting stuck after the ramming attack. So imagine you use your ram at the prow of your boat to punch a hole in the enemy's hull, and then your ram gets stuck. It gets stuck in the hole that it punched. You are now just as disabled as the other ship, and if it's dipping down in the water, you're going to
be dipping 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.
Right because another one could be right behind you. Now we got three ships all crashed together.
So as important as the ramming maneuver was, an equally important thing was designing the ram and the ship so as not to get not to punch through and get stuck in the first place, and then also to have the crew master the ability of going in reverse to disengage after a successful attack. Now I was reading a bit more about some boat design considerations in a book called Archaeology and the Social History of Ships by Richard A. Gould from Cambridge University Press, twenty eleven. Ramming as an
attack maneuver introduces stresses on the ship's hull integrity. Of course, right your goule 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.
Wow, and you can only imagine that would that would add to this idea that they were costly vehicles to you, because yeah, if you could only get like maybe one hit out of this vehicle, like now it's ruined now it's it's totaled and you've got to build another one from scrap.
I mean, hopefully it's not totaled after one hit, but you know there, the more hits you do with it, the more risk you have that you are going to incur damage to the ship itself. Gould writes, quote early rams were pointed and risk to becoming stuck in the opposing ship's hull. So if you look up pictures of these, these earlier rams were often more they look just kind
of like a horn or a tusk or something. But 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 to damage the target ship's hull in way that maybe cracks the wood or takes it or causes damage to a joint or something that 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 behigh to 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.
Wow, so ramming speed could also conceivably mean or like ramming deceleration once you're in a position.
Based on what I've read, yes, it seems like you don't want to hit the hit the opposing boat at top speed again because of risks to your own hull integrity absorbing the shock of that hit, And you don't want to get stuck, so you just want to you want to hit it just hard enough to damage it now.
Gould also points out that there could have been additional things that that ancient shipbuilders did to reinforce the hull for battles and make it make it better able to 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.
Yeah, or I also couldn't help but think about Star Trek a little bit, which makes sense. Star Trek and its space combat is very much based on naval combat. You know, It's it's basically just a space age variation on all of that, and so if but with no up and down right right, But but you could imagine a scenario where if you know, Captain Picard wanted to need or needed to ram another ship, he wouldn't want
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.
Oh man, I would love to see that. So one one more question, if we're thinking about trying to zero in on ideal ramming speed for one of these attacks. I was reading in several sources. One was a book by an author named Nick Fields called Athenian Trirem Versus Persian Trirem The Greco Persian Wars four nine four forty nine. This was published in twenty twenty two by Bloomsbury, and this book contains interesting photos of a 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 not just four 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 boat's 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 trirems. This was published by Izak at All in the journal Journal of Archaeological Science Reports in twenty twenty four. The paper is called Damaging a Trirem 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 knots, 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 four course of that impact concentrated down not across like the full like height of its of the ship's hull, but down into this small impact zone at the tip of the ram.
Yeah. Yeah, I'd be interested to hear from many folks out there who have a lot of experience around boats who can speak to like accidental rammings or bumpings like in harbor and docks situations like you know, like how how easy is it to accidentally punch a hole in the hull of a small vessel or at least a wooden vessel that we're talking about wooden wooden ships here. Well, this has been fascinating. Yeah, ramming one boat into another seems that, you know, on the surface, to be something
that would be very simple and straightforward. But yeah, there's a there's a whole, 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 actual combat scenario learning that would be involved in all of this, as well as experiments and testing. Yeah, it's it kind of boggles the mind. Gives you a new new respect for what these ancient mariners were up.
To, how they had to all work together to make the boat function as kind of a single organism.
All right, well, we're going to go ahead and close out this episode, but we'll be back for a third. I think the third episode will cap everything off, so tune back in on Tuesday as we return with Part three of Ancient Oars on the Wine Dark Sea. In the meantime, we'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episode on Wednesdays.
On Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway, and huge thanks to our guests for dous for today, Andrew Howard. Appreciate you stepping in, Andrew. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Shaw.
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