August 30, 2025 • 51 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 8/22/2024)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday, so we're going into the
vault for an older episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
This is part two of our series about the oor
powered galleys and warships of the ancient Mediterranean. This one
originally published on August twenty second, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick,
and we're back with part two in our series on
the or powered galleys of the ancient world. Now, if
you haven't heard part one yet, you might want to
go listen to that first. But in the previous episode
we talked about Ptolemy, the fourth of Egypt's great or,
(01:00):
which allegedly was built in the third century BCE. We
have no physical remains, only historical descriptions, but Rob, what
were some good details on that It allegedly had like
thousands of people manning it.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Yeah, it's just an unreasonable amount of ores and oars men,
but would have been essentially an ancient world aircraft carrier,
though of course not for aircraft, but for at least troops,
if not maybe siege equipment. The general consensus has often
been that this was not a practical war vessel, but
just a way of showing off. So we talked a
(01:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Mediterranean, yes, we will have to return to the big one.
But also last time we talked about the difference between
paddling and rowing, and thus the difference between paddles and ores.
You paddle with paddle and you row with an ore,
the main difference being that an ore is locked or
pinned to the boat's hull itself some way, and you
(02:08):
typically row facing backwards while you paddle facing forwards. We
also talked about some prehistoric evidence of the use of
wooden paddles for water transport in Stone Age northern Europe,
including one eight to nine thousand year old paddle, and
we also talked about some of the pressures leading to
the development of different mechanisms for powering watercraft in the
(02:30):
ancient Mediterranean, like wind versus human powered propulsion. And we're
back with part two to continue the discussion today.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, as we started getting into in the last episode,
the ancient Mediterranean was this vast inland sea ringed by
coastal lands that boasted various powerful and established civilizations as
well as emergent powers coastal cultures largely contained to this
inland sea. Means to travel and exploit these waters, but
(03:03):
the development of wind power was a huge game changer,
allowing for greater use of the sea for transportation despite
the unpredictable nature of Mediterranean wins. So with all of
this we get the establishment of greater trade routes between
these various powers, and islands like Crete also become more
and more important given all this traffic. But this also
(03:23):
means that you know, especially out of ancient Egypt and
out of ancient Mesopotamia. You know again you have the
emergence of all these marine trade routes, and this ends
up spilling over into conflict as well. Conflict over these
trade routes and around these trade routes, and we get
like a couple of key developments in maritime conflict technology.
The first one is pretty obvious and simple, and that is, okay,
(03:46):
if you have a ship that can carry cargo, it
can also carry troops. And so the first warships were
basically just cargo ships carrying armed forces. And we have
various accounts of this. Ancient Egyptian record speak of this
is far back is twenty four to fifty BCE. That's
when the pharaoh Sahure that means he who is close
(04:08):
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
(04:28):
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 2 (04:42):
A theme I've noticed before, which is that sometimes the
line between naval warfare and piracy is quite thin.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Yes, yeah, absolutely depends on his who's doing the analysis
and we'll have more examples of that as we go here.
One of my sources in this that I cided in
the last episode is the book The a Mariners by
Lionel Cassen, who is one of the one of the
key authorities of the twentieth century on ancient Mediterranean sea
(05:10):
powers and so forth. And he wrote that these vessels
were likely that these rovers, these smaller faster vessels were
likely as old as the big cargo ships, but our
written records of their usage and conflict only goes back
to like the fourteenth century BCE, but they're quite telling.
We get this idea of fleets of sea rovers utilized
(05:31):
to disrupt cross sea communication and maritime trade, as well
as to eventually enforced blockades. Syrian naval units were thus
able to disrupt the link between Egypt and Biblos, and
he also had full fledged sea powers like the Minoans
and then the Mycenians, who were able to hold their
(05:52):
own and then some against powers like Egypt. It also
meant that an age of rich oversea trade largely entered
into an age of like rampant sea rovers. So you know,
we see some of the first recorded sea battles during
this rough time period we're looking at here, such as
Rameses the Third's defeat of an invading fleet of the
(06:14):
Sea Peoples the Battle of the Delta in eleven seventy
five BCEE.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
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 1 (06:31):
Yeah, and you get that from the Egyptian illustrations of
the battle, the way that it ends up rolling out.
So a couple of basics on the way this went down. Now,
on the subject of the Sea Peoples, much has been
hypothesized about who they were and where they came from.
But they definitely invaded Eastern and Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus,
(06:56):
and Egypt toward the end of the Bronze Age, and
we're particularly active ing the thirteenth century BC. There are
different ways to look at them, from a confederacy of
different seafaring raiders, two varying groups of people's displaced by
late Bronze Age disturbances. So it's an entire topic undo itself.
But this would have been the second war between the
(07:17):
Egyptians and the Sea people's case in his book, wrote
that it was very much it seems like a mass migration,
and not at all like the smaller raids that Egypt
had pretty much always had to contend with on their
coastal border. It consisted of two main forces working their
way down the coast toward Egypt at this point, the
main body that moved by land and the accompanying fleet
(07:40):
that largely kept pace along the coast. Now, as far
as the actual engagement, the way it is said to
have gone down is as follows. So the forces of
Egypt had just defeated the forces of the Sea peoples
on land in Syria and then rushed back across the
sea to Egypt with the Sea People's in pursuit, and
(08:03):
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
(08:25):
land shooting arrows at the ships, flaming or otherwise boarding
actions and so forth. Again, a lot of this just
this is what we gather from ancient Egyptian illustrations of
the conflict.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Yes, there's one quite famous illustration of this battle that
is busy to look at.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Yeah, the only thing that's instantly clear is which one
is the pharaoh. You can figure that out pretty easily.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
He's the big one.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
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,
(09:12):
and as related in the Iliad, you have, of course
the whole business with Troy of course, as as we've
discussed in the show before, also their caveats about our
understanding of the historical aspects of Troy as opposed to
the literary context here. But for the most part, you know,
(09:32):
we have this story of a like a Greek alliance
taking on the city of Troy, the forces of Greece
consisting of you know, experienced marauders and traders, everyone joining
up under the command of Agamemnon in his book, Cason writes,
it's a very it's a very well written book and
(09:54):
has some nice descriptions. He writes, for once, the major
cities of Greece for went their traditional past time of
preying on one another and joined hands for a combined
operation against Troy. And while it's described as of course
a land based siege of a city with no navy,
they traveled to their destination via ship.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
And of course the ships play a major role in
the narrative of the Iliad. You know, there's like the
famous passage where there's like the listing of all the
ships and the warriors brought with them.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah, yeah, there's a The works of Homer, you know,
are actually a key point in trying to understand like
what these ships were and how they functioned. Okays In
points out that ancient freighters, as the Mycenians would have used,
typically traversed by sail alone. They were roomy and slow
(10:41):
ships built exclusively for war. However, it had to be galleys.
We've kind of gotten to this already, I think. So
they had to be fast when it mattered, so they
could depend on sales when speed wasn't a necessity, or
when the wind was good, which, of course, you know,
it's worth noting that if the wind is really good,
that will propel you rather swiftly, but can have to
be right, and you could not necessarily count on the
(11:03):
Mediterranean wins, especially if conflict was involved, So the sales
could easily be stored away in favor of that ore
power that was dependent entirely upon the muscles of your crew.
And he points out that the ore power here again
in Homeric times, if you will, was provided by the
crew of the vessel, which also included the ship's fighting men.
(11:26):
So it's interesting. So on one hand, we shouldn't make
the mistake of thinking that they were not good oarsmen.
They were apparently very good oarsmen, highly trained, very skilled.
There's actually a part in the Odyssey where Alcinous brags
that brags about what great oarsmen his men are. But
they were not just dedicated to oarsmen. They also would
(11:48):
have been called on to do all these other things
as well. Okay, so there was a careful balance apparently
in play to how hard you would push your rowers,
because if you were planning on, you know, making an
amphibious landing, an amphibious invasion on the other end of
your journey. They need to be able to get up
and go and do that. So I was trying to imagine,
(12:11):
like what would be comparison with It would be kind
of like if an NFL team had to potentially row
to I don't know, the Super Bowl and then play
the game when they got there.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah, they've got to run to the game or something.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Yeah, So the author here he contends that, yeah, basically
these folks would rather sail than row, and they would
depend on sailing as often as possible. But again, there
are going to be certain conditions where it's just going
to make sense and make all the difference to get
everybody pushing those oars or pulling those oars. Now, what
were these ships like? We have few illustrations. We have
(12:45):
the descriptions by Homer, including a part in the Odyssey
where Odysseus builds a new ship. But even a lot
of this didn't come together till the twentieth century when
we had maritime archaeology to give us have some actual
evidence to base some of this on other archaeological data
that we could take some of those passages and make
(13:07):
better sense of what they were saying. So Cason contends
that the vessels, which he jokingly describes as sea going
greyhounds during this period between thirteen hundred and twelve hundred BC,
would have looked essentially like this, long low holes on
abruptly rising prowl. That's the front of the ship, and
they had a curved stern, as opposed to the reported
(13:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
All right.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
So at this point we're talking more or less about
single level galleys becoming the norm. These would have been
single level or vessels powered by around thirty men, and
we based a lot of this on like vase paintings,
Homeric writings, chronicles from a century BC, and so forth.
(13:57):
That let us know that. Okay, Eventually, though, the ships
begin to vary in size, the number of the oars
ends up ranging from twenty to forty or even fifty.
We'll get into that more later. Early on, though, we
would have been dealing with a case where most of
these vessels would have been privately owned, and they would
have engaged in both merchant trade and raiding. So as
(14:18):
well as you know, carrying armed men to a destination,
and there would have been more of this than dedicated
fighting at sea. Again, we get into that idea that
there's a thin line between between what is piracy and
what is some other pursuit, including actual trade. But as
all this heats up, it gets to the point where Okay,
(14:39):
a single row of ores is not going to cut it.
You're going to need an additional row of ores. And
it's interesting getting into this because yeah, we see the
birth of the fifty ORed vessels, the penticonters, which might
have apparently reflected a development in the eighth century BCE
(15:02):
according to Fagan and Rancoff, who I sided in the
last episode. That's Brian Fagan and Boris Rancoff. So the
vessels we're talking about here would have featured two levels
of rowers, one rowing at the same level is those
single row galleys that came before, but then a lower
level in the hold working ores through apertures in the hull.
(15:24):
So it's interesting. You might imagine that we just built
one on top of the other, like an ice cream cone,
but it's not quite the same. It's a little more
complicated than that. Ends up involving like a reworking of
the hull itself.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
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
(15:58):
design and construction of the vessel.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
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
(16:22):
the ability to make not only a faster vessel, but
this is key, a more maneuverable one. Ah.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
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 1 (16:38):
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
(16:58):
in their own way. But I don't know, maybe it's
the halfway useful analogy. But these general changes that are
going on here, according to Fake and Runkoff, they seem
to suggest though that fighting capacity was becoming more and
more important and carrying capacity was less of a concern.
So yeah, you're you're having to upgrade the design of
(17:20):
your vessels in order to emphasize speed and mobility as
opposed to just how much stuff you could carry, be
that stuff cargo or troops or something else. However, the
length of these vessels does gradually increase, incorporating more and
more ores, upward of one hundred. So again everything continues
to evolve new forms, and then like stretch the ability
(17:43):
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
(18:06):
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,
(18:28):
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 2 (18:53):
Literal corporate raiders.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Exactly. Yeah, so it's dangerous out there. And yeah, any
stresses that the building up of nay these and the
perfecting of these different maritime war technologies in the ancient world,
all this one hand in hand with the planning, the
planting of colonies, the opening up of new trade routes
between these various city states, and so forth. So yeah,
it's just it gets more and more dangerous. And uh,
(19:16):
the the maritime technology evolves to keep up with that. Now,
the Pentagonter seemed again that the two leveled org vessels
seems to have remained the main warship from the eighth
through six centuries BCE. But clearly this climate demanded greater innovation,
you know, to continue to to to you know, to
push the boundaries of what's possible. Every conceivable edge is
(19:41):
going to count in one of these altercations. And uh
so we see a couple of things, and they're very
interconnected here. One was the increasing importance of the nautical ram,
which which we'll get to in a bit. But then
the other goes in hand in hand with that as well,
and that is I think everyone can guess at a
third level of rowers to your vessel optimize. Yeah, you
(20:05):
add more ores, more humans pulling those oars so that
we can have more power.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
So the name of the try Rem comes from three
levels of rowers.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
That's right, the try Rem. It's basically like we've been describing.
It's the Pentaconter with a third level added. But make
no mistake, this edition really did apparently push the engineering
limits of the ancient world, and according to what I've
been reading, could easily be considered the most advanced vehicle
of the age. So it wasn't just let's strap another
(20:39):
row of oars up there. It wasn't. It involved redesigning
the whole ship. And these were advanced vehicles that in
the last episode we compared to jet fighters of today,
ultimately in the long run too expensive for city states
to keep up with. And of course these became just
a staple of sea conflict and seem power see Power.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Of the day.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
The Greeks use these, and then the defeat of the
Persians at Salamis in four AD BCE, and they would
be a major part of their maritime might. This battle,
by the way, I am reminded, is depicted in the
twenty fourteen three hundred sequel. As usually a sequel, there
was a sequel. I saw part of it on an
(21:22):
airplane as usual. I am dubious about looking to a
three hundred picture for any kind of historical accuracy. But
I don't know. People who have seen the movie write
in maybe it has some really good trirem scenes. I mean,
I would at least ask that there would be cool
trirem action sequences in that picture. So, as far as
(21:42):
we know, with the trirem, the third level, the top
level would have had the oarsmen rowing through outriggers so
as to keep the hole as narrow as possible, while
the two lower levels would have rowed through whole apertures.
As such, you could power up a vessel with a
good one hundred and seventy oars and it would have
(22:02):
been as maneuverable as the two level pentdiconter, but ultimately
faster and deadly. Now where did this innovation come from? Well,
according to the author as I was reading here, Athenian
general and historian Thucydides credited to the Corinthian shipwright Menocles
in the eighth century, but Fagan and Rankov state that
(22:24):
more recent scholarship suggests that the invention hailed from perhaps
the Egyptians or the Phoenicians under Persian rule near the
end of the sixth century. Now, as of their writing,
there had been zero wrecks of these vessels discovered, due
in part to the fact that they would have apparently
it's thought, have had positive buoyancy of hold. But in
(22:45):
any case this was the case, then it's still the case.
Now thousands of these ships were built and lost, and
apparently truly lost, because we've never found a wreck.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Now by never found a wreck, Rob, you mean never
found a substantially intact direct But we do have pieces, right.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
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 2 (23:22):
But if somebody's trying to build a replica replica of
an ancient Greek trirem in the modern world, it is
an exercise involving some amount of speculation and interpretation. You
don't just have like one you can copy.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Right right, And this was the endeavor in the creation
of the Olympias in the mid nineteen eighties, where you
had a bunch of experts come together and build what
I've seen referred to as a floating hypothesis. Let's take
everything we know about what a trirem probably was, you
(23:57):
know what we know about ancient construction techniques and so forth,
and let's build one with the under understanding that we're
we're not going to get it one hundred percent correct.
You know, nobody, nobody has u I have seen Anybody
arguing that the resulting ship is just dead on, it's
inevitably incorrect. It cannot possibly be a one for one
(24:19):
match for what any given trireham actually was in the
ancient world. But the idea is that it would give
us like a solid model which we could then run
through trials, experiment with, and then have nuanced conversations about
where this prototype gets it wrong, you know, where this
(24:39):
recreation gets it wrong, Like Okay, maybe it's it's too
heavy and therefore too slow, or maybe, uh, you know,
it's not tough enough to withstand being rammed and so forth,
and so they they built this thing, and there's there
are plenty of images of this vessel. There are there,
there's there's footage, there's there have been documentaries, U there was.
(25:00):
The resulting craft was thirty six point nine meters or
one hundred and twenty one feet one inch in length,
powered by two sails, and of course one hundred and
seventy oarsmen. And I believe oarsmen is technically considered a
gender neutral term, because i've and I have seen plenty
of photos of the folks that they recruited to power
(25:21):
this vessel. In these trials, and you see plenty of
female oarsmen on the crew as well, and they did
five seasons of trials between nineteen eighty seven and nineteen
ninety four, so.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
I guess some people got really good at rowing.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Yeah. I mean, you can imagine where there would have
been a huge sense of camaraderie in this. If you
were a rowing enthusiast or and or you know, an
ancient maritime warfare enthusiast, you know you'd want to get
in there, cram into this vessel with all these people
and start pulling these oars.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Oh does it look fairly cozy?
Speaker 1 (25:55):
It looks like there is a sense of camaraderie. And
the photos that I was looking at, you know, it's
a very nice day in the Mediterranean, so there is
a certain vacation he feel to these photos. But also
it is a lot of people crammed into and above
the whole of a vessel, pulling oars and having to
do so in a skilled and determined fashion. I've read
(26:16):
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
(26:37):
made for a nice time travel movie.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Right. Wait, you mean the replica and its krew gets
sent to the past and they have to fight their
way through through I don't know, battles in the fifth
century BCE or a bunch of try Reams from the
fifth century BCE come to now and threaten all of
our modern navies and only a Tryream can fight them back.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
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,
(27:16):
and again a lot of this was about, you know,
creating space to then have these more nuanced discussions about
what they got right and what they perhaps got wrong.
But apparently they found that chiefly a three level war
system is viable. Prior to this, some scholars had doubted
that it was actually possible to have three levels of oarsmen.
They also found that it was both fast and highly maneuverable.
(27:39):
I think with this model they were able to reach
maximum more speeds of just under nine knots. But I
think there are some discussions about how maybe that was
too slow, maybe the vessel was too heavy. Again, there's
a lot of back and forth as part of the
research surrounding it. But Fagan and Rencoff, and by the way,
Rencoff was a rowing master, professor of ancient history and
(28:03):
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,
(28:28):
or close enough to the money for us to to
use it as a means of understanding what these vessels were.
I included a couple of photos here in our outline,
and everyone out there can look these up as well.
But yeah, the ship at sea with oars out sales
raised looks absolutely amazing, and there's a peek inside at
(28:49):
the folks pulling the oars. Again. It seems like they're
having a great time, but it is not spacious.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Also, I see there's a multi level seating with people
next to each other. I guess that's to get the
different angles of the ores in play, so a lot
of people are sort of head level with their neighbors' butts.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Yeah. Yeah, when we're talking about three levels, don't think
of it like an apartment building. There's a there's like
a clear dividing point between first floor, second floor, third floor. No,
it's all it's all crammed in there, and it's all part.
It's not like an ice cream cone scoop scenario. It's
all incorporated into the design, and that design is ultimately
(29:34):
a large part of it is about powering that ram
That's right.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
So, Rob, you asked me to take a look at
ramming and ramming maneuvers for this episode, and this was
a lot more interesting and complex than I expected. I
was just thinking, yeah, you know what, how complex can
it be? You're just trying to run into each other.
But no, it's a delicate dance.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Yeah, I have to admit that it was more complex
than I was expecting as well, And I think part
of it is that I watched twenty Thousand Leagues under
the Sea, the nineteen fifty four adaptation a lot as
a kid, in which, of course the fictional submarine the
Nautilus rams enemy ships or enemies perceived enemies of Captain Nemo.
And again, this may be more nuanced in the film
(30:19):
than I remember, and maybe more so in the text,
but I seem to think of it as just the
Nautilus just goes as fast as it can and just
crashes through whatever it's trying to destroy, And so it's
easy for me to fall back on that and think, oh, yeah,
well ramming speed with a triream, it's just row as
fast as possible and hit them with as much velocity
as you can muster.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
It's been a while since I've read twenty Thousand Leagues
under the Sea, but I recall a plotline early in
the book where somebody, maybe it's a Professor Aronnax or
one of his rifles, proposes that all of the ships
that are mysteriously sinking around the world. This is like
the inciting incident or phenomena phenomenon that begins the story
(31:00):
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
(31:20):
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,
(31:40):
they can move troops, they can move cargo and provisions,
they can engage in scouting, they can deliver messages and
so forth. But this age of war, galleys, the naval
ships powered by rows of oars, really showed the importance
of direct ship to ship combat, and thus the speed,
design and maneuver ability of the galleys themselves became paramount
(32:03):
and that's what ultimately leads to this extremely optimized design
of the trirem. So in ancient naval conflict, as we've
already alluded to, there are several different methods you could
have of attacking other boats on the water. You could
have archers on your boat. You could come up alongside
that boat and shoot at enemy troops or the crew
(32:25):
on board. You could have marines armed soldiers like maybe
the Greek boats might have some hoplite soldiers that would
board enemy boats and try to attack and overwhelm the crew.
Or you could attack the physical boat itself. So a
major goal of the trirem in ancient warfare was to
(32:46):
destroy or more accurately, immobilize enemy ships, and the primary
method of doing this was ramming. So before you had
the cannon and the torpedo, you had the ram.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
The ancient mariners' rights no longer was a sea battle,
simply a match in which ships closed and the marines
on each side fought it out, a sort of land
fight transferred to shipboard, as in Ramsey's successful attack on
the Sea Raiders. The ram changed all that. It shifted
the emphasis to the men that manned the oars.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
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 1 (33:31):
And in this you end up depending on a highly
skilled rowing crew that could, in Case's words, respond instantly
and accurately to command.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
They had to be on the same page, They had
to act fast, with great strength and power, and they
had to all know what they were doing at the
same time synchronization. So, picking up again on your analogy earlier,
rob of the Trireme as kind of like a jet
fighter of its time. It was a highly optimized vessel.
(34:00):
It was stripped down to maximize rowing power. Generally, on
a Trirem there were no living quarters on these boats.
They were essentially all engine. But that engine was human bodies.
And so as such, a weakness of the Trirem in
a way was that it would generally have to go
(34:21):
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 1 (34:34):
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 2 (34:53):
There are accounts of people doing it, like there's one
famous account in the ancient world of a trirem that
was sent out after another one to try to overtake
it to countermand the orders it had been given, and
so allegedly like the rowers like worked in shifts so
they could row all night and one slept while the
(35:13):
other road, And so there are stories that this kind
of thing could be done in the extreme, but generally
this is not a vessel to live on for extended
periods of time. It is made for battle, and so
a major factor deciding the success of an ancient war
galley was the ability of its crew to perform. The
(35:33):
corollary of that is that human exhaustion could mean death,
So ancient trirems often would be fitted with sales of
some kind. They might have a main mast sail that
could be used to save the crew's strength while they're
just sort of cruising somewhere, and then would generally not
be used for battle. The boat might like leave ashore
(35:55):
its main mast sail if contact with the enemy was imminent.
The goal of naval combat, this ship to ship combat
at the time was to crush or puncture the hull
of the enemy vessel to or sometimes alternately, to shear
off its ores on one side, either of which would
(36:15):
disable it in battle. Now in the modern era, if
we think of puncturing the hull of a ship, we
think this means the goal is to sink the enemy ship,
to send it to the bottom of the ocean. But
that's not necessarily the case. In fact, that's usually not
the case. In ancient Mediterranean naval combat. The ship, being
made of wood and lightly constructed and not full of
(36:39):
much else, would usually not sink entirely, but would become
a floating wreck which the winner of the battle could
later toe away for salvage or for you know, just
to show off what you did.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Yeah in case In points out that there would often
be a capture of the enemy's ship's ram as a trophy.
This is apparently common practice, though again you can recognize
the challenges involved. You know it would have to be
It would have to be a matter of capturing the
whole vessel and not just all right, we punctured them.
Now everyone go get that ram.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Hit right, Oh right, I mean it would still be
full of hostile enemy troops and all that. So like,
there's some more there's some more work to be done here.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Yeah. And one thing that case mentioned is that the
whole like grappling and boarding actions that never completely goes away.
But this ramming, this becomes like the key attack method.
This becomes like the main focus of the ship design.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
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.
(37:56):
You can imagine the physical aftermath in the area of
an ancient naval would be a like a fascinating and
terrifying place.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
So what was going on with the ramming itself? Well,
from what I've been reading, it seems to me that
ramming is primarily a maneuvering game. So trirems were built
with of course, dedicated ramming mechanisms. So sticking out of
the front of the boat there would be a thick
reinforced wooden spike that extends from the keel, and that
(38:36):
would be capped with a metal covering. So like an
Athenian trirem would would have a wooden extension from the
keel and just around the water line, maybe right ad
or right below the water line, and this would be
covered in a bronze sheath. A later and popular Athenian
ram design would have like three horizontally aligned fins, these
(39:01):
sort of thin fins lined up in rows, and I'll
get to the reason for that in a minute. Speed
and maneuverability were a crucial part of the battle. In
order to perform a successful ram, the galley would need
to set up its maneuver correctly. It would need to
build up speed so that it could get in position
(39:23):
to gain an advantageous angle, and it would be trying
to come into the other boat's broadside, so before the
actual ramming itself. A major part of ancient Mediterranean naval
tactics seemed to be focused on getting behind the enemy,
getting through the enemy lines, and positioning your coming around
(39:43):
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 1 (39:54):
That's right, it's got to in order for a ship
that you're facing from behind to turn around and potential
we come back and face you, it would have to
expose its entire side to your ramming force.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
Exactly. Yes. Another very important consideration is not getting stuck
after the ramming attack. So imagine you use your ram
at the prow of your boat to punch a hole
in the enemy's hull, and then your ram gets stuck.
It gets stuck in the hole that it punched. You
are now just as disabled as the other ship, and
(40:28):
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 1 (40:41):
Right because another one could be right behind you. Now
we got three ships all crashed together.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
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
(41:10):
called Archaeology and the Social History of Ships by Richard A.
Gould from Cambridge University Press, twenty eleven. Ramming as an
attack maneuver introduces stresses on the ship's hull integrity. Of course,
right your goule calls ramming quote controlled collision, and that's
that is what it is. You're just crashing into another ship,
(41:33):
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 1 (41:52):
Wow, and you can only imagine that would that would
add to this idea that they were costly vehicles to you,
because yeah, if you could only get like maybe one
hit out of this vehicle, like now it's ruined now
it's it's totaled and you've got to build another one
from scrap.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
I mean, hopefully it's not totaled after one hit, but
you know there, the more hits you do with it,
the more risk you have that you are going to
incur damage to the ship itself. Gould writes, quote early
rams were pointed and risk to becoming stuck in the
opposing ship's hull. So if you look up pictures of these,
these earlier rams were often more they look just kind
(42:30):
of like a horn or a tusk or something. But
but Gould says, quote trirem rams were blunt with a
squared off face and were intended to pound and shatter
the planks in the opposing ship's hull rather than punch
a hole through it. So you were trying to to
damage the target ship's hull in way that maybe cracks
(42:53):
the wood or takes it or causes damage to a
joint or something that that ruins its watertight integrity. It
will start to take on water. That's the goal. But
you do not want to just punch a hole all
the way through and get stuck inside it again. For
all the reasons we've talked about that that is a
risk to you. So this delicate balance of considerations not
(43:17):
only had implications for the design of the ram and
the ship, but also for the crew, because a ramming
attack had to be fast enough that the target ship
could not escape and fast enough that the impact force
would break through the planks of the enemy's hull and
make it take on water. But at the same time,
it could not be so fast that the impact caused
(43:40):
damage to the attacking ship or punched through and got
the ram stuck. So this made me sort of rethink
the idea of speed and the triream. Based on what
I'm reading in this book by Gould here, it seems
that top speed was especially important for maneuvering in trying
to get behigh to the enemy and into the advantageous position.
(44:03):
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 1 (44:17):
Wow, so ramming speed could also conceivably mean or like
ramming deceleration once you're in a position.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
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
(44:46):
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
(45:08):
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 1 (45:22):
Yeah, or I also couldn't help but think about Star
Trek a little bit, which makes sense. Star Trek and
its space combat is very much based on naval combat.
You know, It's it's basically just a space age variation
on all of that, and so if but with no
up and down right right, But but you could imagine
a scenario where if you know, Captain Picard wanted to
(45:45):
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
(46:05):
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 2 (46:19):
Oh man, I would love to see that. So one
one more question, if we're thinking about trying to zero
in on ideal ramming speed for one of these attacks.
I was reading in several sources. One was a book
by an author named Nick Fields called Athenian Trirem Versus
Persian Trirem The Greco Persian Wars four nine four forty nine.
(46:42):
This was published in twenty twenty two by Bloomsbury, and
this book contains interesting photos of a bronze ram sheath
that is from the ancient world. Maybe we'll come back
and talk about that in the next part. But because
it has some interesting design features, not just not just
four ramming efficiency, but a decorative design features that I
(47:06):
thought were interesting. But I just wanted to mention this
book because it gets into the idea of ramming speed.
So Fields says that if the target ship is either
stationary or moving towards you, and you can hit it
within an angle of between twenty and seventy degrees, the
attacking boat's ramming speed only needed to be about three
(47:28):
to four knots. So that's not that's not super fast.
That's between five point five and seven point five kilometers
per hour. And so that's if you're hitting it at
a more oblique angle between twenty and seventy degrees. If
you're able to line up something closer to a ninety
degree hit, you hit it in the middle of its length.
Even less speed is required to break through and make
(47:52):
it take on water. That's probably between two to three knots,
which is between three point seven and five point five
kilometers per hour. There was also research published just this
year about the ramming speeds needed for trirems. This was
published by Izak at All in the journal Journal of
Archaeological Science Reports in twenty twenty four. The paper is
(48:14):
called Damaging a Trirem by Ramming the Kinetics, and the
main finding was that quote, the minimum impact velocity required
to break a single plank is one point three to
three knots, So this was obviously well within the capabilities
of a trirem. There's really no question that it could
easily achieve the speeds needed to cause damage to the
(48:36):
opposing ships, and it didn't have to be near top
speed to do it. They could go at a quite
achievable speed and cause that damage with minimal risk to
the attacking ship. And even on just an intuitive physics level,
it kind of makes sense that you wouldn't need that
much speed because, of course you are hitting a boat
at its weak point with your strongest point, and you've
(48:59):
got the four course of that impact concentrated down not
across like the full like height of its of the
ship's hull, but down into this small impact zone at
the tip of the ram.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
Yeah. Yeah, I'd be interested to hear from many folks
out there who have a lot of experience around boats
who can speak to like accidental rammings or bumpings like
in harbor and docks situations like you know, like how
how easy is it to accidentally punch a hole in
the hull of a small vessel or at least a
(49:32):
wooden vessel that we're talking about wooden wooden ships here. Well,
this has been fascinating. Yeah, ramming one boat into another
seems that, you know, on the surface, to be something
that would be very simple and straightforward. But yeah, there's
a there's a whole, a whole engineering problem to it.
There's an there's a there's a there's a military art
(49:53):
to it, and involves a discipline and maneuver. It's pretty fascinating,
and you can only imagine the mix of actual combat
scenario learning that would be involved in all of this,
as well as experiments and testing. Yeah, it's it kind
of boggles the mind. Gives you a new new respect
(50:14):
for what these ancient mariners were up.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
To, how they had to all work together to make
the boat function as kind of a single organism.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
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
(50:43):
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 2 (50:54):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway,
and huge thanks to our guests for dous for today,
Andrew Howard. Appreciate you stepping in, Andrew. If you would
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Shaw.
(51:21):
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.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday, so we're going into the
vault for an older episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
This is part two of our series about the oor
powered galleys and warships of the ancient Mediterranean. This one
originally published on August twenty second, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick,
and we're back with part two in our series on
the or powered galleys of the ancient world. Now, if
you haven't heard part one yet, you might want to
go listen to that first. But in the previous episode
we talked about Ptolemy, the fourth of Egypt's great or,
(01:00):
which allegedly was built in the third century BCE. We
have no physical remains, only historical descriptions, but Rob, what
were some good details on that It allegedly had like
thousands of people manning it.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Yeah, it's just an unreasonable amount of ores and oars men,
but would have been essentially an ancient world aircraft carrier,
though of course not for aircraft, but for at least troops,
if not maybe siege equipment. The general consensus has often
been that this was not a practical war vessel, but
just a way of showing off. So we talked a
(01:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Mediterranean, yes, we will have to return to the big one.
But also last time we talked about the difference between
paddling and rowing, and thus the difference between paddles and ores.
You paddle with paddle and you row with an ore,
the main difference being that an ore is locked or
pinned to the boat's hull itself some way, and you
(02:08):
typically row facing backwards while you paddle facing forwards. We
also talked about some prehistoric evidence of the use of
wooden paddles for water transport in Stone Age northern Europe,
including one eight to nine thousand year old paddle, and
we also talked about some of the pressures leading to
the development of different mechanisms for powering watercraft in the
(02:30):
ancient Mediterranean, like wind versus human powered propulsion. And we're
back with part two to continue the discussion today.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, as we started getting into in the last episode,
the ancient Mediterranean was this vast inland sea ringed by
coastal lands that boasted various powerful and established civilizations as
well as emergent powers coastal cultures largely contained to this
inland sea. Means to travel and exploit these waters, but
(03:03):
the development of wind power was a huge game changer,
allowing for greater use of the sea for transportation despite
the unpredictable nature of Mediterranean wins. So with all of
this we get the establishment of greater trade routes between
these various powers, and islands like Crete also become more
and more important given all this traffic. But this also
(03:23):
means that you know, especially out of ancient Egypt and
out of ancient Mesopotamia. You know again you have the
emergence of all these marine trade routes, and this ends
up spilling over into conflict as well. Conflict over these
trade routes and around these trade routes, and we get
like a couple of key developments in maritime conflict technology.
The first one is pretty obvious and simple, and that is, okay,
(03:46):
if you have a ship that can carry cargo, it
can also carry troops. And so the first warships were
basically just cargo ships carrying armed forces. And we have
various accounts of this. Ancient Egyptian record speak of this
is far back is twenty four to fifty BCE. That's
when the pharaoh Sahure that means he who is close
(04:08):
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
(04:28):
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 2 (04:42):
A theme I've noticed before, which is that sometimes the
line between naval warfare and piracy is quite thin.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Yes, yeah, absolutely depends on his who's doing the analysis
and we'll have more examples of that as we go here.
One of my sources in this that I cided in
the last episode is the book The a Mariners by
Lionel Cassen, who is one of the one of the
key authorities of the twentieth century on ancient Mediterranean sea
(05:10):
powers and so forth. And he wrote that these vessels
were likely that these rovers, these smaller faster vessels were
likely as old as the big cargo ships, but our
written records of their usage and conflict only goes back
to like the fourteenth century BCE, but they're quite telling.
We get this idea of fleets of sea rovers utilized
(05:31):
to disrupt cross sea communication and maritime trade, as well
as to eventually enforced blockades. Syrian naval units were thus
able to disrupt the link between Egypt and Biblos, and
he also had full fledged sea powers like the Minoans
and then the Mycenians, who were able to hold their
(05:52):
own and then some against powers like Egypt. It also
meant that an age of rich oversea trade largely entered
into an age of like rampant sea rovers. So you know,
we see some of the first recorded sea battles during
this rough time period we're looking at here, such as
Rameses the Third's defeat of an invading fleet of the
(06:14):
Sea Peoples the Battle of the Delta in eleven seventy
five BCEE.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
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 1 (06:31):
Yeah, and you get that from the Egyptian illustrations of
the battle, the way that it ends up rolling out.
So a couple of basics on the way this went down. Now,
on the subject of the Sea Peoples, much has been
hypothesized about who they were and where they came from.
But they definitely invaded Eastern and Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus,
(06:56):
and Egypt toward the end of the Bronze Age, and
we're particularly active ing the thirteenth century BC. There are
different ways to look at them, from a confederacy of
different seafaring raiders, two varying groups of people's displaced by
late Bronze Age disturbances. So it's an entire topic undo itself.
But this would have been the second war between the
(07:17):
Egyptians and the Sea people's case in his book, wrote
that it was very much it seems like a mass migration,
and not at all like the smaller raids that Egypt
had pretty much always had to contend with on their
coastal border. It consisted of two main forces working their
way down the coast toward Egypt at this point, the
main body that moved by land and the accompanying fleet
(07:40):
that largely kept pace along the coast. Now, as far
as the actual engagement, the way it is said to
have gone down is as follows. So the forces of
Egypt had just defeated the forces of the Sea peoples
on land in Syria and then rushed back across the
sea to Egypt with the Sea People's in pursuit, and
(08:03):
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
(08:25):
land shooting arrows at the ships, flaming or otherwise boarding
actions and so forth. Again, a lot of this just
this is what we gather from ancient Egyptian illustrations of
the conflict.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Yes, there's one quite famous illustration of this battle that
is busy to look at.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Yeah, the only thing that's instantly clear is which one
is the pharaoh. You can figure that out pretty easily.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
He's the big one.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
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,
(09:12):
and as related in the Iliad, you have, of course
the whole business with Troy of course, as as we've
discussed in the show before, also their caveats about our
understanding of the historical aspects of Troy as opposed to
the literary context here. But for the most part, you know,
(09:32):
we have this story of a like a Greek alliance
taking on the city of Troy, the forces of Greece
consisting of you know, experienced marauders and traders, everyone joining
up under the command of Agamemnon in his book, Cason writes,
it's a very it's a very well written book and
(09:54):
has some nice descriptions. He writes, for once, the major
cities of Greece for went their traditional past time of
preying on one another and joined hands for a combined
operation against Troy. And while it's described as of course
a land based siege of a city with no navy,
they traveled to their destination via ship.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
And of course the ships play a major role in
the narrative of the Iliad. You know, there's like the
famous passage where there's like the listing of all the
ships and the warriors brought with them.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah, yeah, there's a The works of Homer, you know,
are actually a key point in trying to understand like
what these ships were and how they functioned. Okays In
points out that ancient freighters, as the Mycenians would have used,
typically traversed by sail alone. They were roomy and slow
(10:41):
ships built exclusively for war. However, it had to be galleys.
We've kind of gotten to this already, I think. So
they had to be fast when it mattered, so they
could depend on sales when speed wasn't a necessity, or
when the wind was good, which, of course, you know,
it's worth noting that if the wind is really good,
that will propel you rather swiftly, but can have to
be right, and you could not necessarily count on the
(11:03):
Mediterranean wins, especially if conflict was involved, So the sales
could easily be stored away in favor of that ore
power that was dependent entirely upon the muscles of your crew.
And he points out that the ore power here again
in Homeric times, if you will, was provided by the
crew of the vessel, which also included the ship's fighting men.
(11:26):
So it's interesting. So on one hand, we shouldn't make
the mistake of thinking that they were not good oarsmen.
They were apparently very good oarsmen, highly trained, very skilled.
There's actually a part in the Odyssey where Alcinous brags
that brags about what great oarsmen his men are. But
they were not just dedicated to oarsmen. They also would
(11:48):
have been called on to do all these other things
as well. Okay, so there was a careful balance apparently
in play to how hard you would push your rowers,
because if you were planning on, you know, making an
amphibious landing, an amphibious invasion on the other end of
your journey. They need to be able to get up
and go and do that. So I was trying to imagine,
(12:11):
like what would be comparison with It would be kind
of like if an NFL team had to potentially row
to I don't know, the Super Bowl and then play
the game when they got there.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah, they've got to run to the game or something.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Yeah, So the author here he contends that, yeah, basically
these folks would rather sail than row, and they would
depend on sailing as often as possible. But again, there
are going to be certain conditions where it's just going
to make sense and make all the difference to get
everybody pushing those oars or pulling those oars. Now, what
were these ships like? We have few illustrations. We have
(12:45):
the descriptions by Homer, including a part in the Odyssey
where Odysseus builds a new ship. But even a lot
of this didn't come together till the twentieth century when
we had maritime archaeology to give us have some actual
evidence to base some of this on other archaeological data
that we could take some of those passages and make
(13:07):
better sense of what they were saying. So Cason contends
that the vessels, which he jokingly describes as sea going
greyhounds during this period between thirteen hundred and twelve hundred BC,
would have looked essentially like this, long low holes on
abruptly rising prowl. That's the front of the ship, and
they had a curved stern, as opposed to the reported
(13:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
All right.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
So at this point we're talking more or less about
single level galleys becoming the norm. These would have been
single level or vessels powered by around thirty men, and
we based a lot of this on like vase paintings,
Homeric writings, chronicles from a century BC, and so forth.
(13:57):
That let us know that. Okay, Eventually, though, the ships
begin to vary in size, the number of the oars
ends up ranging from twenty to forty or even fifty.
We'll get into that more later. Early on, though, we
would have been dealing with a case where most of
these vessels would have been privately owned, and they would
have engaged in both merchant trade and raiding. So as
(14:18):
well as you know, carrying armed men to a destination,
and there would have been more of this than dedicated
fighting at sea. Again, we get into that idea that
there's a thin line between between what is piracy and
what is some other pursuit, including actual trade. But as
all this heats up, it gets to the point where Okay,
(14:39):
a single row of ores is not going to cut it.
You're going to need an additional row of ores. And
it's interesting getting into this because yeah, we see the
birth of the fifty ORed vessels, the penticonters, which might
have apparently reflected a development in the eighth century BCE
(15:02):
according to Fagan and Rancoff, who I sided in the
last episode. That's Brian Fagan and Boris Rancoff. So the
vessels we're talking about here would have featured two levels
of rowers, one rowing at the same level is those
single row galleys that came before, but then a lower
level in the hold working ores through apertures in the hull.
(15:24):
So it's interesting. You might imagine that we just built
one on top of the other, like an ice cream cone,
but it's not quite the same. It's a little more
complicated than that. Ends up involving like a reworking of
the hull itself.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
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
(15:58):
design and construction of the vessel.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
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
(16:22):
the ability to make not only a faster vessel, but
this is key, a more maneuverable one. Ah.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
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 1 (16:38):
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
(16:58):
in their own way. But I don't know, maybe it's
the halfway useful analogy. But these general changes that are
going on here, according to Fake and Runkoff, they seem
to suggest though that fighting capacity was becoming more and
more important and carrying capacity was less of a concern.
So yeah, you're you're having to upgrade the design of
(17:20):
your vessels in order to emphasize speed and mobility as
opposed to just how much stuff you could carry, be
that stuff cargo or troops or something else. However, the
length of these vessels does gradually increase, incorporating more and
more ores, upward of one hundred. So again everything continues
to evolve new forms, and then like stretch the ability
(17:43):
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
(18:06):
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,
(18:28):
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 2 (18:53):
Literal corporate raiders.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Exactly. Yeah, so it's dangerous out there. And yeah, any
stresses that the building up of nay these and the
perfecting of these different maritime war technologies in the ancient world,
all this one hand in hand with the planning, the
planting of colonies, the opening up of new trade routes
between these various city states, and so forth. So yeah,
it's just it gets more and more dangerous. And uh,
(19:16):
the the maritime technology evolves to keep up with that. Now,
the Pentagonter seemed again that the two leveled org vessels
seems to have remained the main warship from the eighth
through six centuries BCE. But clearly this climate demanded greater innovation,
you know, to continue to to to you know, to
push the boundaries of what's possible. Every conceivable edge is
(19:41):
going to count in one of these altercations. And uh
so we see a couple of things, and they're very
interconnected here. One was the increasing importance of the nautical ram,
which which we'll get to in a bit. But then
the other goes in hand in hand with that as well,
and that is I think everyone can guess at a
third level of rowers to your vessel optimize. Yeah, you
(20:05):
add more ores, more humans pulling those oars so that
we can have more power.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
So the name of the try Rem comes from three
levels of rowers.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
That's right, the try Rem. It's basically like we've been describing.
It's the Pentaconter with a third level added. But make
no mistake, this edition really did apparently push the engineering
limits of the ancient world, and according to what I've
been reading, could easily be considered the most advanced vehicle
of the age. So it wasn't just let's strap another
(20:39):
row of oars up there. It wasn't. It involved redesigning
the whole ship. And these were advanced vehicles that in
the last episode we compared to jet fighters of today,
ultimately in the long run too expensive for city states
to keep up with. And of course these became just
a staple of sea conflict and seem power see Power.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Of the day.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
The Greeks use these, and then the defeat of the
Persians at Salamis in four AD BCE, and they would
be a major part of their maritime might. This battle,
by the way, I am reminded, is depicted in the
twenty fourteen three hundred sequel. As usually a sequel, there
was a sequel. I saw part of it on an
(21:22):
airplane as usual. I am dubious about looking to a
three hundred picture for any kind of historical accuracy. But
I don't know. People who have seen the movie write
in maybe it has some really good trirem scenes. I mean,
I would at least ask that there would be cool
trirem action sequences in that picture. So, as far as
(21:42):
we know, with the trirem, the third level, the top
level would have had the oarsmen rowing through outriggers so
as to keep the hole as narrow as possible, while
the two lower levels would have rowed through whole apertures.
As such, you could power up a vessel with a
good one hundred and seventy oars and it would have
(22:02):
been as maneuverable as the two level pentdiconter, but ultimately
faster and deadly. Now where did this innovation come from? Well,
according to the author as I was reading here, Athenian
general and historian Thucydides credited to the Corinthian shipwright Menocles
in the eighth century, but Fagan and Rankov state that
(22:24):
more recent scholarship suggests that the invention hailed from perhaps
the Egyptians or the Phoenicians under Persian rule near the
end of the sixth century. Now, as of their writing,
there had been zero wrecks of these vessels discovered, due
in part to the fact that they would have apparently
it's thought, have had positive buoyancy of hold. But in
(22:45):
any case this was the case, then it's still the case.
Now thousands of these ships were built and lost, and
apparently truly lost, because we've never found a wreck.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Now by never found a wreck, Rob, you mean never
found a substantially intact direct But we do have pieces, right.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
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 2 (23:22):
But if somebody's trying to build a replica replica of
an ancient Greek trirem in the modern world, it is
an exercise involving some amount of speculation and interpretation. You
don't just have like one you can copy.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Right right, And this was the endeavor in the creation
of the Olympias in the mid nineteen eighties, where you
had a bunch of experts come together and build what
I've seen referred to as a floating hypothesis. Let's take
everything we know about what a trirem probably was, you
(23:57):
know what we know about ancient construction techniques and so forth,
and let's build one with the under understanding that we're
we're not going to get it one hundred percent correct.
You know, nobody, nobody has u I have seen Anybody
arguing that the resulting ship is just dead on, it's
inevitably incorrect. It cannot possibly be a one for one
(24:19):
match for what any given trireham actually was in the
ancient world. But the idea is that it would give
us like a solid model which we could then run
through trials, experiment with, and then have nuanced conversations about
where this prototype gets it wrong, you know, where this
(24:39):
recreation gets it wrong, Like Okay, maybe it's it's too
heavy and therefore too slow, or maybe, uh, you know,
it's not tough enough to withstand being rammed and so forth,
and so they they built this thing, and there's there
are plenty of images of this vessel. There are there,
there's there's footage, there's there have been documentaries, U there was.
(25:00):
The resulting craft was thirty six point nine meters or
one hundred and twenty one feet one inch in length,
powered by two sails, and of course one hundred and
seventy oarsmen. And I believe oarsmen is technically considered a
gender neutral term, because i've and I have seen plenty
of photos of the folks that they recruited to power
(25:21):
this vessel. In these trials, and you see plenty of
female oarsmen on the crew as well, and they did
five seasons of trials between nineteen eighty seven and nineteen
ninety four, so.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
I guess some people got really good at rowing.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Yeah. I mean, you can imagine where there would have
been a huge sense of camaraderie in this. If you
were a rowing enthusiast or and or you know, an
ancient maritime warfare enthusiast, you know you'd want to get
in there, cram into this vessel with all these people
and start pulling these oars.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Oh does it look fairly cozy?
Speaker 1 (25:55):
It looks like there is a sense of camaraderie. And
the photos that I was looking at, you know, it's
a very nice day in the Mediterranean, so there is
a certain vacation he feel to these photos. But also
it is a lot of people crammed into and above
the whole of a vessel, pulling oars and having to
do so in a skilled and determined fashion. I've read
(26:16):
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
(26:37):
made for a nice time travel movie.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Right. Wait, you mean the replica and its krew gets
sent to the past and they have to fight their
way through through I don't know, battles in the fifth
century BCE or a bunch of try Reams from the
fifth century BCE come to now and threaten all of
our modern navies and only a Tryream can fight them back.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
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,
(27:16):
and again a lot of this was about, you know,
creating space to then have these more nuanced discussions about
what they got right and what they perhaps got wrong.
But apparently they found that chiefly a three level war
system is viable. Prior to this, some scholars had doubted
that it was actually possible to have three levels of oarsmen.
They also found that it was both fast and highly maneuverable.
(27:39):
I think with this model they were able to reach
maximum more speeds of just under nine knots. But I
think there are some discussions about how maybe that was
too slow, maybe the vessel was too heavy. Again, there's
a lot of back and forth as part of the
research surrounding it. But Fagan and Rencoff, and by the way,
Rencoff was a rowing master, professor of ancient history and
(28:03):
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,
(28:28):
or close enough to the money for us to to
use it as a means of understanding what these vessels were.
I included a couple of photos here in our outline,
and everyone out there can look these up as well.
But yeah, the ship at sea with oars out sales
raised looks absolutely amazing, and there's a peek inside at
(28:49):
the folks pulling the oars. Again. It seems like they're
having a great time, but it is not spacious.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Also, I see there's a multi level seating with people
next to each other. I guess that's to get the
different angles of the ores in play, so a lot
of people are sort of head level with their neighbors' butts.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Yeah. Yeah, when we're talking about three levels, don't think
of it like an apartment building. There's a there's like
a clear dividing point between first floor, second floor, third floor. No,
it's all it's all crammed in there, and it's all part.
It's not like an ice cream cone scoop scenario. It's
all incorporated into the design, and that design is ultimately
(29:34):
a large part of it is about powering that ram
That's right.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
So, Rob, you asked me to take a look at
ramming and ramming maneuvers for this episode, and this was
a lot more interesting and complex than I expected. I
was just thinking, yeah, you know what, how complex can
it be? You're just trying to run into each other.
But no, it's a delicate dance.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Yeah, I have to admit that it was more complex
than I was expecting as well, And I think part
of it is that I watched twenty Thousand Leagues under
the Sea, the nineteen fifty four adaptation a lot as
a kid, in which, of course the fictional submarine the
Nautilus rams enemy ships or enemies perceived enemies of Captain Nemo.
And again, this may be more nuanced in the film
(30:19):
than I remember, and maybe more so in the text,
but I seem to think of it as just the
Nautilus just goes as fast as it can and just
crashes through whatever it's trying to destroy, And so it's
easy for me to fall back on that and think, oh, yeah,
well ramming speed with a triream, it's just row as
fast as possible and hit them with as much velocity
as you can muster.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
It's been a while since I've read twenty Thousand Leagues
under the Sea, but I recall a plotline early in
the book where somebody, maybe it's a Professor Aronnax or
one of his rifles, proposes that all of the ships
that are mysteriously sinking around the world. This is like
the inciting incident or phenomena phenomenon that begins the story
(31:00):
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
(31:20):
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,
(31:40):
they can move troops, they can move cargo and provisions,
they can engage in scouting, they can deliver messages and
so forth. But this age of war, galleys, the naval
ships powered by rows of oars, really showed the importance
of direct ship to ship combat, and thus the speed,
design and maneuver ability of the galleys themselves became paramount
(32:03):
and that's what ultimately leads to this extremely optimized design
of the trirem. So in ancient naval conflict, as we've
already alluded to, there are several different methods you could
have of attacking other boats on the water. You could
have archers on your boat. You could come up alongside
that boat and shoot at enemy troops or the crew
(32:25):
on board. You could have marines armed soldiers like maybe
the Greek boats might have some hoplite soldiers that would
board enemy boats and try to attack and overwhelm the crew.
Or you could attack the physical boat itself. So a
major goal of the trirem in ancient warfare was to
(32:46):
destroy or more accurately, immobilize enemy ships, and the primary
method of doing this was ramming. So before you had
the cannon and the torpedo, you had the ram.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
The ancient mariners' rights no longer was a sea battle,
simply a match in which ships closed and the marines
on each side fought it out, a sort of land
fight transferred to shipboard, as in Ramsey's successful attack on
the Sea Raiders. The ram changed all that. It shifted
the emphasis to the men that manned the oars.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
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 1 (33:31):
And in this you end up depending on a highly
skilled rowing crew that could, in Case's words, respond instantly
and accurately to command.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
They had to be on the same page, They had
to act fast, with great strength and power, and they
had to all know what they were doing at the
same time synchronization. So, picking up again on your analogy earlier,
rob of the Trireme as kind of like a jet
fighter of its time. It was a highly optimized vessel.
(34:00):
It was stripped down to maximize rowing power. Generally, on
a Trirem there were no living quarters on these boats.
They were essentially all engine. But that engine was human bodies.
And so as such, a weakness of the Trirem in
a way was that it would generally have to go
(34:21):
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 1 (34:34):
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 2 (34:53):
There are accounts of people doing it, like there's one
famous account in the ancient world of a trirem that
was sent out after another one to try to overtake
it to countermand the orders it had been given, and
so allegedly like the rowers like worked in shifts so
they could row all night and one slept while the
(35:13):
other road, And so there are stories that this kind
of thing could be done in the extreme, but generally
this is not a vessel to live on for extended
periods of time. It is made for battle, and so
a major factor deciding the success of an ancient war
galley was the ability of its crew to perform. The
(35:33):
corollary of that is that human exhaustion could mean death,
So ancient trirems often would be fitted with sales of
some kind. They might have a main mast sail that
could be used to save the crew's strength while they're
just sort of cruising somewhere, and then would generally not
be used for battle. The boat might like leave ashore
(35:55):
its main mast sail if contact with the enemy was imminent.
The goal of naval combat, this ship to ship combat
at the time was to crush or puncture the hull
of the enemy vessel to or sometimes alternately, to shear
off its ores on one side, either of which would
(36:15):
disable it in battle. Now in the modern era, if
we think of puncturing the hull of a ship, we
think this means the goal is to sink the enemy ship,
to send it to the bottom of the ocean. But
that's not necessarily the case. In fact, that's usually not
the case. In ancient Mediterranean naval combat. The ship, being
made of wood and lightly constructed and not full of
(36:39):
much else, would usually not sink entirely, but would become
a floating wreck which the winner of the battle could
later toe away for salvage or for you know, just
to show off what you did.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Yeah in case In points out that there would often
be a capture of the enemy's ship's ram as a trophy.
This is apparently common practice, though again you can recognize
the challenges involved. You know it would have to be
It would have to be a matter of capturing the
whole vessel and not just all right, we punctured them.
Now everyone go get that ram.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Hit right, Oh right, I mean it would still be
full of hostile enemy troops and all that. So like,
there's some more there's some more work to be done here.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Yeah. And one thing that case mentioned is that the
whole like grappling and boarding actions that never completely goes away.
But this ramming, this becomes like the key attack method.
This becomes like the main focus of the ship design.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
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.
(37:56):
You can imagine the physical aftermath in the area of
an ancient naval would be a like a fascinating and
terrifying place.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
So what was going on with the ramming itself? Well,
from what I've been reading, it seems to me that
ramming is primarily a maneuvering game. So trirems were built
with of course, dedicated ramming mechanisms. So sticking out of
the front of the boat there would be a thick
reinforced wooden spike that extends from the keel, and that
(38:36):
would be capped with a metal covering. So like an
Athenian trirem would would have a wooden extension from the
keel and just around the water line, maybe right ad
or right below the water line, and this would be
covered in a bronze sheath. A later and popular Athenian
ram design would have like three horizontally aligned fins, these
(39:01):
sort of thin fins lined up in rows, and I'll
get to the reason for that in a minute. Speed
and maneuverability were a crucial part of the battle. In
order to perform a successful ram, the galley would need
to set up its maneuver correctly. It would need to
build up speed so that it could get in position
(39:23):
to gain an advantageous angle, and it would be trying
to come into the other boat's broadside, so before the
actual ramming itself. A major part of ancient Mediterranean naval
tactics seemed to be focused on getting behind the enemy,
getting through the enemy lines, and positioning your coming around
(39:43):
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 1 (39:54):
That's right, it's got to in order for a ship
that you're facing from behind to turn around and potential
we come back and face you, it would have to
expose its entire side to your ramming force.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
Exactly. Yes. Another very important consideration is not getting stuck
after the ramming attack. So imagine you use your ram
at the prow of your boat to punch a hole
in the enemy's hull, and then your ram gets stuck.
It gets stuck in the hole that it punched. You
are now just as disabled as the other ship, and
(40:28):
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 1 (40:41):
Right because another one could be right behind you. Now
we got three ships all crashed together.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
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
(41:10):
called Archaeology and the Social History of Ships by Richard A.
Gould from Cambridge University Press, twenty eleven. Ramming as an
attack maneuver introduces stresses on the ship's hull integrity. Of course,
right your goule calls ramming quote controlled collision, and that's
that is what it is. You're just crashing into another ship,
(41:33):
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 1 (41:52):
Wow, and you can only imagine that would that would
add to this idea that they were costly vehicles to you,
because yeah, if you could only get like maybe one
hit out of this vehicle, like now it's ruined now
it's it's totaled and you've got to build another one
from scrap.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
I mean, hopefully it's not totaled after one hit, but
you know there, the more hits you do with it,
the more risk you have that you are going to
incur damage to the ship itself. Gould writes, quote early
rams were pointed and risk to becoming stuck in the
opposing ship's hull. So if you look up pictures of these,
these earlier rams were often more they look just kind
(42:30):
of like a horn or a tusk or something. But
but Gould says, quote trirem rams were blunt with a
squared off face and were intended to pound and shatter
the planks in the opposing ship's hull rather than punch
a hole through it. So you were trying to to
damage the target ship's hull in way that maybe cracks
(42:53):
the wood or takes it or causes damage to a
joint or something that that ruins its watertight integrity. It
will start to take on water. That's the goal. But
you do not want to just punch a hole all
the way through and get stuck inside it again. For
all the reasons we've talked about that that is a
risk to you. So this delicate balance of considerations not
(43:17):
only had implications for the design of the ram and
the ship, but also for the crew, because a ramming
attack had to be fast enough that the target ship
could not escape and fast enough that the impact force
would break through the planks of the enemy's hull and
make it take on water. But at the same time,
it could not be so fast that the impact caused
(43:40):
damage to the attacking ship or punched through and got
the ram stuck. So this made me sort of rethink
the idea of speed and the triream. Based on what
I'm reading in this book by Gould here, it seems
that top speed was especially important for maneuvering in trying
to get behigh to the enemy and into the advantageous position.
(44:03):
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 1 (44:17):
Wow, so ramming speed could also conceivably mean or like
ramming deceleration once you're in a position.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
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
(44:46):
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
(45:08):
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 1 (45:22):
Yeah, or I also couldn't help but think about Star
Trek a little bit, which makes sense. Star Trek and
its space combat is very much based on naval combat.
You know, It's it's basically just a space age variation
on all of that, and so if but with no
up and down right right, But but you could imagine
a scenario where if you know, Captain Picard wanted to
(45:45):
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
(46:05):
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 2 (46:19):
Oh man, I would love to see that. So one
one more question, if we're thinking about trying to zero
in on ideal ramming speed for one of these attacks.
I was reading in several sources. One was a book
by an author named Nick Fields called Athenian Trirem Versus
Persian Trirem The Greco Persian Wars four nine four forty nine.
(46:42):
This was published in twenty twenty two by Bloomsbury, and
this book contains interesting photos of a bronze ram sheath
that is from the ancient world. Maybe we'll come back
and talk about that in the next part. But because
it has some interesting design features, not just not just
four ramming efficiency, but a decorative design features that I
(47:06):
thought were interesting. But I just wanted to mention this
book because it gets into the idea of ramming speed.
So Fields says that if the target ship is either
stationary or moving towards you, and you can hit it
within an angle of between twenty and seventy degrees, the
attacking boat's ramming speed only needed to be about three
(47:28):
to four knots. So that's not that's not super fast.
That's between five point five and seven point five kilometers
per hour. And so that's if you're hitting it at
a more oblique angle between twenty and seventy degrees. If
you're able to line up something closer to a ninety
degree hit, you hit it in the middle of its length.
Even less speed is required to break through and make
(47:52):
it take on water. That's probably between two to three knots,
which is between three point seven and five point five
kilometers per hour. There was also research published just this
year about the ramming speeds needed for trirems. This was
published by Izak at All in the journal Journal of
Archaeological Science Reports in twenty twenty four. The paper is
(48:14):
called Damaging a Trirem by Ramming the Kinetics, and the
main finding was that quote, the minimum impact velocity required
to break a single plank is one point three to
three knots, So this was obviously well within the capabilities
of a trirem. There's really no question that it could
easily achieve the speeds needed to cause damage to the
(48:36):
opposing ships, and it didn't have to be near top
speed to do it. They could go at a quite
achievable speed and cause that damage with minimal risk to
the attacking ship. And even on just an intuitive physics level,
it kind of makes sense that you wouldn't need that
much speed because, of course you are hitting a boat
at its weak point with your strongest point, and you've
(48:59):
got the four course of that impact concentrated down not
across like the full like height of its of the
ship's hull, but down into this small impact zone at
the tip of the ram.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
Yeah. Yeah, I'd be interested to hear from many folks
out there who have a lot of experience around boats
who can speak to like accidental rammings or bumpings like
in harbor and docks situations like you know, like how
how easy is it to accidentally punch a hole in
the hull of a small vessel or at least a
(49:32):
wooden vessel that we're talking about wooden wooden ships here. Well,
this has been fascinating. Yeah, ramming one boat into another
seems that, you know, on the surface, to be something
that would be very simple and straightforward. But yeah, there's
a there's a whole, a whole engineering problem to it.
There's an there's a there's a there's a military art
(49:53):
to it, and involves a discipline and maneuver. It's pretty fascinating,
and you can only imagine the mix of actual combat
scenario learning that would be involved in all of this,
as well as experiments and testing. Yeah, it's it kind
of boggles the mind. Gives you a new new respect
(50:14):
for what these ancient mariners were up.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
To, how they had to all work together to make
the boat function as kind of a single organism.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
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
(50:43):
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 2 (50:54):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway,
and huge thanks to our guests for dous for today,
Andrew Howard. Appreciate you stepping in, Andrew. If you would
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Shaw.
(51:21):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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