August 22, 2024 • 51 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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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome do Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two in our series on the ore 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 war ship, which allegedly was built
(00:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, it's just an unreasonable amount of oars 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 is not a practical war vessel, but
just a way of showing off. So we talked a
(01:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
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 a 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
(01:42):
typically row facing backwards while you paddle facing forwards. We
also talked about some prehistoric evidence of the use of
wooden paddles for water transport in Stone Age Northern Europe,
including one eight to nine thousand year old paddle, and
we also talked to some of the pressures leading to
the development of different mechanisms for powering watercraft in the
(02:05):
ancient Mediterranean, like wind versus human powered propulsion. And we're
back with part two to continue the discussion today.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah, as we started getting into in the last episode,
the ancient Mediterranean was this vast inland sea ringed by
coastal lands that both did various powerful and established civilizations
as well as emergent powers. Coastal cultures largely contained to
this inland sea developed means to travel and exploit these waters.
(02:37):
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 winds. So with all of
this we get the establishment of greater trade routes between
these various powers, and islands like Crete also become more
and more important given all this traffic. But this also
(02:57):
means that you know, especially out of ancient Egypt and
out of Ancia in Mesopotamia, again you have the emergence
of all these marine trade routes and this ends up
spilling over into conflict as well, conflict over these trade
routes and around these trade routes, and we get like
a couple of key developments in maritime conflict technology. The
first one is pretty obvious and simple, and that is, okay,
(03:20):
if you have a ship that can carry cargo, it
can also carry troops. And so the first warships were
basically just cargo ships carrying armed forces, and we have
various accounts of this. Ancient Egyptian record speak of this
as far back as twenty four to fifty BCE. That's
when the pharaoh Sahure that means he who is close
(03:42):
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
(04:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
A theme I've noticed before, which is that sometimes the
line between naval warfare and piracy is quite thin.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yes, yeah, absolutely, it depends on 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 Ancient Mariners by
Lionel Cassen, who is one of the one of the
key authorities of the twentieth century on ancient Mediterranean sea
(04:44):
powers and so forth, and he wrote that these vessels
were likely that these rovers, these smaller faster vessels were
likely as old as the big cargo ships, but our
written records of their usage and conflict only goes back
to like the fourteenth century BC. But they're quite telling.
We get this idea of fleets of sea rovers utilized
(05:06):
to disrupt cross sea communication and maritime trade, as well
as to eventually enforced blockades. Syrian naval units were thus
able to disrupt the link between Egypt and Biblos, and
you also had full fledged sea powers like the Minoans
and then the Mycenians who were able to hold their
(05:26):
own and then some against powers like Egypt. It also
meant that an age of rich over sea trade largely
entered into an age of like rampant sea rovers. So
you know, we see some of the first recorded sea
battles during this rough time period we're looking at here,
such as Rameses the Third's defeat of an invading fleet
(05:48):
of the Sea peoples the Battle of the Delta in
eleven seventy five BCE.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yeah, and you get that from the Egyptian illustrations of
the battle, the way that it ends up rolling out.
It's a couple of basics on the way this went down. Now,
on the subject of the Sea People's much has been
hypothesized about who they were and where they came from,
but they definitely invaded Eastern Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, and
(06:30):
Egypt toward the end of the Bronze Age and were
particularly active during the thirteenth century BC. There are different
ways to look at them, from a confederacy of different
seafaring raiders to varying groups of people's displaced by late
Bronze Age disturbances. So it's an entire topic undo itself.
But this would have been the second war between the
(06:51):
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
(07:14):
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,
(07:38):
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
(07:59):
land shooting arrows of the ships, flaming or otherwise boarding
actions and so forth. Again, a lot of this is
what we gather from ancient Egyptian illustrations of the conflict.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Yes, there's one quite famous illustration of this battle that
is busy to look at.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yeah, the only thing that's instantly clear is which one
is the pharaoh. You can figure that out pretty easily.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
He's the big one.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
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,
(08:46):
and as related in the Iliad, you have, of course
the whole business with Troy. Of course, as we've discussed
in the show before, also their caveats about our understanding
of the historical aspects of of Troy as opposed to
the literary context here. But for the most part, you know,
(09:06):
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,
(09:27):
it's a very well written book and has some nice descriptions.
He writes, for once the major cities of Greece for
went their traditional pastime of praying on one another and
joined hands for a combined operation against Troy. And while
it's described as of course a land based siege of
a city with no navy, they travel to their destination
via ship, and of.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Yeah, yeah, there's at the works of homer Are you know,
are actually a key point in trying to understand what
these ships were and how they functioned. Okayse And points
out that ancient freighters, as the my Sitians would have used,
typically traversed by sail alone. They were roomy and slow
(10:15):
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 sails when speed wasn't a necessity, or
when the wind was good, which, of course it's worth
noting that if the wind is really good, that will
propel you rather swiftly. But conditions have to be right,
(10:35):
and you could not necessarily count on the Mediterranean winds,
especially if conflict was involved. So the sails could easily
be stored away in favor of that ore power that
was dependent entirely upon the muscles of your crew. And
he points out that the ore power here again in
Homeric times, if you will, was provided by the crew
(10:56):
of the vessel, which also included the ship's fighting men.
So it's interesting. So on one hand, we shouldn't make
the mistake of thinking that they were not good oarsmen.
They were apparently very good oarsman, highly trained, very skilled.
There's actually a part in the Odyssey where Alcinous brags
that brags about what great oarsmen his men are. But
(11:20):
they were not just dedicated to oarsmen. They also would
have been called on to do all these other things
as well.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
M okay.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
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
(11:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Yeah, they've got to run to the game or something.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
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
(12:16):
were these ships like? We have few illustrations. We have
the descriptions by Homer, including part in the Odyssey where
Odysseus builds a new ship, But even a lot of
this didn't come together till the twentieth century when we
had maritime archaeology to give us some actual evidence to
base some of this on other archaeological data, that we
(12:38):
could take some of those passages and make better sense
of what they were saying. So Cason contends that the vessels,
which he jokingly describes as seagoing greyhounds during this period
between thirteen hundred and twelve hundred BC, would have looked
essentially like this, long low holes on abruptly rising prow.
That's the front of the ship. They had a curved stern,
(13:01):
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,
(13:25):
Homeric writings, you know, chronicles from eighth century BC, and
so forth that let us know that. Okay, eventually though,
the ships begin to vary in size, the number of
the oars ends up ranging from twenty to forty or
even fifty. We'll get into that more later. Early on, though,
we would have been dealing with a case where most
(13:45):
of these vessels would have been privately owned, and they
would have engaged in both merchant trade and raiding so
as well as you know, carrying armed men to a destination,
and there would have been more of this than dedicated fighting. Again,
we get into that idea that there's a thin line
between between what is piracy and what is some other pursuit,
(14:08):
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
(14:34):
a major development in the eighth century BCE, according to
Fagan and Rancoff, who I scided in the last episode.
That's Brian Fagan and Boris Rhancoff. So the vessels we're
talking about here would have featured two levels of rowers,
one rowing at the same level is those single row
galleys that came before, but then a lower level in
(14:56):
the hold working ores through apertures in the hole. So
it's interesting. You might imagine that we just built one
on top of the other, like an ice cream cone,
but it's not quite the same. It's a little more
complicated than that ends up involving like a reworking of
the whole itself.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
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
(15:32):
design and construction of the vessel.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
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
(15:56):
the ability to make not only a faster vessel, but
this is key, a more maneuverable one.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
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
(16:32):
in their own way. But I don't know, maybe it's
a halfway useful analogy. But these general changes that are
going on here, according to Fake and Rohnkoff, they seem
to suggest though that fighting capacity was becoming more and
more important, and carrying capacity was less of a concern.
So yeah, you're you're having to upgrade the design of
(16:54):
your vessels in order to emphasize speed and mobility as
opposed to just how much stuff you could care, be
that that stuff cargo or troops or something else. However,
the length of these vessels does gradually increase, incorporating more
and more ores, upward of one hundred. So again everything
continues to evolve new forms, and then like stretch the
(17:17):
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
(17:40):
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,
(18:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Literal corporate raiders exactly.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah, so it's dangerous out there. And yeah, any stresses
that the building up of navies 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 the maritime
(18:51):
technology evolves to keep up with that. Now, the pentagonter
seemed again that the two leveled org vessels seems to
have remained the main warship from the eight through six
centuries BCE, But clearly this climate demanded greater innovation, you know,
to continue to to you know, to push the boundaries
(19:12):
of what's possible. Every conceivable edge is going to count
in one of these altercations. And so we see a
couple of things, and they're very interconnected here. One was
the increasing importance of the nautical ram, which we'll get
to in a bit. But then the other goes in
hand in hand with that as well, and that is
(19:32):
I think everyone can guess, add a third level of
rowers to your vessel optimize. Yeah, add more ores, more
humans pulling those ores so that we can have more power.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
So the name of the try Rem comes from three
levels of rowers.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
That's right, the try Rem. It's basically like we've been describing.
It's the Penticonter with a third level added. But make
no mistake, this is 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
(20:13):
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 sea power of the day.
(20:36):
The Greeks used these, and then the defeat of the
Persians at Salamis in for ADBCE, and they would be
a major part of their maritime might. This battle, by
the way, I am reminded, is depicted in the twenty
fourteen three hundred sequel. As usual a sequel, there was
a sequel. I saw part of it on an airplane,
(20:58):
as usual. I am dubious about out looking to a
three hundred picture for any kind of historical accuracy. But
I don't know. People who have seen the movie write
in maybe it has some really good trirem scenes. I mean,
I would at least ask that there would be cool
trirem action sequences in that picture. So, as far as
we know, with the trirem the third level, the top
(21:20):
level would have had the oarsmen rowing through outriggers so
as to keep the whole as narrow as possible, while
the two lower levels would have rowed through whole apertures.
As such, you could power up a vessel with a
good one hundred and seventy ores and it would have
been as maneuverable as the two level pentdiconter, but ultimately
(21:41):
faster and deadlier. Now where did this innovation come from? Well,
according to the author, as I was reading here, Athenian
general and historian Thucydides credited to the Corinthian shipwright Menocles
in the eighth century, but Fagan and Rankov state that
more recent scholarships suggest that the invention hailed from perhaps
(22:02):
the Egyptians or the Phoenicians under Persian rule near the
end of the sixth century. Now, as of their writing,
there had been zero wrecks of these vessels discovered, duing
part to the fact that they would have apparently it's
thought have had positive buoyancy of hold. But in any
case this was the case, then it's still the case.
(22:23):
Now thousands of these ships were built and lost, and
apparently truly lost, because we've never found a wreck.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Now by never found a wreck, rob you mean never
found a substantially intact wreck. But we do have pieces, right.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
But if somebody's trying to build a replica replica of
an ancient Greek tryrem, 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.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
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 tr rem probably was, you know
(23:31):
what we know about ancient construction techniques and so forth,
and let's build one with the understanding that we're we're
not going to get it one hundred percent correct. You know,
nobody has I have seen anybody arguing that the resulting
ship is just dead on. It's inevitably incorrect. It cannot
(23:51):
possibly be a one for one match for what any
given try ream actually was in the ancient world. But
the idea is that it would give us like a
solid model which we could then run through trials, experiment with,
and then have nuanced conversations about where this prototype gets
(24:12):
it wrong. You know, where this recreation gets it wrong,
Like Okay, maybe it's it's too heavy and therefore too slow,
or maybe you know, it's not tough enough to withstand
being rammed and so forth, And so they built this thing.
And there are plenty of images of this vessel there are,
there's there's footage, there's there have been documentaries, there is.
(24:34):
The resulting craft was thirty six point nine meters or
one hundred and twenty one feet one inch in length,
powered by two sails, and of course one hundred and
seventy oarsmen. And I believe oorsmon is technically considered a
gender neutral term because i've and I have seen plenty
of photos of the folks that they recruited to power
(24:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
So I guess some people got really good at rowing.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
These oars oh, does it look fairly cozy.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
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 y 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
(25:51):
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
(26:11):
made for a nice time travel movie.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
Right Wait, you mean the replica and its krew get
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.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
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,
(26:50):
and again a lot of this was about, you know,
creating space to then have these more nuanced discussions about
what they got wrong right and what they perhaps got wrong.
But apparently they found that chiefly a three level war
system is viable. Prior to this, some scholars had doubted
that it was actually possible to have three levels of oarsmen.
They also found that it was both fast and highly maneuverable.
(27:13):
I think with this model they were able to reach
maximum more speeds of just under nine knots. But I
think there are some discussions about how maybe that was
too slow, maybe the vessel was too heavy. Again, there's
a lot of back and forth as part of the
research surrounding it. But Fagan and Rehnkoff and by the way,
Rencoff was a rowing Master professor of ancient history and
(27:38):
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,
(28:02):
or close enough to the money for us to to
use it as a means of understanding what these vessels were.
I included a couple of photos here in our outline,
and everyone out there can can look these up as well.
But yeah, the ship at sea with oars out, sails
raised looks absolutely amazing, and there's a peek inside at
(28:23):
the folks pulling the oars. Again, it seems like they're
having a great time, but it is not spacious.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
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 oars in play, so a lot
of people are sort of head level with their neighbors.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
Butts, Yeah, yeah, when we're talking about three levels, don't
think of it like an apartment building where there's a
there's like a clear U 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
I Cream cone scoop scenario. It's all incorporated into the design,
(29:05):
and that design is ultimately a large part of it
is about powering that ram That's right.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
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, how complex can it be?
You're just trying to run into each other. But no,
it's a delicate dance.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
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 ram's enemy ships or enemies perceived enemies of Captain Nemo.
And again, this may be more nuanced in the film
(29:54):
than I remember, and maybe more so in the text,
but I seem to think of it as just the
Nautilus just goes as fast as it can and just
crashes through whatever it's trying to destroy. And so it's
easy for me to fall back on that and think, oh, yeah,
well ramming speed with a trirem it's just row as
fast as possible and hit them with as much velocity
as you can muster.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
It's been a while since I've read twenty thousand Leagues
under the Sea, but I recall a plot line early
in the book where somebody, maybe it's a Professor Aronnax
or one of his rivals, 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,
(30:34):
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
(30:55):
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,
(31:15):
they can move troops, they can move cargo and provisions,
they can engage in scouting, they can deliver messages and
so forth. But this age of war, galleys, the naval
ships powered by rows of oars, really showed the importance
of direct ship to ship combat, and thus the speed,
design and maneuverability of the galleys themselves became paramount, and
(31:37):
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.
(32:00):
You could have marines armed soldiers like maybe the Greek
boats might have some hoplight soldiers that would board enemy
boats and try to attack and overwhelm the crew. Or
you could attack the physical boat itself. So a major
goal of the trirem in ancient warfare was to destroy
(32:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Okas in 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 nanned the oars.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
And in this you end up depending on a highly
skilled rowing crew that could, in Cason's words, respond instantly
and accurately to command.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
They had to be on the same page, they had
to act fast, with great strength and power, and they
had to know what they were doing at the same
time synchronization. So, picking up again on your analogy earlier,
rob of the trirem as kind of like a jet
fighter of its time. It was a highly optimized vessel.
(33:35):
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
(33:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
There are accounts of people doing it, like there's one
famous account in the ancient world of a trireme that
was sent out after another one to try to overtake
it to countermand the orders that had been given, and
so allegedly, like the rowers worked in shifts so they
could row all night and one slept while the other
(34:47):
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 corollarya
(35:08):
of that is that human exhaustion could mean death. So
ancient trirems often would be fitted with sails of some kind.
They might have a main mast sail that could be
used to save the crew's strength while they're just sort
of cruising somewhere, and then would generally not be used
for battle. The boat might leave ashore its main mast
(35:31):
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
(35:54):
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,
(36:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Yeah. 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.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Hit right 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.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yeah. And one thing the case mentioned is that the
whole like grappling and boarding actions that ever, completely goes away.
But this ramming, this becomes like the key attack method.
This becomes like the main focus of the ship design.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
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.
(37:30):
You can imagine the physical aftermath in the area of
an ancient naval battle 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
(37:53):
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.
(38:13):
So like an Athenian trirem would would have a wooden
extension from the keel just around the water line, maybe
right ad or right below the water line, and this
would be covered in a bronze sheath. A later and
popular Athenian ram design would have like three horizontally aligned fins.
(38:35):
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
(38:57):
position to gain an advantageous angle goal, and it would
be trying to come into the other boat's broadside, so
before the actual ramming itself. A major part of ancient
Mediterranean naval tactics seem to be focused on getting behind
the enemy, getting through the enemy lines, and positioning your
(39:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
That's right, it's got to In order for a ship
that you're facing from behind to turn around and potentially
come back and face you, it would have to expose
its entire side to your ramming force.
Speaker 3 (39:39):
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, wow,
(40:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Right because another one could be right behind you. Now
I got three ships all crashed together.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
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
(40:45):
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 Goole calls ramming quote controlled collision and that's that
is what it is. You're just crashing into another ship,
(41:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Wow, and you can only imagine that would that would
add to this idea that they were costly vehicles to use,
because yeah, if you could only get like maybe one
hit out of this vehicle, like now it's ruined. Now
it's total, and you've got to build another one from scrap.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
I mean, hopefully it's not totaled after one hit. But
you know, the more the more hits you do with it,
the more risk you have that you are going to
incur damage to the ship itself. Goul to Wright's quote,
early rams were pointed and risk to becoming stuck in
the opposing ships hull. So if you look up pictures
of these, these earlier rams were often more they look
(42:04):
just kind of like a horn or a tusk or something.
But Gould says quote trirem rams were blunt with a
squared off face, and were intended to pound and shatter
the planks in the opposing ship's hull rather than punch
a hole through it. So you were trying to damage
(42:25):
the target ship's hull in a way that maybe cracks
the wood or takes it, or causes damage to a
joint or something that ruins its watertight integrity. It will
start to take on water. That's the goal. But you
do not want to just punch a hole all the
way through and get stuck inside it again for all
the reasons we've talked about that that is a risk
(42:47):
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
(43:08):
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
(43:30):
was especially important for maneuvering in trying to get behind
the enemy and into the advantageous position for a ramming charge,
you want to be in the right position and have
your enemy in the wrong position. But top speed was
not necessarily for ramming itself, because ramming at top speed
could have been dangerous to the attacking galley.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Wow, so ramming speed could also conceivably mean or like
ramming deceleration. Once you're in a position.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
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
(44:21):
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
(44:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Yeah, or I also couldn't help but think about Star
Trek a little bit, which makes sense. Star Trek in
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
(45:19):
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
(45:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
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 ninety nine to
(46:15):
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
(46:36):
for ramming efficiency, but a decorative design features that I
thought were interesting. But I just wanted to mention this
book because it gets into the idea of ramming speed.
So Fields says that if the target ship is either
stationary or moving towards you, and you can hit it
within an angle of between twenty and seventy degrees, the
(46:59):
attacking boats. Ramming speed only needed to be about three
to four knots, so that's not that's not super fast.
That's between five point five and seven point five kilometers
per hour, and so that's if you're hitting it at
a more oblique angle between twenty and seventy degrees. If
you're able to line up something closer to a ninety
(47:19):
degree hit, you hit it in the middle of its length.
Even less speed is required to break through and make
it take on water. That's probably between two to three knots,
which is between three point seven and five point five
kilometers per hour. There was also research published just this
year about the ramming speeds needed for try rems. This
(47:40):
was published by itzac at All in the journal Journal
of Archaeological Science Reports in twenty twenty four. The paper
is called Damaging a triyream by Ramming the Kinetics, and
the main finding was that quote the minimum impact velocity
required to break a single plank is one point three
to three knot, so this was obviously well within the
(48:03):
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
(48:24):
physics level, it kind of makes sense that you wouldn't
need that much speed because of course you are hitting
a boat at its weak point with your strongest point,
and you've got the force of that impact concentrated down
not across like the full height of it of the
ship's hull, but down into this small impact zone at
the tip of the ram.
Speaker 2 (48:45):
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 how easy is it
to accidentally punch a hole in the hull of a
small vessel or at least a wooden vessel, given that
(49:08):
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 it's a whole engineering problem. To it. There's
an there's a there's a there's a military art to it,
(49:28):
and involves a discipline and maneuver. It's pretty fascinating, and
you can only imagine the mix of uh, you know,
actual like combat scenario learning that would be involved in
all of this, as well as experiments and testing. Uh yeah,
it's it kind of boggles the mind, gives you a
new new respect for what these ancient mariners were up.
Speaker 3 (49:50):
To, how they had to all work together to make
the boat function as kind of a single organism.
Speaker 2 (49:56):
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
(50:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (50:28):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ
Posway and huge thanks to our guest producer 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 chat.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, what's 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 (00:12):
Hey you welcome do Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two in our series on the ore 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 war ship, which allegedly was built
(00:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, it's just an unreasonable amount of oars 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 is not a practical war vessel, but
just a way of showing off. So we talked a
(01:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
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 a 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
(01:42):
typically row facing backwards while you paddle facing forwards. We
also talked about some prehistoric evidence of the use of
wooden paddles for water transport in Stone Age Northern Europe,
including one eight to nine thousand year old paddle, and
we also talked to some of the pressures leading to
the development of different mechanisms for powering watercraft in the
(02:05):
ancient Mediterranean, like wind versus human powered propulsion. And we're
back with part two to continue the discussion today.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah, as we started getting into in the last episode,
the ancient Mediterranean was this vast inland sea ringed by
coastal lands that both did various powerful and established civilizations
as well as emergent powers. Coastal cultures largely contained to
this inland sea developed means to travel and exploit these waters.
(02:37):
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 winds. So with all of
this we get the establishment of greater trade routes between
these various powers, and islands like Crete also become more
and more important given all this traffic. But this also
(02:57):
means that you know, especially out of ancient Egypt and
out of Ancia in Mesopotamia, again you have the emergence
of all these marine trade routes and this ends up
spilling over into conflict as well, conflict over these trade
routes and around these trade routes, and we get like
a couple of key developments in maritime conflict technology. The
first one is pretty obvious and simple, and that is, okay,
(03:20):
if you have a ship that can carry cargo, it
can also carry troops. And so the first warships were
basically just cargo ships carrying armed forces, and we have
various accounts of this. Ancient Egyptian record speak of this
as far back as twenty four to fifty BCE. That's
when the pharaoh Sahure that means he who is close
(03:42):
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
(04:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
A theme I've noticed before, which is that sometimes the
line between naval warfare and piracy is quite thin.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yes, yeah, absolutely, it depends on 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 Ancient Mariners by
Lionel Cassen, who is one of the one of the
key authorities of the twentieth century on ancient Mediterranean sea
(04:44):
powers and so forth, and he wrote that these vessels
were likely that these rovers, these smaller faster vessels were
likely as old as the big cargo ships, but our
written records of their usage and conflict only goes back
to like the fourteenth century BC. But they're quite telling.
We get this idea of fleets of sea rovers utilized
(05:06):
to disrupt cross sea communication and maritime trade, as well
as to eventually enforced blockades. Syrian naval units were thus
able to disrupt the link between Egypt and Biblos, and
you also had full fledged sea powers like the Minoans
and then the Mycenians who were able to hold their
(05:26):
own and then some against powers like Egypt. It also
meant that an age of rich over sea trade largely
entered into an age of like rampant sea rovers. So
you know, we see some of the first recorded sea
battles during this rough time period we're looking at here,
such as Rameses the Third's defeat of an invading fleet
(05:48):
of the Sea peoples the Battle of the Delta in
eleven seventy five BCE.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yeah, and you get that from the Egyptian illustrations of
the battle, the way that it ends up rolling out.
It's a couple of basics on the way this went down. Now,
on the subject of the Sea People's much has been
hypothesized about who they were and where they came from,
but they definitely invaded Eastern Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, and
(06:30):
Egypt toward the end of the Bronze Age and were
particularly active during the thirteenth century BC. There are different
ways to look at them, from a confederacy of different
seafaring raiders to varying groups of people's displaced by late
Bronze Age disturbances. So it's an entire topic undo itself.
But this would have been the second war between the
(06:51):
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
(07:14):
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,
(07:38):
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
(07:59):
land shooting arrows of the ships, flaming or otherwise boarding
actions and so forth. Again, a lot of this is
what we gather from ancient Egyptian illustrations of the conflict.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Yes, there's one quite famous illustration of this battle that
is busy to look at.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yeah, the only thing that's instantly clear is which one
is the pharaoh. You can figure that out pretty easily.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
He's the big one.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
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,
(08:46):
and as related in the Iliad, you have, of course
the whole business with Troy. Of course, as we've discussed
in the show before, also their caveats about our understanding
of the historical aspects of of Troy as opposed to
the literary context here. But for the most part, you know,
(09:06):
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,
(09:27):
it's a very well written book and has some nice descriptions.
He writes, for once the major cities of Greece for
went their traditional pastime of praying on one another and
joined hands for a combined operation against Troy. And while
it's described as of course a land based siege of
a city with no navy, they travel to their destination
via ship, and of.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Yeah, yeah, there's at the works of homer Are you know,
are actually a key point in trying to understand what
these ships were and how they functioned. Okayse And points
out that ancient freighters, as the my Sitians would have used,
typically traversed by sail alone. They were roomy and slow
(10:15):
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 sails when speed wasn't a necessity, or
when the wind was good, which, of course it's worth
noting that if the wind is really good, that will
propel you rather swiftly. But conditions have to be right,
(10:35):
and you could not necessarily count on the Mediterranean winds,
especially if conflict was involved. So the sails could easily
be stored away in favor of that ore power that
was dependent entirely upon the muscles of your crew. And
he points out that the ore power here again in
Homeric times, if you will, was provided by the crew
(10:56):
of the vessel, which also included the ship's fighting men.
So it's interesting. So on one hand, we shouldn't make
the mistake of thinking that they were not good oarsmen.
They were apparently very good oarsman, highly trained, very skilled.
There's actually a part in the Odyssey where Alcinous brags
that brags about what great oarsmen his men are. But
(11:20):
they were not just dedicated to oarsmen. They also would
have been called on to do all these other things
as well.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
M okay.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
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
(11:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Yeah, they've got to run to the game or something.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
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
(12:16):
were these ships like? We have few illustrations. We have
the descriptions by Homer, including part in the Odyssey where
Odysseus builds a new ship, But even a lot of
this didn't come together till the twentieth century when we
had maritime archaeology to give us some actual evidence to
base some of this on other archaeological data, that we
(12:38):
could take some of those passages and make better sense
of what they were saying. So Cason contends that the vessels,
which he jokingly describes as seagoing greyhounds during this period
between thirteen hundred and twelve hundred BC, would have looked
essentially like this, long low holes on abruptly rising prow.
That's the front of the ship. They had a curved stern,
(13:01):
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,
(13:25):
Homeric writings, you know, chronicles from eighth century BC, and
so forth that let us know that. Okay, eventually though,
the ships begin to vary in size, the number of
the oars ends up ranging from twenty to forty or
even fifty. We'll get into that more later. Early on, though,
we would have been dealing with a case where most
(13:45):
of these vessels would have been privately owned, and they
would have engaged in both merchant trade and raiding so
as well as you know, carrying armed men to a destination,
and there would have been more of this than dedicated fighting. Again,
we get into that idea that there's a thin line
between between what is piracy and what is some other pursuit,
(14:08):
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
(14:34):
a major development in the eighth century BCE, according to
Fagan and Rancoff, who I scided in the last episode.
That's Brian Fagan and Boris Rhancoff. So the vessels we're
talking about here would have featured two levels of rowers,
one rowing at the same level is those single row
galleys that came before, but then a lower level in
(14:56):
the hold working ores through apertures in the hole. So
it's interesting. You might imagine that we just built one
on top of the other, like an ice cream cone,
but it's not quite the same. It's a little more
complicated than that ends up involving like a reworking of
the whole itself.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
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
(15:32):
design and construction of the vessel.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
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
(15:56):
the ability to make not only a faster vessel, but
this is key, a more maneuverable one.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
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
(16:32):
in their own way. But I don't know, maybe it's
a halfway useful analogy. But these general changes that are
going on here, according to Fake and Rohnkoff, they seem
to suggest though that fighting capacity was becoming more and
more important, and carrying capacity was less of a concern.
So yeah, you're you're having to upgrade the design of
(16:54):
your vessels in order to emphasize speed and mobility as
opposed to just how much stuff you could care, be
that that stuff cargo or troops or something else. However,
the length of these vessels does gradually increase, incorporating more
and more ores, upward of one hundred. So again everything
continues to evolve new forms, and then like stretch the
(17:17):
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
(17:40):
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,
(18:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Literal corporate raiders exactly.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah, so it's dangerous out there. And yeah, any stresses
that the building up of navies 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 the maritime
(18:51):
technology evolves to keep up with that. Now, the pentagonter
seemed again that the two leveled org vessels seems to
have remained the main warship from the eight through six
centuries BCE, But clearly this climate demanded greater innovation, you know,
to continue to to you know, to push the boundaries
(19:12):
of what's possible. Every conceivable edge is going to count
in one of these altercations. And so we see a
couple of things, and they're very interconnected here. One was
the increasing importance of the nautical ram, which we'll get
to in a bit. But then the other goes in
hand in hand with that as well, and that is
(19:32):
I think everyone can guess, add a third level of
rowers to your vessel optimize. Yeah, add more ores, more
humans pulling those ores so that we can have more power.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
So the name of the try Rem comes from three
levels of rowers.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
That's right, the try Rem. It's basically like we've been describing.
It's the Penticonter with a third level added. But make
no mistake, this is 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
(20:13):
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 sea power of the day.
(20:36):
The Greeks used these, and then the defeat of the
Persians at Salamis in for ADBCE, and they would be
a major part of their maritime might. This battle, by
the way, I am reminded, is depicted in the twenty
fourteen three hundred sequel. As usual a sequel, there was
a sequel. I saw part of it on an airplane,
(20:58):
as usual. I am dubious about out looking to a
three hundred picture for any kind of historical accuracy. But
I don't know. People who have seen the movie write
in maybe it has some really good trirem scenes. I mean,
I would at least ask that there would be cool
trirem action sequences in that picture. So, as far as
we know, with the trirem the third level, the top
(21:20):
level would have had the oarsmen rowing through outriggers so
as to keep the whole as narrow as possible, while
the two lower levels would have rowed through whole apertures.
As such, you could power up a vessel with a
good one hundred and seventy ores and it would have
been as maneuverable as the two level pentdiconter, but ultimately
(21:41):
faster and deadlier. Now where did this innovation come from? Well,
according to the author, as I was reading here, Athenian
general and historian Thucydides credited to the Corinthian shipwright Menocles
in the eighth century, but Fagan and Rankov state that
more recent scholarships suggest that the invention hailed from perhaps
(22:02):
the Egyptians or the Phoenicians under Persian rule near the
end of the sixth century. Now, as of their writing,
there had been zero wrecks of these vessels discovered, duing
part to the fact that they would have apparently it's
thought have had positive buoyancy of hold. But in any
case this was the case, then it's still the case.
(22:23):
Now thousands of these ships were built and lost, and
apparently truly lost, because we've never found a wreck.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Now by never found a wreck, rob you mean never
found a substantially intact wreck. But we do have pieces, right.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
But if somebody's trying to build a replica replica of
an ancient Greek tryrem, 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.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
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 tr rem probably was, you know
(23:31):
what we know about ancient construction techniques and so forth,
and let's build one with the understanding that we're we're
not going to get it one hundred percent correct. You know,
nobody has I have seen anybody arguing that the resulting
ship is just dead on. It's inevitably incorrect. It cannot
(23:51):
possibly be a one for one match for what any
given try ream actually was in the ancient world. But
the idea is that it would give us like a
solid model which we could then run through trials, experiment with,
and then have nuanced conversations about where this prototype gets
(24:12):
it wrong. You know, where this recreation gets it wrong,
Like Okay, maybe it's it's too heavy and therefore too slow,
or maybe you know, it's not tough enough to withstand
being rammed and so forth, And so they built this thing.
And there are plenty of images of this vessel there are,
there's there's footage, there's there have been documentaries, there is.
(24:34):
The resulting craft was thirty six point nine meters or
one hundred and twenty one feet one inch in length,
powered by two sails, and of course one hundred and
seventy oarsmen. And I believe oorsmon is technically considered a
gender neutral term because i've and I have seen plenty
of photos of the folks that they recruited to power
(24:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
So I guess some people got really good at rowing.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
These oars oh, does it look fairly cozy.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
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 y 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
(25:51):
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
(26:11):
made for a nice time travel movie.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
Right Wait, you mean the replica and its krew get
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.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
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,
(26:50):
and again a lot of this was about, you know,
creating space to then have these more nuanced discussions about
what they got wrong right and what they perhaps got wrong.
But apparently they found that chiefly a three level war
system is viable. Prior to this, some scholars had doubted
that it was actually possible to have three levels of oarsmen.
They also found that it was both fast and highly maneuverable.
(27:13):
I think with this model they were able to reach
maximum more speeds of just under nine knots. But I
think there are some discussions about how maybe that was
too slow, maybe the vessel was too heavy. Again, there's
a lot of back and forth as part of the
research surrounding it. But Fagan and Rehnkoff and by the way,
Rencoff was a rowing Master professor of ancient history and
(27:38):
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,
(28:02):
or close enough to the money for us to to
use it as a means of understanding what these vessels were.
I included a couple of photos here in our outline,
and everyone out there can can look these up as well.
But yeah, the ship at sea with oars out, sails
raised looks absolutely amazing, and there's a peek inside at
(28:23):
the folks pulling the oars. Again, it seems like they're
having a great time, but it is not spacious.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
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 oars in play, so a lot
of people are sort of head level with their neighbors.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
Butts, Yeah, yeah, when we're talking about three levels, don't
think of it like an apartment building where there's a
there's like a clear U 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
I Cream cone scoop scenario. It's all incorporated into the design,
(29:05):
and that design is ultimately a large part of it
is about powering that ram That's right.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
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, how complex can it be?
You're just trying to run into each other. But no,
it's a delicate dance.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
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 ram's enemy ships or enemies perceived enemies of Captain Nemo.
And again, this may be more nuanced in the film
(29:54):
than I remember, and maybe more so in the text,
but I seem to think of it as just the
Nautilus just goes as fast as it can and just
crashes through whatever it's trying to destroy. And so it's
easy for me to fall back on that and think, oh, yeah,
well ramming speed with a trirem it's just row as
fast as possible and hit them with as much velocity
as you can muster.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
It's been a while since I've read twenty thousand Leagues
under the Sea, but I recall a plot line early
in the book where somebody, maybe it's a Professor Aronnax
or one of his rivals, 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,
(30:34):
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
(30:55):
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,
(31:15):
they can move troops, they can move cargo and provisions,
they can engage in scouting, they can deliver messages and
so forth. But this age of war, galleys, the naval
ships powered by rows of oars, really showed the importance
of direct ship to ship combat, and thus the speed,
design and maneuverability of the galleys themselves became paramount, and
(31:37):
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.
(32:00):
You could have marines armed soldiers like maybe the Greek
boats might have some hoplight soldiers that would board enemy
boats and try to attack and overwhelm the crew. Or
you could attack the physical boat itself. So a major
goal of the trirem in ancient warfare was to destroy
(32:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Okas in 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 nanned the oars.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
And in this you end up depending on a highly
skilled rowing crew that could, in Cason's words, respond instantly
and accurately to command.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
They had to be on the same page, they had
to act fast, with great strength and power, and they
had to know what they were doing at the same
time synchronization. So, picking up again on your analogy earlier,
rob of the trirem as kind of like a jet
fighter of its time. It was a highly optimized vessel.
(33:35):
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
(33:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
There are accounts of people doing it, like there's one
famous account in the ancient world of a trireme that
was sent out after another one to try to overtake
it to countermand the orders that had been given, and
so allegedly, like the rowers worked in shifts so they
could row all night and one slept while the other
(34:47):
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 corollarya
(35:08):
of that is that human exhaustion could mean death. So
ancient trirems often would be fitted with sails of some kind.
They might have a main mast sail that could be
used to save the crew's strength while they're just sort
of cruising somewhere, and then would generally not be used
for battle. The boat might leave ashore its main mast
(35:31):
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
(35:54):
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,
(36:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Yeah. 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.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Hit right 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.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yeah. And one thing the case mentioned is that the
whole like grappling and boarding actions that ever, completely goes away.
But this ramming, this becomes like the key attack method.
This becomes like the main focus of the ship design.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
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.
(37:30):
You can imagine the physical aftermath in the area of
an ancient naval battle 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
(37:53):
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.
(38:13):
So like an Athenian trirem would would have a wooden
extension from the keel just around the water line, maybe
right ad or right below the water line, and this
would be covered in a bronze sheath. A later and
popular Athenian ram design would have like three horizontally aligned fins.
(38:35):
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
(38:57):
position to gain an advantageous angle goal, and it would
be trying to come into the other boat's broadside, so
before the actual ramming itself. A major part of ancient
Mediterranean naval tactics seem to be focused on getting behind
the enemy, getting through the enemy lines, and positioning your
(39:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
That's right, it's got to In order for a ship
that you're facing from behind to turn around and potentially
come back and face you, it would have to expose
its entire side to your ramming force.
Speaker 3 (39:39):
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, wow,
(40:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Right because another one could be right behind you. Now
I got three ships all crashed together.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
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
(40:45):
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 Goole calls ramming quote controlled collision and that's that
is what it is. You're just crashing into another ship,
(41:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Wow, and you can only imagine that would that would
add to this idea that they were costly vehicles to use,
because yeah, if you could only get like maybe one
hit out of this vehicle, like now it's ruined. Now
it's total, and you've got to build another one from scrap.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
I mean, hopefully it's not totaled after one hit. But
you know, the more the more hits you do with it,
the more risk you have that you are going to
incur damage to the ship itself. Goul to Wright's quote,
early rams were pointed and risk to becoming stuck in
the opposing ships hull. So if you look up pictures
of these, these earlier rams were often more they look
(42:04):
just kind of like a horn or a tusk or something.
But Gould says quote trirem rams were blunt with a
squared off face, and were intended to pound and shatter
the planks in the opposing ship's hull rather than punch
a hole through it. So you were trying to damage
(42:25):
the target ship's hull in a way that maybe cracks
the wood or takes it, or causes damage to a
joint or something that ruins its watertight integrity. It will
start to take on water. That's the goal. But you
do not want to just punch a hole all the
way through and get stuck inside it again for all
the reasons we've talked about that that is a risk
(42:47):
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
(43:08):
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
(43:30):
was especially important for maneuvering in trying to get behind
the enemy and into the advantageous position for a ramming charge,
you want to be in the right position and have
your enemy in the wrong position. But top speed was
not necessarily for ramming itself, because ramming at top speed
could have been dangerous to the attacking galley.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Wow, so ramming speed could also conceivably mean or like
ramming deceleration. Once you're in a position.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
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
(44:21):
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
(44:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Yeah, or I also couldn't help but think about Star
Trek a little bit, which makes sense. Star Trek in
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
(45:19):
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
(45:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
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 ninety nine to
(46:15):
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
(46:36):
for ramming efficiency, but a decorative design features that I
thought were interesting. But I just wanted to mention this
book because it gets into the idea of ramming speed.
So Fields says that if the target ship is either
stationary or moving towards you, and you can hit it
within an angle of between twenty and seventy degrees, the
(46:59):
attacking boats. Ramming speed only needed to be about three
to four knots, so that's not that's not super fast.
That's between five point five and seven point five kilometers
per hour, and so that's if you're hitting it at
a more oblique angle between twenty and seventy degrees. If
you're able to line up something closer to a ninety
(47:19):
degree hit, you hit it in the middle of its length.
Even less speed is required to break through and make
it take on water. That's probably between two to three knots,
which is between three point seven and five point five
kilometers per hour. There was also research published just this
year about the ramming speeds needed for try rems. This
(47:40):
was published by itzac at All in the journal Journal
of Archaeological Science Reports in twenty twenty four. The paper
is called Damaging a triyream by Ramming the Kinetics, and
the main finding was that quote the minimum impact velocity
required to break a single plank is one point three
to three knot, so this was obviously well within the
(48:03):
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
(48:24):
physics level, it kind of makes sense that you wouldn't
need that much speed because of course you are hitting
a boat at its weak point with your strongest point,
and you've got the force of that impact concentrated down
not across like the full height of it of the
ship's hull, but down into this small impact zone at
the tip of the ram.
Speaker 2 (48:45):
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 how easy is it
to accidentally punch a hole in the hull of a
small vessel or at least a wooden vessel, given that
(49:08):
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 it's a whole engineering problem. To it. There's
an there's a there's a there's a military art to it,
(49:28):
and involves a discipline and maneuver. It's pretty fascinating, and
you can only imagine the mix of uh, you know,
actual like combat scenario learning that would be involved in
all of this, as well as experiments and testing. Uh yeah,
it's it kind of boggles the mind, gives you a
new new respect for what these ancient mariners were up.
Speaker 3 (49:50):
To, how they had to all work together to make
the boat function as kind of a single organism.
Speaker 2 (49:56):
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
(50:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (50:28):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ
Posway and huge thanks to our guest producer 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 chat.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, what's the iHeartRadio app,
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