August 20, 2024 • 40 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the mysteries and marvels of oar-powered galleys and warships in the ancient Mediterranean world. How many oars did they depend on? How many rowers and how many levels of rowers? And what are we to make of Ptolemy IV Philopator’s 40-oar Tessarakonteres? Find out…
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
My name is Robert Rant and I am Joe McCormick.
And today on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we are
going to be kicking off a series looking at paddles
and oars, rowing and paddling the boats of the ancient world.
Rob So you pick this topic out. What got you
thinking about paddles and oars?
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Well, I was kind of hungry for another dip into
the invention style episode that we frequently come back to.
You know, something that talks about generally or as often
as the case, you know, some sort of ancient technology
and how it comes about, and what what what leads
to these innovations, you know, what is the environment that
(00:57):
they evolve in and so forth. And I started looking
around of some of my usual primary sources and I
was like, Oh, this looks like the perfect thing to
get into, like getting into the history of these ancient
Mediterranean or powered boats. In many cases we're dealing with warships,
but this would have also applied to varying degrees to
(01:19):
various trade vessels as well. And it's one of those
topics when you really get into it, like all these
different disciplines converge because there's archaeology, modern maritime archaeology, there
is there's of course literary history. There are also all
these enduring mysteries and disagreements throughout the ages about how
(01:41):
to interpret what has been passed down concerning these vessels.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Now with these ancient warships that were powered by many rowers,
you know, and we can talk as we go on
about the different designs there, the different numbers of levels
of rowers and things like that is part of the
idea there that you would have these even in the
case where it's a boat that could move under sail
power in some cases, but you would transition to ore
(02:09):
power to increase like maneuverability and speed during a battle.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah. Yeah, this is a big part of it. Like
you could you could certainly get by with just sails,
but having the oars on hand meant that you could
absolutely have the power at your disposal when you needed it,
especially if you're dealing with an environment where the winds
might not cooperate with you. You can't necessarily count on
the winds to be there for that push to the shore.
(02:37):
If you're doing some sort of like a marine landing,
or you can't depend on the wind to help you
outrun or chase down another vessel. But if you have
your oars, well, then you're only limited by the amount
of skilled oarsmanship on board your vessel. And I think
that's an important That's one of the things that attracted
me to this too, because I feel like, speaking for myself,
(03:00):
I felt like growing up, I pretty much had a
Scooby Doo level understanding of what it meant to have
or power on a vessel. You know, sort of like
thinking about maybe not Scooby Doo in particular, but various
fictions in which people were captured by you know, some
sort of nefarious enemy thrown into the hold of the
ship where they have to pull the oars, and you know,
(03:23):
the idea here is like, oh, and we can easily,
you know, imagine ourselves in that scenario like oh, I
don't know how to pull an or mean, I've never
done this before, but now someone's going to whip me
if I don't, Well, why.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Was that Scooby Doo? Does this happen in Scooby Doo?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
I don't know if it happened in Scooby Doo, but
it may have happened in something consumed in that general area.
You know, it probably happened on some of these old cartoons.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Or Scooby and Shaggy would not be good at rowing.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
But whatever you're imagining was Scooby Doo and Shaggy thrown
into the into a ship and made to pull an oar.
Like that's kind of like where my head used to
be concerning this. But when you get into it, especially
in the ancient world, you're not dealing with a bunch
of like forced amateur oarsmen down there. You're dealing with
(04:08):
trained oorsmen. And it also non specialized doorsmen. Like it
might be very good, but this is not the only
thing they're going to be called on to do, so,
you know. Suffice to say, I feel like it's a
topic where I had a lot of long standing bits
of misinformation in my head, you know, and just assumptions
about what this world consisted of, and when you get
(04:30):
into the details, when you get into what is known
and even what was written about in the ancient world,
it's a far more complex scenario. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
I like it when we can learn everything we assumed
was wrong.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, now, I thought an interesting place to kick this
off would be to sort of jump ahead and talk
about one of the more extreme and unsustainable examples of
the technology, sort of like looking at the spruce goose
before we talk about airplanes in general.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Well, look at the lineage by seeing what's one of
the most ridiculous places that can go right.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
And the place to start is, by all accounts, the
tessar Aranka terrace, which means forty road or simply forty.
This was an allegedly massive catamaran galley warship, an extreme
example of a polyrem or mini ORed vessel, and this
was like you can look up pictures of what this
(05:23):
may have looked like. There's a lot of guesswork and
analysis involved here, but think about like an ancient world
aircraft carrier with oars, and you're kind of in the
right zone for this.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
The version I'm looking at has like more oars than
you can count sticking out all the sides of it,
and it's got what looks like a giant gramophone horn
on it. I don't know what that's for.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
So this would have been the pride and joy of
the ruler Ptolemy the fourth philopatter that means lover of
his father, which I don't know. It sounds like if
that's your title, now I'm questioning your love for your
father because you're making such a big deal out of it.
But anyway, he was the fourth Ptolemaic pharaoh of Egypt.
(06:09):
A little background. I think we've touched on the Ptolemies
on the show before, but the rule of the Ptolemies began
in three oh five BCE after the collapse of the
Macedonian rule established by Alexander the Great. When Alexander's expansive
empire collapsed, his followers ended up competing with each other
for the fragmented remains of that empire, and his general
(06:32):
and companion, Ptolemy the First Solder or Ptolemy the Savior,
claimed the Egyptian territory, the Egyptian centered territory, and established
the Ptolemaic kingdom there. So the Ptolemies would rule over
Egypt as essentially a Hellenistic state for three centuries until
the death of Cleopatra. That's when the Roman Empire conquered
(06:55):
Egypt in thirty BCE. Historians often point to make Egypt
as the longest and final Egyptian dynasty. During their rule,
they faced constant threats. Like at the very beginning, there
were the wars of the Diodechai. These were the successors
of Alexander, again fighting for the scraps of that empire.
(07:16):
There were multiple wars with the Seleucid Empire and the
Kushite Empire to the south. There were rebellions in southern Egypt,
and then, of course, finally the Roman Empire which conquered them.
Now coming to Ptolemy, the fourth lover of his father,
who he would have ruled two twenty one through two
four BCE, generally held up as part of the dynasty's decline.
(07:42):
Despite some successes in the Fourth Syrian War, it was
a period of rebellion in the south of Egypt, and
he was often criticized as being far more concerned with luxury,
ceremony and the trappings of empire rather than the severe
work required to prolong its era. But if nothing else,
he by all accounts had a massive boat, and that
(08:05):
is where the Tesla ronca terras comes into play. Now.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
If he had a reputation for being being more concerned
with luxury and ceremony than with practicality does the boat
follow this design?
Speaker 2 (08:18):
It seems like most of the sources I've looked at
argue that this is the case. That this was. I've
seen some quibbles, and we'll get into some of this,
but by and large, a lot of people are like, yeah,
this is exactly the sort of vessel that someone more
concerned with appearances and pomp would would want constructed, A
massive vessel that is maybe not actually an operational war platform,
(08:42):
but just a way to show off how awesome you
are and could potentially be in battle, as long as
you don't think too hard about how the ship's going
to get around. Okay, let's hear about it, all right.
So I mentioned it has a lot of ores. Depending
on how you try and reconstruct it on paper in
your head, you might have had more more than five
rows of ores. We'll get into the details of that,
(09:04):
probably more in the next episode. But seven naval rams
and flat on top an enormous aircraft carrier style deck,
and this would have been used to carry or at
least show off troops and or siege equipment. Now, to
be clear, we have no physical evidence of the Tessar
Raga teris. We have archaeological evidence of some very old
(09:26):
boats and ships from around the world, and thanks to
twentieth and twenty first century maritime archaeology and all of
its technological innovations, we actually know more than ever before.
I noticed that Michael Levinson had an article in The
New York Times from earlier this year get the point
that it's a golden age for shipwreck discoveries. We're just
(09:47):
able to see what's down there, detect things, and then
analyze them in ways that we couldn't even do last century,
and last century was a pivotal time for advancing our
understanding of what came before. Well, it's interesting to think
about because, on one hand, an operational wooden ship, as
I've seen pointed out, is just in a perpetual state
(10:08):
of decay. I mean, that's why we have the concept
of the ship of theseus. It's constantly rotting. Essentially, it wears,
it breaks, it requires upkeep and replacement, and if left
to the ravages of time, if conditions are not right,
the whole thing is lost. For instance, one of the
main culprits, it's often pointed out, is the shipworm, as
(10:29):
a simil pullock, a nautical archaeologist at Texas A and
M University and College Station pointed out, and this is
who was citing a that GEO article from twenty fourteen
titled five Shipwrecks Lost to Time that archaeologists would love
to get their hands on by Jane J. Lee, which
which does get into some ships from this time period.
But basically the idea is that this is this worm
(10:52):
is a wood burrowing mollusc. We may have talked about
it on the show. Before they can break down a
submerged wooden vessel apparently in as little as five years.
But the main way that ancient ships survive are by
winding up buried under sediment or buried under their own cargo,
such as you know, a bunch of ceramic andphora, you know,
(11:15):
basically earthenware containers that end up serving as man made
sediment to preserve the portion of the hull underneath it.
If you've watched any documentaries about, you know, ancient Mediterranean shipwrecks,
you've probably seen some footage like this where it looks like, oh,
it looks like a bunch of urns on the bottom
(11:37):
of the ocean, and that's essentially what it is. But
then what is underneath those urns, what else is preserved?
And sometimes we can learn a lot from what remains beneath.
And this is why harbors, rather than open ocean, are
often considered better hiding places for some of these ancient wrecks.
And there also may be factors related to just how
many of these ships operated and so forth, and how
they operated. But yeah, it's like it's one of these
(12:00):
these cases where, yeah, we have one particular giant vessel
that one's lost to history. But in terms of more
common vessels of this type, yeah, we do have examples
of shipwrecks we've been able to find and learn from,
you know, especially in recent years. But as with the
fossil record, you know, depending on what we have to
depend on, has various holes in it. You know, we
(12:21):
have physical evidence of ships, and then we also have
the written word to turn to. But as Christopher E.
Choffen discusses in the Tessaranka Terras reconsidered this is this
was a nineteen ninety one through nineteen ninety three a
publication of Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Technical
information in these ancient texts is uncommon, so it's you'll
(12:44):
have mentions of ships, but you know how many times
do they stop to really roll out the details and
the stats for a given vessel. But I guess the
thing about the about a ship this big is that
there would be some descriptions, some stats. It's out there
since it is so novel. You know, it's kind of
like if you look in like biblical texts, are you
(13:07):
going to have this, you know, actual length and with
descriptions for a cart? Now probably not everyone knows what
a card is the arc of the covenant, well, and
then you got might get some details right. So, concerning
the Tessaranka terras, there are two main sources that are
typically cited. One is a second century CE Greek source,
(13:27):
the writings of Athenaeus of Necratis. This is more than
two hundred years after the reign of Ptolemy. The fourth.
Chaffin cites this one in his work, and among the
details included are the following two hundred and eighty cubits
in length, which, to understand this would be like four
hundred and twenty feet or one hundred and thirty meters
(13:48):
a breadth of thirty eight cubits or fifty seven feet
seventeen meters. I'm not sure if this is per catamaran
hole seven naval rams. As we discussed proportions, breathtaking decorations.
This is all subjective. And then it's said to have
required four thousand oarsmen and four hundred sailors and officers.
(14:16):
That alone is is incredible, if not unbelievable. And if
it's said to carry two eight hundred and fifty.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Marines, okay, and the marines would refer to like armed
soldiers who were not involved in the piloting or powering
of the vessel, so they could you know, if you
made contact with another ship at sea or made a landing,
they could disembark or board another vessel to attack.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Yeh, pretty much now in terms of whether they were
pulling the oars or not, as we'll get into maybe so.
But then you look at these stats, it's like, okay,
four thousand oarsmen. Even if every single marine was double
doing double duty and also pulling the oars, you still
would and also throwing the four hundred sailors and officers,
(15:00):
You're still short by a lot. You still need hundreds
and hundreds of additional oarsmen to power this thing.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
So do experts have an opinion of like whether this
could be possible, whether this possibly existed as described, or
what's going on here?
Speaker 2 (15:17):
I mean it basically the big discussion comes down to
whether it was for show or operational, you know, like
because another detail that is mentioned in this text is
that it required this big specialized launching system in docks.
So it was like so huge that it required something
new to be built in order to even you know,
(15:38):
go up to it and use it to any limited
degree in the water. But even still ancient authors were
still skeptical about it as well, like for instance, another
the other major description is a lot shorter, and it
comes from Plutarch. He lived forty six through one nineteen CE,
and he repeats some of the exact same stats, but
(15:59):
also add that the ship was just for show and
could only be moved with great difficulty and danger. So
he comments that it was not at all a practical warship,
but a spectacle, certainly in keeping with the reputation of
Ptolemy the Fourth that has passed down through the centuries. Okay, now,
(16:19):
I guess you could get into a more nuanced discussion
about to what extent the spectacle is as useful or
more useful than a functional vessel. I mean, I guess
that's that's on the table. And then we have to
also take into account the reputation of ancient rulers as
becomes kind of submitted in the in the historical record.
(16:42):
So you know, there's a there's a lot of back
and forth to have there, But it sounds like there's
a strong case to be made that this was not
very a very functional warship, that it was just about
showing off your military mind. But I think it's an
interesting place to set out on our journey here. You know,
looking at the Tessaranka tear is something that exists as
the most outrageous and possibly grotesquely unrealistic example of an
(17:06):
evolution of design in the ancient world. And I think
this is especially interesting in light of how absolutely on
point the engineering of the try Rem is considered to
have been. I'm going to share a quote from Chaffin
on this that I referenced earlier. To be clear, this
is he's not talking about the Tessaranga teris here. He's
talking about the more common and functional tri rem or
(17:28):
driven vessel. He writes it was a warship design at
the very limits of available technology, incapable of further development,
expensive to maintain, costly and trained manpower, and in the
long run too costly for the resources of the city state.
So I think it seems reasonable to think of these
almost as like jet fighters in the modern area, you know,
(17:48):
in terms of their upkeep and the technology involved, and
just how expensive they are to maintain and use. So
we're going to come back around to these, We're going
to come back around to the Tasaronkataris, We're going to
(18:11):
come back around to the Trireme, and they sort of
pinnacle of this technology as it develops in the ancient world.
But before we get into that, we need to talk
more basically about oars and paddles and other related technologies
that are the basis for all of this. So I
guess to kick off here just a discussion of some
(18:33):
of the basic terminology that is used here. I was
looking at the chapter in the seventy Great Inventions of
the Ancient World by Brian M. Fagan, and the chapter
that deals one of the chapters that deals with boats
has Sean mcgrail on there as the co author who
wrote the book Boats of the world. It covers the
(18:55):
basics of paddles, polls, and ores. So polling involves the
use of a long pole or setting pole, sometimes forked
at the end, to push a small craft along by
pushing it against the bottom of a body of water.
And of note, this is a technology that may leave
no trace on the vessel itself, like it's you know,
(19:17):
you can imagine it. You've probably seen some version of this,
you know, in the world around you, because it is
still used to this day. You know, it's just somebody
poling along.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
Because they're especially useful in very shallow bodies of water
and shallow channels. You might often see them paired with
a kind of boat called a punt, which is a
more square shaped, flat bottomed boat that goes less deeply
into the water. So yeah, you'll see people out on
you know, shallow reams and streams and rivers, punting out
(19:46):
on a kind of flat bottom boat, pushing along the
bottom of the pole.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yeah, yeah, you see, you see these out in the
world for sure. And then of course there are paddles.
Use of a paddle generally doesn't leave any evidence on
craft itself either, And then you have ores. Ores require
a pivot and possibly other specialized fittings, something that often
(20:10):
will leave evidence on a vessel, though you know, should
enough of that vessel survive and I guess, depending on
the materials used, you could also have like some of
these fittings alone survive.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Yeah, so yes, to pick up on that. This is
a distinction that I did not fully have in my
mind before researching for this episode. But there is a
difference between a paddle and an ore. I would have
previously used these words interchangeably. But a paddle is a
bladed beam that is held freely in the hands. And
(20:44):
you might have a blade just on one end you
paddle on one side of the boat, or you might
have a double sided paddle with two different blades, and
you can alternate which side, like you might use in
a kayak or something. So the paddle is held freely
in the hands, while an ore is mounted to the
boat in some way through a lock or a pin,
sometimes called an ore lock, though that is a false
(21:06):
cognate with the name or lock, as in count or lock.
It is skilled differently thoar locked. Okay, And as with
the different names of these devices, the verb is different
as well, so Pushing through the water with a paddle
is called paddling. Pushing through the water with an ore
is called rowing. That's what rowing is. Now. If you
(21:27):
have no experience with canoes or row boats yourself, you
might not think of this. But there's a difference in
the orientation of the operator with these two different ways
of pushing through the water with bladed sticks. A person
operating a free hand paddle is usually facing the same
direction they're traveling, while a person rowing with a locked
(21:51):
or is usually facing away from their direction of travel.
So a canoe you're looking ahead, a row boat you're
looking behind.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
You know, it's interesting that I've done both of these before,
only a little bit of rowboat usage, mostly like canoe
stuff packing. But my mind instantly goes to how these
translate differently in cinematic usage. You know, like if you
have someone in a row boat and you want their face,
(22:20):
you want their emotions, their facial expression in the picture,
then you are focusing, you're looking at the rear of
the vessel and you're seeing them move away from the camera,
Whereas if you're going you want the same effect more
or less with someone in a canoe, where you're going
to have to have them coming towards the camera. So
I don't know, you could probably get into a into
(22:41):
a into a big, you know, cinematic discussion about how
the different technologies transfer differently to the screen and what
they say about the characters and their journeys.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Yeah, that's interesting, you know. For some reason, I tend
to think of when you have a shot of somebody
powering a rowboat with oars with in oarlocks, so they're
facing towards the stern of the boat. They're usually talking
to somebody, aren't they Usually there's somebody sitting facing forward
opposite them, sitting behind them, talking to them, and it seems.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Like that, yeah, or they're like a lonely individual like
rowing away from the shore where our point of view is,
and it seems to like, you know, drive home a
sort of like sort of a negative connotation, like they
are leaving us, or they're going off into loneliness or something.
Whereas again, if someone's in the canoe, they're often moving
towards us. So I don't know, I guess there are
(23:33):
ways of sorting that out in our hands.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
Rowing and paddling is like more interesting the more I
think about it. It reveals more kind of unappreciated physical
forces in play that I don't know are just invisible
to you while you're doing it. But one of the
other things I was thinking about that makes rowing a
powerful way of moving an object is the idea that
(23:59):
there is great resistance to a paddle blade moving through
water than there is to a paddle blade moving through air. Right,
so you have the ability at the surface of the
water to dip the ore in for a power stroke,
and there's greater resistance there, which allows you to have
more force pushing the boat forward, and then you can
(24:21):
lift the ore up out of the water to move
it back into place for another power stroke. But while
it's moving through the air to go back for the
next stroke, the return stroke is not really offsetting your
movement very much, because the ore moves very easily through
the air, and in some cases you can even see
like practiced rowers tilting the blade so that it's like
(24:42):
sharp edge going through the air instead of flat edge
going through the air. I guess, to get even less
air resistance while they're moving it back.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
This makes me think of various illustrations of like old
illustrations of possible submarines, only you would see ores on them, now,
I guess, without getting into ancient submarine designs, I guess
sometimes these were depicted as ways that a submarine would
move along as a traditional boat, and not how they
would operate beneath the waters. But if you were to
(25:15):
I guess you could operate ores beneath the waters, probably
having to turn the blade so that it could move
more easily back up to a starting position, but not
as easily as you'd be able to do this by
having the blade of the ore dip in and out
of the water.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
That's right. Yeah, So I think you could still move
by a rowing motion under the water, And in fact,
you can think of the way some like a fish's
pectoral fins can kind of you know, move it around
a little bit with with a sort of rowing like
motion in the water. But yeah, I think by all
accounts of oars would be much less efficient if you
were if you were only able to move them under
(25:52):
the water, you could probably still get some movement out
of them, like you said by yeah, like by orienting
the blades differently or going flat or going flat when
it's time to push and then for the return stroke
laying them, laying them sharp side forward. Maybe also by
this is a good question. I'm not sure if this
would work. Maybe also by altering the speed of movement
through the water, like with a fast power stroke and
(26:14):
then a very slow return stroke. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
It sounds reasonable to me, but I don't.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
Know for sure. I haven't tested it out. But yeah,
so it's like by existing, by floating on top of
the water, existing at the interface between the greater resistance
of the water and the lower resistance of the air,
you can get a greater advantage from the rowing movement
by having this resistance on the power stroke and then
relatively easier environment for the return stroke.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Interesting. Yeah, so it's fascinating to break down the basic
physics behind these different methods, these different machines. But in
terms of when did they develop, well, this is one
of those questions. It's ultimately unanswerable, and we have to
throw in all the general caveats about wooden artifacts and
how frequently are lost. At the time of the publication
(27:02):
of Fagan's book, they cited the earliest known paddles dating
to seventy five hundred BCE in Germany and Britain. They
Cite thirty two one hundred BCE is the oldest evidence
of polling from Mesopotamia and date rowing to third millennium
BCE in Egypt. Also, paddle use was apparently first illustrated
(27:24):
in the fourth millennium BCE in Egypt.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Yeah, we don't know for sure when the earliest paddle
driven boats were used, but we have some interesting pieces
of evidence from apparently fairly early use at least. So
One source I was looking at was a paper published
in a journal called Past Mobilities by Mark Dunkley called
Traveling by Water A Chronology of Prehistoric Boat Archaeology slash
(27:48):
Mobility in England. This was published in twenty sixteen, and
the author here notes something interesting about the archaeological record
in Northern Europe at least, which is that the evidence
of the use of boats and water transport goes back
to very generally between the tenth and fifth millennium before present,
(28:10):
which falls within the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age, but
that the earliest evidence for water transport is generally not
the physical remains of boats. Rather it is first of
all circumstantial evidence and Dunky sites, as one example here,
evidence of human settlement on islands such as the Inner
(28:32):
Hebrides and Ireland, and in those cases this was by
the ninth millennium before present, during times when we can
be fairly confident that they were not connected to the
rest of Eurasia by land bridges or expanses that were
traversible in any method other than by boat. So this
implies there must have been some way for Stone Age
(28:53):
settlers to cross these large expanses of water. Thus they
likely had some form of watercraft. Another piece of evidence
early evidence that Dunkley mentions for water transport in northern
Europe is paddles dated from the tenth to fifth millennium
before present, especially found in areas on the edge of
the Baltic Sea. And one example that I came up
(29:15):
when I was looking for I was looking for specific
examples of earliest known paddles in the archaeological record, and
one is the so called Duvincy paddle, which was discovered
in the nineteen twenties. I've seen two different dates on
this nineteen twenty six in nineteen twenty four, I'm not
sure which is right, but discovered in the nineteen twenties
at an archaeological site associated with Middlestone Age hunter gatherers
(29:39):
in northern Germany in a place now called du Vinci.
And this paddle is made of pine wood and based
on two different samples, it has been dated to between
eight and nine thousand years ago. Interesting note is it's
not huge. It seems that it was about fifty two
cinema in length, or you know, it's just over twenty
(30:04):
inches long. So that's kind of interesting to think about.
Usually the paddles I think of today are longer, but
you can still paddle with a shorter paddle.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah, And looking at the photograph here of the artifact,
I mean it very much looks like paddle. You don't
have to read into it too much. I mean it
instantly reads as a paddle to just casual observation.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Yeah. So I was trying to understand the human context
in which this paddle would have been used. I was
reading about the apparent Mesolithic settlement in this area in
a source called spade Paddling on a Mesolithic Lake, Remarks
on pre boreal and boreal sites from du Vinsi, Northern
Germany by Klaus Bochelmann, published in twenty twelve in some
(30:52):
kind of collection. It's called a mindset on flint studies
in honor of Dick Stapert Part three the Mesolithic and Neolithic,
and so the area of Lake Douvency, interestingly was likely
exploited at this time as a temporary encampment for the
harvesting of hazel nuts. You a fan of hazel nuts, Rob.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
I don't know. My mind instly goes to like hazel
nut coffee, and I say no, thank you, And no,
I mean, I guess that what hazel nuts, and you
think of of various like hazel nut based chocolate spread.
So no, I'm I guess I'm very much in favor
of them in other contexts.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
I guess they didn't have chocolate yet. But you're like
halfway to stone Age in nutella? Wait, is there even
chocolate in nutella? It's like brown and sweet.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
There is chocolate and nutella. Yeah, okay, but nutella. Yeah.
It's interesting because I think I've looked into this before
and it's like conceivable that you had some form of
ancient nut butter based on hazel nuts, but you could
not have possibly had nutella yet because you didn't have
access to chocolate from of course South America.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Right, But about these people who were harvesting hazel nut.
Bokelman writes, quote short term harvesting camps, sometimes under pine
trees and marked not by huts but by birch bark mats,
were set up on muddy ground near open water and
on islets of the lake. These were optimal locations for
spade paddling harvesting trips to hazel groves in the vicinity
(32:19):
of the lake. Hazelnuts were roasted in hot sand in
open fireplaces, and the edible kernels were either consumed on
the spot or were stored for future use. Doesn't that
just sound cozy? I don't know, it sounds nice. So
Bokeelman says that the evidence indicates that small family based
groups probably occupied the area for several days at a
(32:41):
time until the area became more thickly forested. I guess
there's some changing climate and flora around there, and as
the forest came in, this reduced the productivity of the
hazel groves and thus made Lake d Vinci less attractive
as a gathering location for humans because there were fewer
(33:02):
hazel nuts to harvest.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Fewer nuts, less reason to go there.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
Right, But so this paddle was found, it seemed to
have been become buried in sediments sometime you know, eight
to nine thousand years ago and was preserved until it
was found in the nineteen twenties. And so somebody was
paddling obviously, somebody was paddling some kind of watercraft, some
very early watercraft through the water, possibly to harvest hazel
(33:28):
nuts in this area at the time. And now interestingly,
according to Dunkley, the author I mentioned earlier, these types
of paddles appear in the archaeological record before the earliest
evidence of log boats, leading to the speculation by an
author named Lanting in nineteen ninety seven that the earliest
watercraft were not log boats but were skin boats or
(33:51):
bark boats. So some kind of design that you know,
you might you would build around a frame and make
roughly waterproof, but would be less likely to be preserved intact.
And there are some sort of candidate pieces people have found,
you know, like a piece of work to Antler, where
somebody's looked at this and said, ah, this might have
formed part of the skeleton of a skin boat or
(34:13):
a bark boat or something, but it's hard to be sure.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
I mean, I wonder if part of that The idea
here is that like a skin boat would perhaps be
easier to carry around. You could if you're having to
depend on a lifestyle then involves more of a transient
existence and moving from point A to point B with
the seasons and so forth. Then the skin boat you
can carry with you, as opposed to a dugout canoe,
which might be harder in some context to carry around.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Yeah. I wouldn't know for sure, but that makes sense
to me.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Now. Much of what we'll be discussing here concerns the
seagoing vessels of the ancient Mediterranean or the wine dark Sea,
if you will, to invoke a common translation from Homer's
Iliad in the Odyssey, But what was it about these
waters and what were some of the defining elements in
the development of ancient marine navigation here? Well, one of
my chief sources on this is The Ancient Mariners by
(35:16):
Lionel Cason, published nineteen ninety one. He was to cease now,
he was, but he was one of the leading scholars
on ancient ships and marine operations. And as we progress,
we'll also try to incorporate added insight garnered via later
(35:37):
twentieth and twenty first century maritime archaeology. But Casein writes
that while historians have differed over the years on the subject,
evidence suggests that Mediterranean sailors kept mostly to this inland
sea the Mediterranean, and the key innovation that enabled them
to make use of the sea here was wind. So
(35:59):
prior to this they depended on poles for shallow navigation
and various forms of paddling and rowing if they needed
to go farther out. But wind power, case In Wrights,
was a real game changer. So I want to read
a quote here. This is from again his book The
Ancient Mariners nineteen ninety one. For the first time they
(36:20):
harnessed a force other than their own muscles, their servants,
or their wives. It was a discovery whose effect reached
down the ages. From this moment on, the easiest and
cheapest way of transporting bulky loads over distances of appreciable
length was by water.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
And remain so today, by the way.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Yeah, and so we get into this discussion though, and
we'll deal more with this in the next episode. But
so you're gonna end up with a situation where you
have wind power your disposal, which is very clearly awesome
and is a real game changer. But you also have
these technologies of the ore and the paddle. But on
(37:00):
top of this in the Mediterranean zone in particular, coming
back to Fagan and one of his other contributing riders,
Boris Rankoff, who will come back to points out that
the galley, the sea going vessel powered by oars in
the ancient world, this was, for all intents and purposes,
a Mediterranean phenomenon. Elsewhere at this time, ores were more
(37:25):
for powering small vessels on rivers and lakes, and you
often were able to lean more into the sail the
rest of the time. But they point out that a
lot of the reason that we see this emphasis on
ores in the ancient Mediterranean it comes down to the
unreliability of the wind there. Unreliability by the way, as
(37:47):
it applies to high stakes, often conflict oriented sailing. None
of this is directly applicable to modern discussions of wind energy.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
Ah, But what you're saying there makes sense as to
why you would often think of a trade ship as
being one that solely relied on wind power versus a
warship being more likely to have lots of rowers and ores.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Right, Because it comes down to a situation where you're
going to depend on the sales as much as you can.
But when it comes down to it, when you need
to close the distance between yourself and an enemy or
try to greatly increase that distance, you might not have
the wind on your side. You cannot necessarily count on it.
But what you can count on are the mechanisms of
(38:31):
the ores and the muscle power of the people to
pull those ores. So yeah, if you need that power
and you can't count on the wind or the wind
is not cooperating, well, then you bust out the oars
and you use or power to meet your objective. Nice
So in the next episode, we'll come back in and
we'll talk at a greater length about this, and then
(38:54):
we'll get into some examples of ancient sea battles that
we know based on the written record and some illustrations,
and then we'll get into the technology of these or
powered vessels that are so famous among the Greeks, and
then later the Romans.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
I can't wait, all.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Right, so ramming speed in the next episode, but for
now we're gonna go ahead and close it out. We'll
remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, we do a short form episode.
We've been running a lot of monster facts recently, but
in the weeks ahead, I'll come back with more Animalia stependium,
(39:35):
some more artifacts as we move forward. And then on
Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk
about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
to topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
My name is Robert Rant and I am Joe McCormick.
And today on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we are
going to be kicking off a series looking at paddles
and oars, rowing and paddling the boats of the ancient world.
Rob So you pick this topic out. What got you
thinking about paddles and oars?
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Well, I was kind of hungry for another dip into
the invention style episode that we frequently come back to.
You know, something that talks about generally or as often
as the case, you know, some sort of ancient technology
and how it comes about, and what what what leads
to these innovations, you know, what is the environment that
(00:57):
they evolve in and so forth. And I started looking
around of some of my usual primary sources and I
was like, Oh, this looks like the perfect thing to
get into, like getting into the history of these ancient
Mediterranean or powered boats. In many cases we're dealing with warships,
but this would have also applied to varying degrees to
(01:19):
various trade vessels as well. And it's one of those
topics when you really get into it, like all these
different disciplines converge because there's archaeology, modern maritime archaeology, there
is there's of course literary history. There are also all
these enduring mysteries and disagreements throughout the ages about how
(01:41):
to interpret what has been passed down concerning these vessels.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Now with these ancient warships that were powered by many rowers,
you know, and we can talk as we go on
about the different designs there, the different numbers of levels
of rowers and things like that is part of the
idea there that you would have these even in the
case where it's a boat that could move under sail
power in some cases, but you would transition to ore
(02:09):
power to increase like maneuverability and speed during a battle.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah. Yeah, this is a big part of it. Like
you could you could certainly get by with just sails,
but having the oars on hand meant that you could
absolutely have the power at your disposal when you needed it,
especially if you're dealing with an environment where the winds
might not cooperate with you. You can't necessarily count on
the winds to be there for that push to the shore.
(02:37):
If you're doing some sort of like a marine landing,
or you can't depend on the wind to help you
outrun or chase down another vessel. But if you have
your oars, well, then you're only limited by the amount
of skilled oarsmanship on board your vessel. And I think
that's an important That's one of the things that attracted
me to this too, because I feel like, speaking for myself,
(03:00):
I felt like growing up, I pretty much had a
Scooby Doo level understanding of what it meant to have
or power on a vessel. You know, sort of like
thinking about maybe not Scooby Doo in particular, but various
fictions in which people were captured by you know, some
sort of nefarious enemy thrown into the hold of the
ship where they have to pull the oars, and you know,
(03:23):
the idea here is like, oh, and we can easily,
you know, imagine ourselves in that scenario like oh, I
don't know how to pull an or mean, I've never
done this before, but now someone's going to whip me
if I don't, Well, why.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Was that Scooby Doo? Does this happen in Scooby Doo?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
I don't know if it happened in Scooby Doo, but
it may have happened in something consumed in that general area.
You know, it probably happened on some of these old cartoons.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Or Scooby and Shaggy would not be good at rowing.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
But whatever you're imagining was Scooby Doo and Shaggy thrown
into the into a ship and made to pull an oar.
Like that's kind of like where my head used to
be concerning this. But when you get into it, especially
in the ancient world, you're not dealing with a bunch
of like forced amateur oarsmen down there. You're dealing with
(04:08):
trained oorsmen. And it also non specialized doorsmen. Like it
might be very good, but this is not the only
thing they're going to be called on to do, so,
you know. Suffice to say, I feel like it's a
topic where I had a lot of long standing bits
of misinformation in my head, you know, and just assumptions
about what this world consisted of, and when you get
(04:30):
into the details, when you get into what is known
and even what was written about in the ancient world,
it's a far more complex scenario. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
I like it when we can learn everything we assumed
was wrong.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, now, I thought an interesting place to kick this
off would be to sort of jump ahead and talk
about one of the more extreme and unsustainable examples of
the technology, sort of like looking at the spruce goose
before we talk about airplanes in general.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Well, look at the lineage by seeing what's one of
the most ridiculous places that can go right.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
And the place to start is, by all accounts, the
tessar Aranka terrace, which means forty road or simply forty.
This was an allegedly massive catamaran galley warship, an extreme
example of a polyrem or mini ORed vessel, and this
was like you can look up pictures of what this
(05:23):
may have looked like. There's a lot of guesswork and
analysis involved here, but think about like an ancient world
aircraft carrier with oars, and you're kind of in the
right zone for this.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
The version I'm looking at has like more oars than
you can count sticking out all the sides of it,
and it's got what looks like a giant gramophone horn
on it. I don't know what that's for.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
So this would have been the pride and joy of
the ruler Ptolemy the fourth philopatter that means lover of
his father, which I don't know. It sounds like if
that's your title, now I'm questioning your love for your
father because you're making such a big deal out of it.
But anyway, he was the fourth Ptolemaic pharaoh of Egypt.
(06:09):
A little background. I think we've touched on the Ptolemies
on the show before, but the rule of the Ptolemies began
in three oh five BCE after the collapse of the
Macedonian rule established by Alexander the Great. When Alexander's expansive
empire collapsed, his followers ended up competing with each other
for the fragmented remains of that empire, and his general
(06:32):
and companion, Ptolemy the First Solder or Ptolemy the Savior,
claimed the Egyptian territory, the Egyptian centered territory, and established
the Ptolemaic kingdom there. So the Ptolemies would rule over
Egypt as essentially a Hellenistic state for three centuries until
the death of Cleopatra. That's when the Roman Empire conquered
(06:55):
Egypt in thirty BCE. Historians often point to make Egypt
as the longest and final Egyptian dynasty. During their rule,
they faced constant threats. Like at the very beginning, there
were the wars of the Diodechai. These were the successors
of Alexander, again fighting for the scraps of that empire.
(07:16):
There were multiple wars with the Seleucid Empire and the
Kushite Empire to the south. There were rebellions in southern Egypt,
and then, of course, finally the Roman Empire which conquered them.
Now coming to Ptolemy, the fourth lover of his father,
who he would have ruled two twenty one through two
four BCE, generally held up as part of the dynasty's decline.
(07:42):
Despite some successes in the Fourth Syrian War, it was
a period of rebellion in the south of Egypt, and
he was often criticized as being far more concerned with luxury,
ceremony and the trappings of empire rather than the severe
work required to prolong its era. But if nothing else,
he by all accounts had a massive boat, and that
(08:05):
is where the Tesla ronca terras comes into play. Now.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
If he had a reputation for being being more concerned
with luxury and ceremony than with practicality does the boat
follow this design?
Speaker 2 (08:18):
It seems like most of the sources I've looked at
argue that this is the case. That this was. I've
seen some quibbles, and we'll get into some of this,
but by and large, a lot of people are like, yeah,
this is exactly the sort of vessel that someone more
concerned with appearances and pomp would would want constructed, A
massive vessel that is maybe not actually an operational war platform,
(08:42):
but just a way to show off how awesome you
are and could potentially be in battle, as long as
you don't think too hard about how the ship's going
to get around. Okay, let's hear about it, all right.
So I mentioned it has a lot of ores. Depending
on how you try and reconstruct it on paper in
your head, you might have had more more than five
rows of ores. We'll get into the details of that,
(09:04):
probably more in the next episode. But seven naval rams
and flat on top an enormous aircraft carrier style deck,
and this would have been used to carry or at
least show off troops and or siege equipment. Now, to
be clear, we have no physical evidence of the Tessar
Raga teris. We have archaeological evidence of some very old
(09:26):
boats and ships from around the world, and thanks to
twentieth and twenty first century maritime archaeology and all of
its technological innovations, we actually know more than ever before.
I noticed that Michael Levinson had an article in The
New York Times from earlier this year get the point
that it's a golden age for shipwreck discoveries. We're just
(09:47):
able to see what's down there, detect things, and then
analyze them in ways that we couldn't even do last century,
and last century was a pivotal time for advancing our
understanding of what came before. Well, it's interesting to think
about because, on one hand, an operational wooden ship, as
I've seen pointed out, is just in a perpetual state
(10:08):
of decay. I mean, that's why we have the concept
of the ship of theseus. It's constantly rotting. Essentially, it wears,
it breaks, it requires upkeep and replacement, and if left
to the ravages of time, if conditions are not right,
the whole thing is lost. For instance, one of the
main culprits, it's often pointed out, is the shipworm, as
(10:29):
a simil pullock, a nautical archaeologist at Texas A and
M University and College Station pointed out, and this is
who was citing a that GEO article from twenty fourteen
titled five Shipwrecks Lost to Time that archaeologists would love
to get their hands on by Jane J. Lee, which
which does get into some ships from this time period.
But basically the idea is that this is this worm
(10:52):
is a wood burrowing mollusc. We may have talked about
it on the show. Before they can break down a
submerged wooden vessel apparently in as little as five years.
But the main way that ancient ships survive are by
winding up buried under sediment or buried under their own cargo,
such as you know, a bunch of ceramic andphora, you know,
(11:15):
basically earthenware containers that end up serving as man made
sediment to preserve the portion of the hull underneath it.
If you've watched any documentaries about, you know, ancient Mediterranean shipwrecks,
you've probably seen some footage like this where it looks like, oh,
it looks like a bunch of urns on the bottom
(11:37):
of the ocean, and that's essentially what it is. But
then what is underneath those urns, what else is preserved?
And sometimes we can learn a lot from what remains beneath.
And this is why harbors, rather than open ocean, are
often considered better hiding places for some of these ancient wrecks.
And there also may be factors related to just how
many of these ships operated and so forth, and how
they operated. But yeah, it's like it's one of these
(12:00):
these cases where, yeah, we have one particular giant vessel
that one's lost to history. But in terms of more
common vessels of this type, yeah, we do have examples
of shipwrecks we've been able to find and learn from,
you know, especially in recent years. But as with the
fossil record, you know, depending on what we have to
depend on, has various holes in it. You know, we
(12:21):
have physical evidence of ships, and then we also have
the written word to turn to. But as Christopher E.
Choffen discusses in the Tessaranka Terras reconsidered this is this
was a nineteen ninety one through nineteen ninety three a
publication of Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Technical
information in these ancient texts is uncommon, so it's you'll
(12:44):
have mentions of ships, but you know how many times
do they stop to really roll out the details and
the stats for a given vessel. But I guess the
thing about the about a ship this big is that
there would be some descriptions, some stats. It's out there
since it is so novel. You know, it's kind of
like if you look in like biblical texts, are you
(13:07):
going to have this, you know, actual length and with
descriptions for a cart? Now probably not everyone knows what
a card is the arc of the covenant, well, and
then you got might get some details right. So, concerning
the Tessaranka terras, there are two main sources that are
typically cited. One is a second century CE Greek source,
(13:27):
the writings of Athenaeus of Necratis. This is more than
two hundred years after the reign of Ptolemy. The fourth.
Chaffin cites this one in his work, and among the
details included are the following two hundred and eighty cubits
in length, which, to understand this would be like four
hundred and twenty feet or one hundred and thirty meters
(13:48):
a breadth of thirty eight cubits or fifty seven feet
seventeen meters. I'm not sure if this is per catamaran
hole seven naval rams. As we discussed proportions, breathtaking decorations.
This is all subjective. And then it's said to have
required four thousand oarsmen and four hundred sailors and officers.
(14:16):
That alone is is incredible, if not unbelievable. And if
it's said to carry two eight hundred and fifty.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Marines, okay, and the marines would refer to like armed
soldiers who were not involved in the piloting or powering
of the vessel, so they could you know, if you
made contact with another ship at sea or made a landing,
they could disembark or board another vessel to attack.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Yeh, pretty much now in terms of whether they were
pulling the oars or not, as we'll get into maybe so.
But then you look at these stats, it's like, okay,
four thousand oarsmen. Even if every single marine was double
doing double duty and also pulling the oars, you still
would and also throwing the four hundred sailors and officers,
(15:00):
You're still short by a lot. You still need hundreds
and hundreds of additional oarsmen to power this thing.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
So do experts have an opinion of like whether this
could be possible, whether this possibly existed as described, or
what's going on here?
Speaker 2 (15:17):
I mean it basically the big discussion comes down to
whether it was for show or operational, you know, like
because another detail that is mentioned in this text is
that it required this big specialized launching system in docks.
So it was like so huge that it required something
new to be built in order to even you know,
(15:38):
go up to it and use it to any limited
degree in the water. But even still ancient authors were
still skeptical about it as well, like for instance, another
the other major description is a lot shorter, and it
comes from Plutarch. He lived forty six through one nineteen CE,
and he repeats some of the exact same stats, but
(15:59):
also add that the ship was just for show and
could only be moved with great difficulty and danger. So
he comments that it was not at all a practical warship,
but a spectacle, certainly in keeping with the reputation of
Ptolemy the Fourth that has passed down through the centuries. Okay, now,
(16:19):
I guess you could get into a more nuanced discussion
about to what extent the spectacle is as useful or
more useful than a functional vessel. I mean, I guess
that's that's on the table. And then we have to
also take into account the reputation of ancient rulers as
becomes kind of submitted in the in the historical record.
(16:42):
So you know, there's a there's a lot of back
and forth to have there, But it sounds like there's
a strong case to be made that this was not
very a very functional warship, that it was just about
showing off your military mind. But I think it's an
interesting place to set out on our journey here. You know,
looking at the Tessaranka tear is something that exists as
the most outrageous and possibly grotesquely unrealistic example of an
(17:06):
evolution of design in the ancient world. And I think
this is especially interesting in light of how absolutely on
point the engineering of the try Rem is considered to
have been. I'm going to share a quote from Chaffin
on this that I referenced earlier. To be clear, this
is he's not talking about the Tessaranga teris here. He's
talking about the more common and functional tri rem or
(17:28):
driven vessel. He writes it was a warship design at
the very limits of available technology, incapable of further development,
expensive to maintain, costly and trained manpower, and in the
long run too costly for the resources of the city state.
So I think it seems reasonable to think of these
almost as like jet fighters in the modern area, you know,
(17:48):
in terms of their upkeep and the technology involved, and
just how expensive they are to maintain and use. So
we're going to come back around to these, We're going
to come back around to the Tasaronkataris, We're going to
(18:11):
come back around to the Trireme, and they sort of
pinnacle of this technology as it develops in the ancient world.
But before we get into that, we need to talk
more basically about oars and paddles and other related technologies
that are the basis for all of this. So I
guess to kick off here just a discussion of some
(18:33):
of the basic terminology that is used here. I was
looking at the chapter in the seventy Great Inventions of
the Ancient World by Brian M. Fagan, and the chapter
that deals one of the chapters that deals with boats
has Sean mcgrail on there as the co author who
wrote the book Boats of the world. It covers the
(18:55):
basics of paddles, polls, and ores. So polling involves the
use of a long pole or setting pole, sometimes forked
at the end, to push a small craft along by
pushing it against the bottom of a body of water.
And of note, this is a technology that may leave
no trace on the vessel itself, like it's you know,
(19:17):
you can imagine it. You've probably seen some version of this,
you know, in the world around you, because it is
still used to this day. You know, it's just somebody
poling along.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
Because they're especially useful in very shallow bodies of water
and shallow channels. You might often see them paired with
a kind of boat called a punt, which is a
more square shaped, flat bottomed boat that goes less deeply
into the water. So yeah, you'll see people out on
you know, shallow reams and streams and rivers, punting out
(19:46):
on a kind of flat bottom boat, pushing along the
bottom of the pole.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yeah, yeah, you see, you see these out in the
world for sure. And then of course there are paddles.
Use of a paddle generally doesn't leave any evidence on
craft itself either, And then you have ores. Ores require
a pivot and possibly other specialized fittings, something that often
(20:10):
will leave evidence on a vessel, though you know, should
enough of that vessel survive and I guess, depending on
the materials used, you could also have like some of
these fittings alone survive.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Yeah, so yes, to pick up on that. This is
a distinction that I did not fully have in my
mind before researching for this episode. But there is a
difference between a paddle and an ore. I would have
previously used these words interchangeably. But a paddle is a
bladed beam that is held freely in the hands. And
(20:44):
you might have a blade just on one end you
paddle on one side of the boat, or you might
have a double sided paddle with two different blades, and
you can alternate which side, like you might use in
a kayak or something. So the paddle is held freely
in the hands, while an ore is mounted to the
boat in some way through a lock or a pin,
sometimes called an ore lock, though that is a false
(21:06):
cognate with the name or lock, as in count or lock.
It is skilled differently thoar locked. Okay, And as with
the different names of these devices, the verb is different
as well, so Pushing through the water with a paddle
is called paddling. Pushing through the water with an ore
is called rowing. That's what rowing is. Now. If you
(21:27):
have no experience with canoes or row boats yourself, you
might not think of this. But there's a difference in
the orientation of the operator with these two different ways
of pushing through the water with bladed sticks. A person
operating a free hand paddle is usually facing the same
direction they're traveling, while a person rowing with a locked
(21:51):
or is usually facing away from their direction of travel.
So a canoe you're looking ahead, a row boat you're
looking behind.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
You know, it's interesting that I've done both of these before,
only a little bit of rowboat usage, mostly like canoe
stuff packing. But my mind instantly goes to how these
translate differently in cinematic usage. You know, like if you
have someone in a row boat and you want their face,
(22:20):
you want their emotions, their facial expression in the picture,
then you are focusing, you're looking at the rear of
the vessel and you're seeing them move away from the camera,
Whereas if you're going you want the same effect more
or less with someone in a canoe, where you're going
to have to have them coming towards the camera. So
I don't know, you could probably get into a into
(22:41):
a into a big, you know, cinematic discussion about how
the different technologies transfer differently to the screen and what
they say about the characters and their journeys.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Yeah, that's interesting, you know. For some reason, I tend
to think of when you have a shot of somebody
powering a rowboat with oars with in oarlocks, so they're
facing towards the stern of the boat. They're usually talking
to somebody, aren't they Usually there's somebody sitting facing forward
opposite them, sitting behind them, talking to them, and it seems.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Like that, yeah, or they're like a lonely individual like
rowing away from the shore where our point of view is,
and it seems to like, you know, drive home a
sort of like sort of a negative connotation, like they
are leaving us, or they're going off into loneliness or something.
Whereas again, if someone's in the canoe, they're often moving
towards us. So I don't know, I guess there are
(23:33):
ways of sorting that out in our hands.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
Rowing and paddling is like more interesting the more I
think about it. It reveals more kind of unappreciated physical
forces in play that I don't know are just invisible
to you while you're doing it. But one of the
other things I was thinking about that makes rowing a
powerful way of moving an object is the idea that
(23:59):
there is great resistance to a paddle blade moving through
water than there is to a paddle blade moving through air. Right,
so you have the ability at the surface of the
water to dip the ore in for a power stroke,
and there's greater resistance there, which allows you to have
more force pushing the boat forward, and then you can
(24:21):
lift the ore up out of the water to move
it back into place for another power stroke. But while
it's moving through the air to go back for the
next stroke, the return stroke is not really offsetting your
movement very much, because the ore moves very easily through
the air, and in some cases you can even see
like practiced rowers tilting the blade so that it's like
(24:42):
sharp edge going through the air instead of flat edge
going through the air. I guess, to get even less
air resistance while they're moving it back.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
This makes me think of various illustrations of like old
illustrations of possible submarines, only you would see ores on them, now,
I guess, without getting into ancient submarine designs, I guess
sometimes these were depicted as ways that a submarine would
move along as a traditional boat, and not how they
would operate beneath the waters. But if you were to
(25:15):
I guess you could operate ores beneath the waters, probably
having to turn the blade so that it could move
more easily back up to a starting position, but not
as easily as you'd be able to do this by
having the blade of the ore dip in and out
of the water.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
That's right. Yeah, So I think you could still move
by a rowing motion under the water, And in fact,
you can think of the way some like a fish's
pectoral fins can kind of you know, move it around
a little bit with with a sort of rowing like
motion in the water. But yeah, I think by all
accounts of oars would be much less efficient if you
were if you were only able to move them under
(25:52):
the water, you could probably still get some movement out
of them, like you said by yeah, like by orienting
the blades differently or going flat or going flat when
it's time to push and then for the return stroke
laying them, laying them sharp side forward. Maybe also by
this is a good question. I'm not sure if this
would work. Maybe also by altering the speed of movement
through the water, like with a fast power stroke and
(26:14):
then a very slow return stroke. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
It sounds reasonable to me, but I don't.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
Know for sure. I haven't tested it out. But yeah,
so it's like by existing, by floating on top of
the water, existing at the interface between the greater resistance
of the water and the lower resistance of the air,
you can get a greater advantage from the rowing movement
by having this resistance on the power stroke and then
relatively easier environment for the return stroke.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Interesting. Yeah, so it's fascinating to break down the basic
physics behind these different methods, these different machines. But in
terms of when did they develop, well, this is one
of those questions. It's ultimately unanswerable, and we have to
throw in all the general caveats about wooden artifacts and
how frequently are lost. At the time of the publication
(27:02):
of Fagan's book, they cited the earliest known paddles dating
to seventy five hundred BCE in Germany and Britain. They
Cite thirty two one hundred BCE is the oldest evidence
of polling from Mesopotamia and date rowing to third millennium
BCE in Egypt. Also, paddle use was apparently first illustrated
(27:24):
in the fourth millennium BCE in Egypt.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Yeah, we don't know for sure when the earliest paddle
driven boats were used, but we have some interesting pieces
of evidence from apparently fairly early use at least. So
One source I was looking at was a paper published
in a journal called Past Mobilities by Mark Dunkley called
Traveling by Water A Chronology of Prehistoric Boat Archaeology slash
(27:48):
Mobility in England. This was published in twenty sixteen, and
the author here notes something interesting about the archaeological record
in Northern Europe at least, which is that the evidence
of the use of boats and water transport goes back
to very generally between the tenth and fifth millennium before present,
(28:10):
which falls within the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age, but
that the earliest evidence for water transport is generally not
the physical remains of boats. Rather it is first of
all circumstantial evidence and Dunky sites, as one example here,
evidence of human settlement on islands such as the Inner
(28:32):
Hebrides and Ireland, and in those cases this was by
the ninth millennium before present, during times when we can
be fairly confident that they were not connected to the
rest of Eurasia by land bridges or expanses that were
traversible in any method other than by boat. So this
implies there must have been some way for Stone Age
(28:53):
settlers to cross these large expanses of water. Thus they
likely had some form of watercraft. Another piece of evidence
early evidence that Dunkley mentions for water transport in northern
Europe is paddles dated from the tenth to fifth millennium
before present, especially found in areas on the edge of
the Baltic Sea. And one example that I came up
(29:15):
when I was looking for I was looking for specific
examples of earliest known paddles in the archaeological record, and
one is the so called Duvincy paddle, which was discovered
in the nineteen twenties. I've seen two different dates on
this nineteen twenty six in nineteen twenty four, I'm not
sure which is right, but discovered in the nineteen twenties
at an archaeological site associated with Middlestone Age hunter gatherers
(29:39):
in northern Germany in a place now called du Vinci.
And this paddle is made of pine wood and based
on two different samples, it has been dated to between
eight and nine thousand years ago. Interesting note is it's
not huge. It seems that it was about fifty two
cinema in length, or you know, it's just over twenty
(30:04):
inches long. So that's kind of interesting to think about.
Usually the paddles I think of today are longer, but
you can still paddle with a shorter paddle.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah, And looking at the photograph here of the artifact,
I mean it very much looks like paddle. You don't
have to read into it too much. I mean it
instantly reads as a paddle to just casual observation.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Yeah. So I was trying to understand the human context
in which this paddle would have been used. I was
reading about the apparent Mesolithic settlement in this area in
a source called spade Paddling on a Mesolithic Lake, Remarks
on pre boreal and boreal sites from du Vinsi, Northern
Germany by Klaus Bochelmann, published in twenty twelve in some
(30:52):
kind of collection. It's called a mindset on flint studies
in honor of Dick Stapert Part three the Mesolithic and Neolithic,
and so the area of Lake Douvency, interestingly was likely
exploited at this time as a temporary encampment for the
harvesting of hazel nuts. You a fan of hazel nuts, Rob.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
I don't know. My mind instly goes to like hazel
nut coffee, and I say no, thank you, And no,
I mean, I guess that what hazel nuts, and you
think of of various like hazel nut based chocolate spread.
So no, I'm I guess I'm very much in favor
of them in other contexts.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
I guess they didn't have chocolate yet. But you're like
halfway to stone Age in nutella? Wait, is there even
chocolate in nutella? It's like brown and sweet.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
There is chocolate and nutella. Yeah, okay, but nutella. Yeah.
It's interesting because I think I've looked into this before
and it's like conceivable that you had some form of
ancient nut butter based on hazel nuts, but you could
not have possibly had nutella yet because you didn't have
access to chocolate from of course South America.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Right, But about these people who were harvesting hazel nut.
Bokelman writes, quote short term harvesting camps, sometimes under pine
trees and marked not by huts but by birch bark mats,
were set up on muddy ground near open water and
on islets of the lake. These were optimal locations for
spade paddling harvesting trips to hazel groves in the vicinity
(32:19):
of the lake. Hazelnuts were roasted in hot sand in
open fireplaces, and the edible kernels were either consumed on
the spot or were stored for future use. Doesn't that
just sound cozy? I don't know, it sounds nice. So
Bokeelman says that the evidence indicates that small family based
groups probably occupied the area for several days at a
(32:41):
time until the area became more thickly forested. I guess
there's some changing climate and flora around there, and as
the forest came in, this reduced the productivity of the
hazel groves and thus made Lake d Vinci less attractive
as a gathering location for humans because there were fewer
(33:02):
hazel nuts to harvest.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Fewer nuts, less reason to go there.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
Right, But so this paddle was found, it seemed to
have been become buried in sediments sometime you know, eight
to nine thousand years ago and was preserved until it
was found in the nineteen twenties. And so somebody was
paddling obviously, somebody was paddling some kind of watercraft, some
very early watercraft through the water, possibly to harvest hazel
(33:28):
nuts in this area at the time. And now interestingly,
according to Dunkley, the author I mentioned earlier, these types
of paddles appear in the archaeological record before the earliest
evidence of log boats, leading to the speculation by an
author named Lanting in nineteen ninety seven that the earliest
watercraft were not log boats but were skin boats or
(33:51):
bark boats. So some kind of design that you know,
you might you would build around a frame and make
roughly waterproof, but would be less likely to be preserved intact.
And there are some sort of candidate pieces people have found,
you know, like a piece of work to Antler, where
somebody's looked at this and said, ah, this might have
formed part of the skeleton of a skin boat or
(34:13):
a bark boat or something, but it's hard to be sure.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
I mean, I wonder if part of that The idea
here is that like a skin boat would perhaps be
easier to carry around. You could if you're having to
depend on a lifestyle then involves more of a transient
existence and moving from point A to point B with
the seasons and so forth. Then the skin boat you
can carry with you, as opposed to a dugout canoe,
which might be harder in some context to carry around.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Yeah. I wouldn't know for sure, but that makes sense
to me.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Now. Much of what we'll be discussing here concerns the
seagoing vessels of the ancient Mediterranean or the wine dark Sea,
if you will, to invoke a common translation from Homer's
Iliad in the Odyssey, But what was it about these
waters and what were some of the defining elements in
the development of ancient marine navigation here? Well, one of
my chief sources on this is The Ancient Mariners by
(35:16):
Lionel Cason, published nineteen ninety one. He was to cease now,
he was, but he was one of the leading scholars
on ancient ships and marine operations. And as we progress,
we'll also try to incorporate added insight garnered via later
(35:37):
twentieth and twenty first century maritime archaeology. But Casein writes
that while historians have differed over the years on the subject,
evidence suggests that Mediterranean sailors kept mostly to this inland
sea the Mediterranean, and the key innovation that enabled them
to make use of the sea here was wind. So
(35:59):
prior to this they depended on poles for shallow navigation
and various forms of paddling and rowing if they needed
to go farther out. But wind power, case In Wrights,
was a real game changer. So I want to read
a quote here. This is from again his book The
Ancient Mariners nineteen ninety one. For the first time they
(36:20):
harnessed a force other than their own muscles, their servants,
or their wives. It was a discovery whose effect reached
down the ages. From this moment on, the easiest and
cheapest way of transporting bulky loads over distances of appreciable
length was by water.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
And remain so today, by the way.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Yeah, and so we get into this discussion though, and
we'll deal more with this in the next episode. But
so you're gonna end up with a situation where you
have wind power your disposal, which is very clearly awesome
and is a real game changer. But you also have
these technologies of the ore and the paddle. But on
(37:00):
top of this in the Mediterranean zone in particular, coming
back to Fagan and one of his other contributing riders,
Boris Rankoff, who will come back to points out that
the galley, the sea going vessel powered by oars in
the ancient world, this was, for all intents and purposes,
a Mediterranean phenomenon. Elsewhere at this time, ores were more
(37:25):
for powering small vessels on rivers and lakes, and you
often were able to lean more into the sail the
rest of the time. But they point out that a
lot of the reason that we see this emphasis on
ores in the ancient Mediterranean it comes down to the
unreliability of the wind there. Unreliability by the way, as
(37:47):
it applies to high stakes, often conflict oriented sailing. None
of this is directly applicable to modern discussions of wind energy.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
Ah, But what you're saying there makes sense as to
why you would often think of a trade ship as
being one that solely relied on wind power versus a
warship being more likely to have lots of rowers and ores.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Right, Because it comes down to a situation where you're
going to depend on the sales as much as you can.
But when it comes down to it, when you need
to close the distance between yourself and an enemy or
try to greatly increase that distance, you might not have
the wind on your side. You cannot necessarily count on it.
But what you can count on are the mechanisms of
(38:31):
the ores and the muscle power of the people to
pull those ores. So yeah, if you need that power
and you can't count on the wind or the wind
is not cooperating, well, then you bust out the oars
and you use or power to meet your objective. Nice
So in the next episode, we'll come back in and
we'll talk at a greater length about this, and then
(38:54):
we'll get into some examples of ancient sea battles that
we know based on the written record and some illustrations,
and then we'll get into the technology of these or
powered vessels that are so famous among the Greeks, and
then later the Romans.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
I can't wait, all.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Right, so ramming speed in the next episode, but for
now we're gonna go ahead and close it out. We'll
remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, we do a short form episode.
We've been running a lot of monster facts recently, but
in the weeks ahead, I'll come back with more Animalia stependium,
(39:35):
some more artifacts as we move forward. And then on
Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk
about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
to topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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