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August 23, 2025 40 mins

In this classic 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… (originally published 8/20/2024)

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. So we're going
into the vault for an older episode of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind. This one originally published August twentieth, twenty
twenty four, and it's part one of our series about
the ore powered galleys and warships of the ancient Mediterranean.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
All right, let's do it.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Again today on Stuff to Blow your Mind, we are
going to be kicking off a series looking at paddles
and oars, rowing and paddling the boats of the ancient world. Rob,
So you pick this topic out. What got you thinking
about paddles and ores?

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Well, I was kind of hungry for another dip into
the invention style episode that we frequently come back to.
You know, something that talks about generally or as often
as the case, you know, some sort of ancient technology
and how it comes about and what leads to these innovations.

(01:22):
You know, what is the environment that they evolve in
and so forth. And I started looking around at some
of my usual primary sources, and I was like, oh,
this looks like the perfect thing to get into, like
getting into the history of these ancient Mediterranean or powered boats.
In many cases we're dealing with warships, but this would

(01:43):
have also applied to varying degrees to various trade vessels
as well. And it's one of those topics when you
really get into it, like all these different disciplines converge
because there's archaeology, modern maritime archaeology, there is there's of
course literary history. There are also all these enduring mysteries

(02:05):
and disagreements throughout the ages about how to interpret what
has been passed down concerning these vessels.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
Now, with these ancient warships that were powered by many rowers,
you know, and we can talk as we go on
about the different designs there, the different numbers of levels
of rowers and things like that. You is part of
the idea there that you would have these even in
the case where it's a boat that could move under
sail power in some cases, but you would transition to

(02:36):
ore power to increase like maneuverability and speed during a battle.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Yeah, yeah, this is a big part of it. Like
you could you could certainly get by with just sails,
but having the ores on hand meant that you could
absolutely have the power at your disposal when you needed it,
especially if you're dealing with an environment where the winds
might not cooperate with you. You can't necessarily count on
the winds to be there for that push to the

(03:04):
shore if you're doing some sort of like a marine landing,
or you can't depend on the wind to help you
outrun or chase down another vessel. But if you have
your oars, well, then you're only limited by the amount
of skilled oarsmanship on board your vessel. And I think
that's an important That's one of the things that attracted
me to this too, because I feel like, speaking for myself,

(03:27):
I felt like growing up, I pretty much had a
Scooby Doo level understanding of what it meant to have
or power on a vessel. You know, sort of like
thinking about maybe not Scooby Doom in particular, but various
fictions in which people were captured by you know, some
sort of nefarious enemy thrown into the hold of the
ship where they have to pull the oars. And you know,

(03:50):
the idea here is like, oh, and we can easily,
you know, imagine ourselves in that scenario, like, oh, I
don't know how to pull an oar. I've never done
this before, but now someone's going to whip me if
I don't.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Why was that Scooby Doo? Does this happen in Scooby Doo?

Speaker 1 (04:03):
I don't know if it happened in Scooby Do, but
it may have happened in something consumed in that general area.
You know, it probably happened on some of these old cartoons.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
Or Scooby and Shaggy would not be good at rowing, But.

Speaker 1 (04:14):
Whatever you're imagining was Scooby Doo and Shaggy thrown into
the into a ship and made to pull an oar.
Like that's kind of like where my head used to
be concerning this. But when you get into it, especially
in the ancient world, you're not dealing with a bunch
of like forced amateur oarsmen down there. You're dealing with

(04:35):
trained orsmen, and it also non specialized dorsemen, Like it
might be very good, but this is not the only
thing they're going to be called on to do. So
you know. Suffice to say, I feel like it's a
topic where I had a lot of long standing bits
of misinformation in my head, you know, and just assumptions
about what this world consisted of. And when you get

(04:57):
into the details, when you get into what is known
and even what was written about in the ancient world,
it's a far more complex scenario. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
I like it when we can learn everything we assumed
was wrong.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
Yeah. Now, I thought an interesting place to kick this
off would be to sort of jump ahead and talk
about one of the more extreme and unsustainable examples of
the technology, sort of like looking at the spruce goose
before we talk about airplanes in general.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
Well, look at the lineage by seeing what's one of
the most ridiculous places that can go right.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
And the place to start is, by all accounts, the
Tessaranka terrace, which means forty road or simply forty. This
was an allegedly massive catamaran galley warship, an extreme example
of a polyrem or mini ORed vessel, and this was
like you can look up pictures of what this may

(05:51):
have looked like. There's a lot of guesswork and analysis
involved here, but think about like an ancient World Air
draft carrier with oars and you're kind of in the
right zone for this.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
The version I'm looking at has like more oars than
you can count sticking out all the sides of it,
and it's got what looks like a giant gramophone horn
on it. I don't know what that's for.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
So this would have been the pride and joy of
the ruler Ptolemy, the fourth Philopater. That means lover of
his father, which I don't know. It sounds like if
that's your title it now I'm questioning your love for
your father because you're making such a big deal out
of it. Yeah, but anyway, he was the fourth Ptolemaic
pharaoh of Egypt. A little background. I think we've touched

(06:39):
on the Ptolemys and the show before, but the rule
of the Ptolemies began in three h five BCE after
the collapse of the Macedonian rule established by Alexander the Great.
When Alexander's expansive empire collapsed, his followers ended up competing
with each other for the fragmented remains of that empire,
and his general and Ptolemy the First Solder or Ptolemy

(07:04):
the Savior, claimed the Egyptian territory there were the Egyptian
centered territory and established the Ptolemaic kingdom there. So the
Ptolemies would rule over Egypt as essentially a Helldenistic state
for three centuries until the death of Cleopatra. That's when
the Roman Empire conquered Egypt in thirty BCE. Historians often

(07:25):
point to Ptolemaic Egypt as the longest and final Egyptian dynasty.
During their rule, they faced constant threats. Like at the
very beginning, there were the wars of the Diodecai. These
were the successors of Alexander, again fighting for the scraps
of that empire. There were multiple wars with the Seleucid

(07:46):
Empire and the Kushite Empire to the south. There were
rebellions in southern Egypt, and then, of course, finally the
Roman Empire which conquered them. Now coming to Ptolemy, the
fourth lover of his father, who he would have ruled
two twenty one through two four BCE, generally held up

(08:06):
as part of the dynasty's decline. Despite some successes in
the Fourth Syrian War, it was a period of rebellion
in the south of Egypt, and he was often criticized
as being far more concerned with luxury, ceremony and the
trappings of empire rather than the severe work required to
prolong its era. But if nothing else, he by all accounts,

(08:30):
had a massive boat, and that is where the Tesla
Ranca Terris comes into play.

Speaker 2 (08:36):
Now, if he had a reputation for being being more
concerned with luxury and ceremony than with practicality, does the
boat follow this design.

Speaker 1 (08:45):
It seems like most of the sources I've looked at
argue that this is the case, that this was. I've
seen some quibbles and we'll get into some of this,
but by and large, a lot of people are like, Yeah,
this is exactly the sort of vessel that someone more
concerned with appearances and pomp would would want constructed. A
massive vessel that is maybe not actually an operational war platform,

(09:09):
but just a way to show off how awesome you
are and could potentially be in battle as long as
you don't think too hard about how the ship's going
to get around.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
Okay, let's hear about it all right.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
So I mentioned it has a lot of ores, depending
on how you try and reconstruct it on paper, in
your head. You might have had more than five rows
of oars. We'll get into the details of that, probably
more in the next episode, but seven naval rams and
flat on top an enormous aircraft carrier style deck, and

(09:40):
this would have been used to carry or at least
show off troops and or siege equipment. Now, to be clear,
we have no physical evidence of the Tessa Raka teris.
We have archaeological evidence of some very old boats and
ships from around the world, and thanks to twentieth and
twenty first century maritime archaeology and all of its technological innovations,

(10:00):
we actually know more than ever before. I noticed that
Michael Levinson had an article in The New York Times
from earlier this year making the point that it's a
golden age for shipwreck discoveries. We're just able to see
what's down there, detect things, and then analyze them in
ways that we couldn't even do last century, and last

(10:22):
century was a pivotal time for advancing our understanding of
what came before as well. It's interesting to think about because,
on one hand, an operational wooden ship, as I've seen pointed out,
is just in a perpetual state of decay. I mean,
that's why we have the concept of the ship of theseus.
It's constantly rotting. Essentially, it wears, it breaks, it requires

(10:44):
upkeep and replacement, and if left to the ravages of time,
if conditions are not right, the whole thing is lost.
For instance, one of the main culprits, it's often pointed out,
is the shipworm. As a Simil Pulluck, a nautical archaeologist
at Texas A and M University in College Station pointed out,
and this is who was cited a that GEO article

(11:05):
from twenty fourteen titled five shipwrecks Lost to Time that
archaeologist would love to get their hands on by Jane J. Lee,
which which does get into some ships from this time period.
But basically the idea is that this is this worm
is a wood burrowing mollusk. We may have talked about
it on the show. Before they can break down a
submerged wooden vessel apparently in as little as five years.

(11:28):
But the main way that ancient ships survive are by
winding up buried under sediment or buried under their own cargo,
such as you know, a bunch of ceramic andphora. You know,
basically earthenware containers that end up serving as man made
sediment to preserve the portion of the hall underneath it.

(11:53):
If you've watched any documentaries about, you know, ancient Mediterranean shipwrecks,
you've probably seen footage like this where it looks like, oh,
it looks like a bunch of urns on the bottom
of the ocean, and that's essentially what it is. But
then what is underneath those urns? What else is preserved?
And sometimes we can learn a lot from what remains beneath,
and this is why harbors, rather than open ocean, are

(12:15):
often considered better hiding places for some of these ancient wrecks.
And there also may be factors related to just how
many of these ships operated and so forth and how
they operated. But yeah, it's like it's one of these
cases where, yeah, we have one particular giant vessel that
one's lost to history. But in terms of more common
vessels of this type, yeah, we do have examples of

(12:37):
shipwrecks we've been able to find and learn from, you know,
especially in recent years. But as with the fossil record,
you know, depending on what we have to depend on,
has various holes in it. You know, we have physical
evidence of ships, and then we also have the written
word to turn to. But as Christopher E. Choffen discusses
in the Tessaranka Terras reconsidered this is this was a

(13:01):
nineteen ninety one through nineteen ninety three of a publication
of Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Technical information
in these ancient texts is uncommon. So it's you'll have
mentions of ships, but you know, how many times do
they stop to really roll out the details and the
stats for a given vessel. But I guess the thing
about the about a ship this big is that there

(13:24):
would be some descriptions, some stats out there. Since it
is so novel. You know, it's kind of like if
you look in like biblical texts, are you going to
have this, you know, actual length and with descriptions for
a cart Now probably not everyone knows what a card
is the arc of the covenant, well, and then you've
got might get some details.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
Right.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
So, concerning the Tessaranka Terris, there are two main sources
that are typically cited. One is a second century CE
Greek source, the writings of Athenaeus of Necratis. This is
more than two hundred year after the reign of Ptolemy.
The fourth Chaffin cites this one in his work, and
among the details included are the following two hundred and

(14:09):
eighty cubits in length, which to understand this would be
like four hundred and twenty feet or one hundred and
thirty meters a breadth of thirty eight cubits or fifty
seven feet seventeen meters. I'm not sure if this is
per catamaran hole seven naval rams. As we discussed fine proportions,
breathtaking decorations. This is all subjective. And then it's said

(14:34):
to have required four thousand oarsmen and four hundred sailors
and officers. That alone is incredible, if not unbelievable. And
if it's said to carry two eight hundred and fifty.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
Marines, okay, And the marines would refer to like armed
soldiers who were not involved in the piloting or powering
of the vessel, so they could, you know, if you
made contact with another ship at sea or made a landing,
they could disembark or board another vessel to attack.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
Yet pretty much now in terms of whether they were
pulling the oars or not as we'll get into maybe so,
But then you look at these stats, it's like, okay,
four thousand oarsmen. Even if every single marine was doing
double duty and also pulling the oars, you still would
and also throwing the four hundred sailors and officers, You're

(15:27):
still short by a lot. You still need hundreds and
hundreds of additional oarsmen to power this thing.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
So do experts have an opinion of like whether this
could be possible, whether this possibly existed as described, or
what's going on here?

Speaker 1 (15:44):
I mean it basically the big discussion comes down to
whether it was for show or operational, you know, like okay,
because another detail that is mentioned in this text is
that it required this big specialized launching system, so it
was like so huge that it required something new to
be built in order to even go up to it

(16:06):
and use it to any limited degree in the water.
But even still ancient authors were still skeptical about it
as well, like, for instance, another the other major description
is a lot shorter, and it comes from Plutarch. He
lived forty six through one nineteen CE, and he repeats
some of the exact same stats, but also adds that

(16:27):
the ship was just for show and could only be
moved with great difficulty and danger. So he comments that
it was not at all a practical warship, but a spectacle,
certainly in keeping with the reputation of Ptolemy the Fourth
that has passed down through the centuries. Okay, now, I
guess you could get into a more nuanced discussion about

(16:50):
to what extent the spectacle is as useful or more
useful than a functional vessel. I mean, I guess that's
on the table. And then we have to also take
into account the reputation of ancient rulers as becomes kind
of submitted in the in the historical record, So you know,
there's a there's a lot of back and forth to

(17:11):
have there. But it sounds like there's a strong case
to be made that this was not a very functional warship,
that it was just about showing off your military mind.
But I think it's an interesting place to set out
on our journey here. You know, looking at the Testaranka
Terras is something that exists as the most outrageous and
possibly grotesquely unrealistic example of an evolution of design in

(17:34):
the ancient world. And I think this is especially interesting
in light of how absolutely on point the engineering of
the try Rem is considered to have been. I'm going
to share a quote from Chaffin on this that I
referenced earlier to be clear, this is not He's not
talking about the Testaranka terras here, he's talking about the
more common and functional try Rem or driven vessel. He writes,

(17:57):
it was a warship design at the very limits of
available technology, incapable of further development, expensive to maintain, costly
and trained manpower, and in the long run, too costly
for the resources of the city state. So I think
it seems reasonable to think of these almost as like
jet fighters in the modern area, you know, in terms
of their upkeep and the technology involved, and just how

(18:20):
expensive they are to maintain and use. So we're going
to come back around to these, We're going to come
back around to the Tsaronka Teris, We're going to come
back around to the Trireme and they sort of pinnacle

(18:42):
of this technology as it develops in the ancient world.
But before we get into that, we need to talk
more basically about wars and paddles and other related technologies
that are the basis for all of this. So I
guess to kick off here just a discussion of some
of the basic terminology that is used here. I was

(19:04):
looking at the chapter in the seventy Great Inventions of
the Ancient World by Brian M. Fagan, and the chapter
that deals One of the chapters that deals with boats
has Sean mcgrail on there as the co author who
wrote the book Boats of the World. It covers the
basics of paddles, poles, and ores. So poling involves the

(19:28):
use of a long pole or setting pole, sometimes forked
at the end, to push a small craft along by
pushing it against the bottom of a body of water.
And of note, this is a technology that may leave
no trace on the vessel itself, like it's you know,
you can imagine it. You've probably seen some version of this,
you know, in the world around you, because it is

(19:49):
still used to this day. You know, it's just somebody
polling along.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
Because they're especially useful in very shallow bodies of water
and shallow channels. You might often see them paired with
a kind of boat called a punt, which is a
more square shaped, flat bottomed boat that goes less deeply
into the water. So yeah, you'll see people out on
you know, shallow reams and streams and rivers, punting out

(20:14):
on a kind of flat bottom boat, pushing along the
bottom with a pole.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
Yeah, yeah, you see. You see these out in the
world for sure. And then of course there are paddles.
Use of a paddle generally doesn't leave any evidence on
the craft itself either, And then you have ores. Ores
require a pivot and possibly other specialized fittings, something that
often will leave evidence on a vessel, though, you know,

(20:41):
should enough of that vessel survive and I guess, depending
on the materials used, you could also have like some
of these fittings alone survive.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
Yeah, so yes, to pick up on that. This this
is a distinction that I did not fully have in
my mind before researching for this episode. But there is
a different between a paddle and an ore. I would
have previously used these words interchangeably. But a paddle is
a bladed beam that is held freely in the hands.

(21:11):
And you might have a blade just on one end
you paddle on one side of the boat, or you
might have a double sided paddle with two different blades,
and you can alternate which side, like you might use
in a kayak or something. So the paddle is held
freely in the hands, while an ore is mounted to
the boat in some way through a lock or a pin,
sometimes called an ore lock, though that is a false

(21:33):
cognate with the name or lock has in count or lock.
It is filled differently though oar lock Okay. And as
with the different names of these devices, the verb is
different as well. So pushing through the water with a
paddle is called paddling. Pushing through the water with an
ore is called rowing, And that's what rowing is. Now.

(21:54):
If you have no experience with canoes or rowboats yourself,
you might not think think of this, But there's a
difference in the orientation of the operator with these two
different ways of pushing through the water with bladed sticks.
A person operating a free hand paddle is usually facing
the same direction they're traveling, while a person rowing with

(22:17):
a locked or is usually facing away from their direction
of travel. So a canoe you're looking ahead, a rowboat
you're looking behind.

Speaker 1 (22:27):
You know, it's interesting that I've done both of these before,
only a little bit of rowboat usage, mostly like canoe
stuff patenting. But my mind instantly goes to how these
translate differently in cinematic usage. You know, like if you
have someone in a row boat and you want their face,

(22:48):
you want their emotions, facial expression in the picture, then
you are focusing, you're looking at the rear of the vessel,
and you're seeing them move away from the camera, where
As if you're going you want the same effect more
or less with someone in a canoe, where you're going
to have to have them coming towards the camera. So
I don't know, you could probably get into a into

(23:09):
a into a big, you know, cinematic discussion about how
the different technologies transfer differently to the screen and what
they say about the characters and their journeys.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yeah, that's interesting, you know. For some reason, I tend
to think of when you have a shot of somebody
powering a rowboat with oars in oarlocks, so they're facing
towards the stern of the boat. They're usually talking to somebody,
aren't they Usually there's somebody sitting facing forward opposite them,
sitting behind them, talking to them, and it seems.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
Like that, yeah, or they're like a lonely individual, like
rowing away from the shore where our point of view is,
and it seems to like, you know, drive home a
sort of like sort of a negative connotation, like they
are leaving us or they're going off into loneliness or something,
Whereas again, if someone's in the canoe, they're often moving
towards us. So I don't know, I guess there are

(24:01):
ways of sorting that out in our hands.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
Rowing and paddling is like more interesting the more I
think about it. It reveals more kind of unappreciated physical
forces in play that I don't know are just invisible
to you while you're doing it. But one of the
other things I was thinking about that makes rowing a
powerful way of moving an object is the idea that

(24:26):
there is greater resistance to a paddle blade moving through
water than there is to a paddle blade moving through air. Right, So, like,
so you have the ability at the surface of the
water to dip the ore in for a power stroke,
and there's greater resistance there, which allows you to have
more force pushing the boat forward, and then you can

(24:48):
lift the ore up out of the water to move
it back into place for another power stroke. But while
it's moving through the air to go back for the
next stroke, the return stroke is not really offsetting your
movement very much because the ore moves very easily through
the air, and in some cases you can even see
like practiced throwers tilting the blade so that it's like

(25:10):
sharp edge going through the air instead of flat edge
going through the air. I guess, to get even less
air resistance while they're moving it back.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
This makes me think of various illustrations of old illustrations
of possible submarines, and occasionally you would see ores on them. Now,
I guess, without getting into ancient submarine designs, I guess
sometimes these were depicted as ways that a submarine would
move along as a traditional boat, and not how they
would operate beneath the waters. But if you were to

(25:42):
I guess you could operate ores beneath the waters, probably
having to turn the blade so that it could move
more easily back up to a starting position, but not
as easily as you'd be able to do this by
having the blade of the ore dip in and out
of the water.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
That's right, Yeah, So I think you could still move
by a rowing motion under the water, And in fact,
you can think of the way some like a fish's
pectoral fins can kind of you know, move it around
a little bit with a sort of rowing like motion
in the water. But yeah, I think by all accounts
ores would be much less efficient if you were only

(26:18):
able to move them under the water. You could probably
still get some movement out of them, like you said
by Yeah, like by orienting the blades differently or going
flat or going flat when it's time to push, and
then for the return stroke laying them laying them sharp
side forward. Maybe also by this is a good question.
I'm not sure if this would work. Maybe also by
altering the speed of movement through the water, like with

(26:40):
a fast power stroke and then a very slow return stroke.
I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 (26:44):
Sounds reasonable to me, but I don't.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Know for sure. I haven't tested it out. But yeah,
so it's like by existing, by floating on top of
the water, existing at the interface between the greater resistance
of the water and the lower resistance of the air,
you can get a greater advantage for the rowing movement
by having this resistance on the power stroke and then
relatively easier environment for the return stroke.

Speaker 1 (27:07):
Interesting. Yeah, So it's fascinating to break down the basic
physics behind these different methods, these different machines, But in
terms of when did they develop, well, this is one
of those questions. It's ultimately unanswerable, and we have to
throw in all the general caveats about wooden artifacts and
how frequently they are lost. At the time of the

(27:29):
publication of Fagan's book, they cited the earliest known paddles
dating to seventy five hundred BCE in Germany and Britain.
They cite thirty two one hundred BCE is the oldest
evidence of polling from Mesopotamia and date rowing to third
millennium BCE in Egypt. Also, paddle use was apparently first

(27:50):
illustrated in the fourth millennium BCE in Egypt.

Speaker 2 (27:54):
Yeah, we don't know for sure when the earliest paddle
driven boats were used, but we have some inting pieces
of evidence from apparently fairly early use at least. So
One source I was looking at was a paper published
in a journal called Past Mobilities by Mark Dunkley called
Traveling by Water A Chronology of Prehistoric Boat Archaeology slash

(28:16):
Mobility in England. This was published in twenty sixteen, and
the author here notes something interesting about the archaeological record
in Northern Europe at least, which is that the evidence
of the use of boats and water transport goes back
to very generally between the tenth and fifth millennium before present,

(28:37):
which falls within the Mesolithic or Middlestone Age, but that
the earliest evidence for water transport is generally not the
physical remains of boats. Rather it is first of all
circumstantial evidence and dunky sites. As one example here evidence
of human settlement on islands such as the Inner Heades

(29:00):
in Ireland, and in those cases this was by the
ninth millennium before present, during times when we can be
fairly confident that they were not connected to the rest
of Eurasia by land bridges or expanses that were traversible
in any method other than by boat. So this implies
there must have been some way for Stone Age settlers

(29:20):
to cross these large expanses of water. Thus they likely
had some form of watercraft. Another piece of evidence early
evidence that Dunkley mentions for water transport in northern Europe
is paddles dated from the tenth to fifth millennium before present,
especially found in areas on the edge of the Baltic Sea.

(29:41):
And one example that I came up when I was
looking for I was looking for specific examples of earliest
known paddles in the archaeological record, and one is the
so called Douvency paddle, which was discovered in the nineteen twenties.
I've seen two different dates on this, nineteen twenty six,
in nineteen twenty four, I'm not sure which is right.
Discovered in the nineteen twenties at an archaeological site associated

(30:04):
with Middlestone Age hunter gatherers in northern Germany in a
place now called du Vinci. And this paddle is made
of pine wood and based on two different samples, it
has been dated to between eight and nine thousand years ago.
Interesting note is it's not huge. It seems that it

(30:25):
was about fifty two centimeters in length, or you know,
it's just over twenty inches long. So that's kind of
interesting to think about. Usually the paddles I think of
today are longer, but you can still paddle with a
shorter paddle.

Speaker 1 (30:41):
Yeah, And looking at the photograph here of the artifact,
I mean it very much looks like a paddle. You
don't have to read into it too much. I mean
it instantly reads as a paddle to just casual observation.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
Yeah, So I was trying to understand the human context
in which this paddle would have been used. I was
reading about the apparent Mesolithic settlement in this area in
a source called Spade Paddling on a Mesolithic Lake Remarks
on pre Boreal and Boreal Sites from du Vinsi, Northern
Germany by Klaus Bockelmann, published in twenty twelve in some

(31:19):
kind of collection. It's called a Mindset on Flint Studies
in honor of Dick Stapert Part three the Mesolithic and Neolithic,
and so the area of Lake du Vincy, interestingly, was
likely exploited at this time as a temporary encampment for
the harvesting of hazel nuts. You a fan of hazel nuts.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
Rob, I don't know. My mind is like goes to
like hazel nut coffee and I say no, thank you,
And no, I mean, I guess that what hazel nuts
think of of various like hazelnut based chocolate spread. So no,
I'm I guess I'm very much in favor of them
in other contexts.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
I guess they didn't have chocolate yet. But you're like
halfway to stone. Wait, is there even chocolate in nutella?
It's like brown and sweet.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
There is chocolate and nutella. Yeah, okay, but nutella, Yeah,
It's interesting because I think I've looked into this before
and it's like conceivable that you had some form of
ancient nut butter based on hazel nuts, but you could
not have possibly had nutella yet because you didn't have
access to chocolate from of course South America.

Speaker 3 (32:24):
Right.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
But about these people who were harvesting hazel nuts, Bocalman writes,
quote short term harvesting camps, sometimes under pine trees and
marked not by huts but by birch bark mats, were
set up on muddy ground near open water and on
islets of the lake. These were optimal locations for spade
paddling harvesting trips to hazel groves in the vicinity of

(32:47):
the lake. Hazel Nuts were roasted in hot sand in
open fireplaces, and the edible kernels were either consumed on
the spot or were stored for future use. Doesn't that
just sound cozy? I don't know that sounds nice. So
Bokeelman says that the evidence indicates that small family based
groups probably occupied the area for several days at a

(33:09):
time until the area became more thickly forested. I guess
there's some changing climate and flora around there, and as
the forest came in. This reduced the productivity of the
hazel groves and thus made Lake da Vinci less attractive
as a gathering location for humans because there were fewer

(33:30):
hazel nuts to.

Speaker 1 (33:30):
Harvest, fewer nuts, less reason to go there.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
Right, But so this paddle was found. It seemed to
have been become buried in sediments sometime you know, eight
to nine thousand years ago, and was preserved until it
was found in the nineteen twenties. And so somebody was
paddling obviously, somebody was paddling some kind of water craft,
some very early watercraft through the water, possibly to harvest

(33:55):
hazelnuts in this area at the time. And now Interestingly,
according to Dunkley the author I mentioned earlier, these types
of paddles appear in the archaeological record before the earliest
evidence of log boats, leading to the speculation by an
author named Lanting in nineteen ninety seven that the earliest
watercraft were not log boats but were skin boats or

(34:18):
bark boats. So some kind of design that you know,
you might you would build around a frame and make
roughly waterproof, but would be less likely to be preserved intact.
And there are some sort of candidate pieces people have found,
you know, like a piece of work to Antler, where
somebody has looked at this and said, ah, this might
have formed part of the skeleton of a skin boat

(34:40):
or a bark boat or something. But it's hard to
be sure.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
I mean, I wonder if part of that the idea
here is that like a skin boat would perhaps be
easier to carry around. You could if you're having to
depend on a lifestyle then involves more of a transient
existence and moving from point A to point B with
the seasons and so forth. Then the skin boat you
can carry with you, as opposed to a dugout canoe,
which might be harder in some context to carry around.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
I wouldn't know for sure, but that makes sense to me.

Speaker 1 (35:20):
Now. Much of what we'll be discussing here concerns the
seagoing vessels of the ancient Mediterranean or the wine dark Sea,
if you will, to invoke a common translation from a
Homer's iliad in the Odyssey, But what was it about
these waters and what were some of the defining elements
in the development of ancient marine navigation here? Well, one
of my chief sources on this is The Ancient Mariners

(35:43):
by Lionel case published nineteen ninety one. He was to
cease now he was, but he was one of the
leading scholars on ancient ships and marine operations, and as
we progress will also try to incorporate added insight garnered

(36:03):
via twenty later twentieth and twenty first century maritime archaeology.
But Casin rights that while historians have differed over the
years on the subject, evidence suggests that Mediterranean sailors kept
mostly to this inland sea the Mediterranean, and the key
innovation that enabled them to make use of the sea

(36:24):
here was wind. So prior to this they depended on
polls for shallow navigation in various forms of paddling and
rowing if they needed to go farther out. But wind power,
cas and rights, was a real game changer. So I
want to read a quote here. This is from again
his book The Ancient Mariners nineteen ninety one. For the

(36:46):
first time they harnessed a force other than their own muscles,
their servants, or their wives. It was a discovery whose
effect reached down the ages. From this moment on, the
easiest and cheapest way of transporting bulky life over distances
of appreciable length was by water.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
And remain so today by the way.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
Mm hmm. Yeah. And so we get into this discussion though,
and we'll deal more with this in the next episode.
But so you're gonna end up with the situation where
you have wind power at your disposal, which like is
very clearly awesome and is a real game changer, but
you also have these technologies of the ore and the paddle.

(37:27):
But on top of this in the Mediterranean zone in particular,
coming back to Fagan and one of his other contributing riders,
Boris Rankoff, who will come back to points out that
the galley, the sea going vessel power by ores in
the ancient world, this was for all intents and purposes,
a Mediterranean phenomenon. Elsewhere at this time, ores were more

(37:52):
for powering small vessels on rivers and lakes, and you
often were able to lean more into in to the
sail the rest of the time. But they point out
that a lot of the reason that we see this
emphasis on ores in the ancient Mediterranean it comes down
to the unreliability of the wind there. Unreliability by the way,

(38:14):
as it applies to high stakes, often conflict oriented sailing.
None of this is directly applicable to modern discussions of
wind energy.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
Ah, but what you're saying there makes sense as to
why you would often think of a trade ship as
being one that solely relied on wind power versus a
warship being more likely to have lots of rowers and oars.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
Right, Because it comes down to a situation where you're
going to depend on the sails as much as you can.
But when it comes down to it, when you need
to close the distance between yourself and an enemy or
try to greatly increase that distance, you might not have
the wind on your side. You cannot necessarily count on it.
But what you can count on are the mechanisms of

(38:59):
the oars and the muscle power of the people to
pull those ores. So yeah, if you need that power
and you can't count on the wind or the wind
is not cooperating, well, then you bust out the oars
and you use or power to meet your objective.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
Nice.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
So in the next episode, we'll come back in and
we'll talk at a greater length about this, and then
we'll get into some examples of ancient sea battles that
we know of based on the written record in some illustrations,
and then we'll get into the technology of these or

(39:36):
powered vessels that are so famous among the Greeks and
then later the Romans. I can't wait, all right, so
ramming speed in the next episode. But for now we're
gonna go ahead and close it out. We'll remind you
that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
On Wednesdays we do a short form episode. We've been
running a lot of monster facts recently, but in the

(39:59):
weeks ahead, I'm back with more animalia stupendium, some more
artifacts as we move forward, and then on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 3 (40:31):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows,

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