September 2, 2025 • 45 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 8/27/2024)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. We were off yesterday for the holiday,
so today's episode is another vault episode. This is going
to be part three of our series from last year,
Ancient Oars on the Wine Dark Sea. It originally published
eight twenty seven, twenty twenty four. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
And I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with part
three of our series on the ore powered galleys of
the ancient world. Now, if you haven't heard parts one
and two yet, you should go back check those out first,
but for a brief recap. In the previous episodes, we
talked about the difference between paddling with a paddle and
with an ore. And ore is of course resting on
(01:03):
or connected to part of the boat itself, and you
typically face backwards when you row. We talked about archaeological
evidence of Mesolithic wooden paddles found in Northern Europe. We
talked about some of the pressures leading to the development
of different power mechanisms for ancient boats, wind powered sails
(01:23):
versus human powered ores. We discussed the different designs of
war galleys in the ancient Mediterranean and the considerations that
led to increasing concentration of rowers and ores put more
ores in, starting with single level galleys, the penticonter and
its evolving forms, and eventually the famous Trirem, which had
(01:45):
three levels of oarsmen and was the dominant weapon of
the navies of the Mediterranean Empires for hundreds of years.
We also talked about experimental modern attempts to create replicas
of ancient Greek trirems, such as the Olympias project built
in the nineteen eighties, and we talked about the primary
(02:05):
battle tactics of the Trirem, the main weapon of which
was the ram used for ramming and cracking the hull
of the opposing ships. Oh and of course, back in
part one, we talked about Ptolemy, the fourth of Egypt's
gigantic ancient war boat, which we are going to come
back to today.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, we'll come back to that one again and sort
of revisit it with perhaps a little more context.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Now, there's something I mentioned last time that I wanted
to come back to at the top of today's episode,
which is the idea of the physical remains of rams
from these ancient warships. So we talked about how the
physical archaeological evidence for ancient war galleys is often pretty sparse,
and so modern reconstructions have mostly had to go off
(02:54):
of descriptions in ancient texts and artistic representations that you
might find on or something. So these ships were made
out of wood, and they, according to some sources we
talked about last time, they generally did not sink when
damaged in battle. They might kind of dip in the
water and become immobilized and they could be towed away afterwards,
(03:17):
or if they did sink, the wooden parts mostly decomposed
over time.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Yeah. Yeah, And I was reading a little bit more
about this, this issue of positive buoyancy in try rems.
I was reading a bit by Mark C. Davies really
long titled to this, but I guess I have to
read the whole an investigation into the absence of ancient
Greek tryrems in the archaeological record and a study of
the battlefield deposition at the site of the Battle of
(03:44):
Agati's off the Agatti Islands to determine whether this example
could direct future exploration for evidence of ancient Greek sea battles.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
M that's tight.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Yeah, I would have cut it if they'd just thrown
a colon in there. Anyway, This was a twenty twenty
one publication by Honor Frost Foundation. Anyway, the author here
is ultimately making the case that some tryrems may have
actually sunk, and we should look for more particular environments
where some of the wreckage might have survived the sinking.
(04:14):
But he also outlines the predominant theory as well, that
we already touched on the trirems had positive buoyancy, particularly
during battle, because if you had anything heavy in there,
you had equipment or ballast, you'd throw that out and
then when defeated, they would not have been sunk like
we've been saying, but they would have been left flooded
and floundering. Thus they again, they tended to be dragged
(04:36):
back to port. They tended to be harvested for wood.
But Davies, for his part, stresses that there is disagreement
about how much equipment and or ballast a tryream would carry,
so it's not something we can be one hundred percent
certain of so there remains at least some scholarly disagreement
and discussion on this matter.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Right. But for whatever reason, the wooden components of these
boats have rarely been preserved into the modern archaeological record.
Maybe that's due to positive buoyancy, maybe that's due to
decomposition in the water, or maybe we just failed to
find whatever's there. But for whatever reason, the wooden components
(05:14):
are often lost. But remember that the ram of the
ancient trirem was usually capped with a solid metal sheath
made of bronze, and we do have a number of
these bronze rams in archaeological collections today. So I was
reading about one particular bronze ram from the ancient world
(05:36):
in a source in a book called War at Sea,
A Shipwrecked History from Antiquity to the Cold War, by
James P. Delgado, Oxford University Press, twenty nineteen. And the
section of this book I was reading concerns a ram
called the Athlete ram. This is a bronze ram filled
(05:57):
with wooden timbers, which was discovered by an archaeologist named
Yehoshua Ramone in nineteen eighty while he was snorkeling off
the coast of a town called Athlet, which is near
the Israeli city of Haifa. Apparently, nothing else of real
archaeological significance was found in the bay, so it wasn't
part of a broader shipwreck that anybody found. We just
(06:20):
have the broken off ram with the bronze sheath on
the outside and a wooden protrusion from the prow of
the boat inside. After being recovered from the sea, this
object was subject to extensive study, so a few things
we know about it. It is thought, though this is
not certain, that the ancient warship it belonged to was
(06:41):
wrecked and then drifted close to the shore, and then
was broken apart and disintegrated somehow. They don't say how,
but maybe it was rocked in the waves or hit
against the rocks or something, but somehow it came apart.
So the ram, with its heavy metal sheath, sank to
the ocean floor, and there it was preserved, and the
(07:03):
rest of the boat, the wooden elements, disintegrated over time.
The ram by itself, according to Delgado, weighs about five
hundred kilograms or about eleven hundred pounds, and the bronze
on it is an alloy of about ninety percent copper
and ten percent ten Now I found some slightly different
figures about the weight. I was reading about it also
(07:26):
at the website of the National Maritime Museum in Haifa,
where the object is kept, and they say about its
weight that the bronze casting is four hundred and sixty
five kilograms, and then together with the wood inside when
it was discovered, it was six hundred kilograms. That's about
a third of the weight of a typical mid sized car.
(07:46):
It originally had sixteen timbers from the ship's frame protruding
into the cast bronze fitting, and those timbers were extracted
by an American nautical archaeologist and named J. Richard Steffi.
Now the metal part of the ram is preserved at
that museum, the National Maritime Museum in Haifa. But Stephi
(08:08):
went on to publish important work on the Athlete Ram,
which led him to conclude that these rams and the
ships that bore them were carefully engineered to distribute the
force of an impact into the sturdy bottom of the
ship's hull, so that the ship itself could absorb the
shock of a ramming impact in battle without damaging itself
(08:29):
in the process. There is a quote from Stephie given
in this book. That is quote, the entire bottom of
the ship was essentially the weapon, so not just the
bronze Ram, but you should think of the ship itself
as the weapon. Another place, another source I was reading
in the last episode compared the Trirem's hull to an arrow.
(08:51):
It's designed to hit and absorb the shock and deliver
that punch at its tip.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, listeners should definitely look up images of this ram
and tr rams in general, because I think one of
the most fetching things about them is that there is
this synthesis of elegance and design. Like it is, it's
a beautiful looking artifact, but its function is clear, like
it's function above everything else. That if you were to
(09:19):
compare it to something, you might compare it to like
a can opener, but a very elegant can opener, you know,
with some decorative flourishes.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Yeah, that's right. But I want to get more into
the design of the bronze part itself in just a minute.
But first I want to focus on the way the
ram fits into the battle tactics. So, as we talked
about last time, there is a delicate balance in play
with the idea of ramming. It seems kind of an
(09:48):
oxymoron almost, you know, the ramming and delicacy, but there
is actually there's a sweet spot you need to hit
when you are designing a ship to ram and carrying
out a ramming maneuver talllets that you need to strike
is being able to ram an enemy boat and crack
its hull causing it to take on water without damaging
your own warship through impact stress and without punching a
(10:13):
hole through the enemy's hull and getting your ram stuck,
which was also bad for the attacking ship because getting
stuck means you are immobilized and vulnerable to being hit
on the broadside yourself. And this ties into something we
talked about in the last episode that ramming speed was
not necessarily top speed for these galleys because ramming another
(10:35):
ship at maximum speed was dangerous to the attacking ship
for the previously mentioned reasons. Instead, you wanted to hit
another ship with your prow on their broadside within an
acceptable angle of attack, at just the right speed, and
to illustrate the forces in play with combat based on
ramming STEPI, the archaeologist used the analogy of trying to
(10:59):
knock down a brick wall with a wheeled vehicle. So
he said, you know, if you drive a motorcycle into
a brick wall at one hundred kilometers per hour, you
might knock down the bricks, but the motorcycle itself is
going to be destroyed in the process. But if you
are driving an eighteen wheeler loaded with heavy cargo into
a brick wall, you can limit the risk to yourself
(11:22):
because you only need a relatively low speed with a
vehicle that heavy. The example given is like an eighteen
wheeler full of cargo going at ten kilometers per hour.
You can knock the wall down and maybe not damage
your own truck too much in the process. And of course,
the reason that a larger vehicle can knock down the
wall at a lower speed is that the greater mass
(11:44):
of the truck results in greater kinetic energy and that's
converted into force upon impact. So there was a trade
off with these warships. A heavier ship could do more
damage with a ramming attack at lower speeds. And I
remember last time, one of the books I was reading
had an estimate of a required ramming speed only around
two to four knots, depending on various factors like the
(12:07):
angle of attack, and that's between three point seven and
seven point five kilometers per hour, so it didn't have
to be going amazingly fast. But on the other hand,
a heavier ship was harder to maneuver, and so it's
harder to get behind the enemy, get to where you
need to be, and to outflank the enemy in terms
of the ramming approach. So there was an impetus to
(12:30):
make the ship lighter and more nimble so that it
could maneuver better in battle, but also heavier so that
it could deliver these attacks at lower speed. Now, if
we're thinking about a trireme or any ancient war alley
that executes a ramming maneuver as an arrow, of course,
a very important thing about an arrow is the arrow
(12:50):
head sort of the war head that delivers the force
of the attack. On one hand, if you want to
maximize your damage causing potential, you could have a ram
shaped like a tusk or a tooth, something that narrows
down to a point at its tip, and that of
course really concentrates your impact force over the smallest surface
(13:12):
area and would be really good at punching a hole
in enemy vessels. You would make sure that when you
hit them it punches through and they take on water,
but again that comes at risk to the attacking vessel.
Once again, with a spike, you're likely to punch through
and then get stuck, which means there is a good
chance you're dead as well. So the popular Greek design
(13:34):
for a bronze ram sheath was actually not a spike,
but it was shaped with three narrow horizontal fins in
a kind of rectangular box shape, and this shape delivered
the ship's punch in a relatively small surface area. A
Delgado says that it's less than half of a square meter,
(13:55):
and it was especially effective at cracking the enemy ship's
pl and making it take on water without stabbing through.
So you have to think of this as like they're
kind of trying to design the perfect bronze hammer. They
want a surface texture that will deliver force well, that
will really really concentrate that impact force and damage the
(14:19):
enemy hull, but never get stuck. And for some reason,
this three finned design seemed to work very well, so
they stuck with it for hundreds of years.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Yeah, Like I say, one can imagine a combination of
field experience at sea in battle, and also perhaps some
harbor experiments as well. Let's try different designs out. Let's
see which ones are going to succeed, which ones can
punch that hole without getness stuck.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah, it would be fascinating if we could learn the
design process, like you know, what led to this particular
design that was used over and over. Now, there's been
some disagreement over the years about how this bronze weapon
(15:09):
was made. The fact that it is a single piece
of cast bronze, of course, is very important. That gives
it strength for battle. You can imagine if it were
like two halves riveted together or something, it would be
much more likely to split and fail during an impact.
According to the National Maritime Museum, the idea was once
(15:29):
that it was made using the sand casting method with
a hinged mold, but more recently scholars think that it
was likely made using the lost wax method, which is
itself a fascinating process that we could talk about at length.
Sometimes it's probably come up on the podcast before years ago,
but anyway, it's worth looking up videos of how the
(15:50):
lost wax method works. It's very interesting. Especially I found
a cool video of like a small sort of statuette
of a humanoid figure being made with a lost wax method.
In short, it involves making a wax replica of the
final metal item you want and then tightly encasing that
(16:11):
within plaster or clay with these channels running out of
the mold, and then you pour the molten bronze into it.
The wax melts and escapes into voids created for the process,
and so the bronze replaces the wax mold.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
I recall us talking about this a bit in our episode.
This is from years back on Tallos, the giant Greek automaton,
because I believe in some tellings there's this idea that
he has this kind of iCore in his body, and
there are a lot of comparisons to be made between
this supposed you know, non blood substance running through this
(16:49):
automaton and this method of casting something.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Oh, very interesting. It's funny that actually connects to So
I mentioned this video watching of making a little bronze
statuette with the lost wax method. So when they put
these channels in that are you know, the bronze is
poured through and the and the wax escapes through. It
ends up looking like all these sort of veins and
(17:15):
pipes running out of the figure's flesh. You know, you're
making a bronze aphrodite or whatever, and it's just got
these like pipes coming out of its body. So it
looks a very steampunk and suggests some kind of horrific automaton.
But coming back to the athlete ram, of course, a
good question is when and where does this come from.
(17:38):
We have a few data points here. Delgado sites a
date range between two oh four and one sixty four BCE,
and this is based mostly on a collection of symbols
encoded on the bronze ram. So it has these these
designs on its symbols on the surface. What would these be, Well,
according to the National Maritime Museum, they are first of
(18:00):
all Poseidon's trident. Of course, Poseidon was the Greek god
of the sea and of storms and earthquakes, and his
trident was commonly used as a metonym for his powers.
Like the trident is Poseidon's power that has some relationship
to the power of the sea or power over the sea,
so you can see why sailors might include that on
(18:22):
a vessel for a kind of magical protection. Second symbol
is a helmet with a star overhead. It's sort of
a half egg shape of a helmet. It's got a
star over the top of it. Rob, I've got a
close up of this for you to see. Here. This
helmet is apparently a symbol of the Dioscuri, meaning the
sons of Zeus. These are the twins Castor and Pollux,
(18:46):
who were commonly said to wield power over storms at
sea and to give hope to shipwrecked seamen. There's some
version of the story where they have these special horses
given to them by Poseidon the gallop the waves and
allow them to rescue sailors lost at sea.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Yeah. In Latin, these are the Genini.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
A third symbol is an eagle's head, and the fourth
symbol is the Cadusius. This is the staff of the
god Hermes, which has many meanings. We could probably come
back and have we ever done an episode on the
Cadusius before.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
I don't think we have, But yeah, there's a number
of rich traditions behind it.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Yeah, it is a mini meaning thing, but one of
the meanings of it was that it was regarded as
sort of the wand of the herald and symbolized diplomatic protections.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
On your nautical ram.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
I don't know exactly the best way to interpret it here,
but it might be seen as a kind of general apotropaic,
you know, a general protective symbol. But I don't know,
maybe there's something more specific at work anyway. According to
the National Maritime Museum, this collection of particular symbols means
the ram likely originated on the island of Cyprus between
(19:58):
the dates previously given, because the same collection of symbols
appears on coins minted in Cyprus during this period. So
if this is correct, the galley probably would have belonged
to the fleet of either Ptolemy the fifth Epiphanes or
Ptolemy the sixth Philometer. However, they also mentioned that radiocarbon
(20:19):
dating of the wood that was initially embedded inside the
bronze ram gave an estimate of four hundred BCE plus
or minus one hundred and thirty years, So the estimate
based the radiocarbon estimate based on the wood is a
little bit older than the estimate based on the symbols.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
By the way, if you're keeping score with your Ptolemies,
that would be Ptolemy the Glorious and Ptolemy lover of
his mother.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
These would both be coming after the guy who made
the really big ship. Correct, We're coming back to that
lover of his father. Yeah. Now, multiple sources have also
suggested that this galley was not a trirem. Maybe it was,
but some say it was more likely a four banked
galley called a tetraris or a quadra reem. But then
(21:06):
Delgado also cites another archaeologist, a scholar named William Murray
into quote Delgado here quote analyzing the symbols and pondering
how the ship came to be lost near Athlete. Murray
feels it was a smaller warship based on the Levantine
coast that may have been lost in a storm or
during an unrecorded naval skirmish during Dynastics struggles for control
(21:30):
of Phoenicia. But ultimately, we're probably never going to know
with certainty where and when exactly this ram came from
or how the ship that it belonged to was destroyed.
But we've got some good guesses here.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Yeah. In one of the books that I was sourcing
for this series, Lionel case Ses the Ancient Mariners, he
gets into discussing this ram a bit and using it
to talk about using it as a data point to
try and understand exactly what naval combat consisted of in
like the age immediately following the dominance of the Trirem,
(22:08):
which we'll be getting into here in a bit. But
I guess one thing to keep in mind about all this,
and I guess this. I mean, this is true of
any archaeological endeavor, but they're a finite number of data points,
and a lot of the scholarship it seems to be
about like connecting all of those lines and trying to
sort of triangulate a probable truth based on it.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
But of course, Rob, you mentioned that there was an
age after the age of Trirem dominance when there when
the ships just kept getting more and more extra.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, yeah, this is really fascinating. You're going to see
the Trirem dominance last for a while, but then the
designs begin to get bigger, and this is going to
of course change the way combat occurs at sea and
the way military endeavors in general are carried out in
the Mediterranean. So basically we're looking at some changes beginning
(22:59):
to take in the fourth century BCE. This would be
the development of fours, fives and polyrems, so Brian Fagan
and Boris Rhankoff in their section on these ships in
the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, they point
to Syracuse in Sicily as being the main place where
this innovation is chiefly cited. The innovation here does not
(23:22):
entail the addition of a fourth and fifth level to
a galley, though we talked previously about how it's like
you start with one level and then the next evolution
is you do two levels, and then you got three levels.
Well we're not doing that anymore at this point, no
fourth and fifth levels. Historians have worked this out over time. Instead,
what it constitutes is more men to each or.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
So you could still add additional rows of oarsmen, but
they're just not each getting their own or right.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
And to be clear, this was not necessarily just a
matter of cramming in extra guys, as we discussed, the
tryream was already crammed essentially all human engine lionel case
and in the Ancient Mariners does state that the initial
Greek updates would have still been the same size as
tryrems with an extra rower to each or on the
(24:17):
upper levels. So there's not much you could do basically
down in the hole of the ship, but they did
find a way to squeeze in more people up top.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Now we've talked about how these boats really did not
have a lot of room for cargo. They were not
meant to be, you know, the vessels to stay at sea.
They were sort of out for the day, but had
to come ashore at night to resupply and allow the
crew to rest. But I was just thinking about, like,
you have that many people working that hard in the heat,
you know, operating sort of at the limits of human exertion,
(24:51):
and you would have to get water to them somehow.
So also I'm imagining that, you know, fresh water has
to be stored aboard so that these people can drink
while they're exerting themselves like this. So so like that's
another consideration.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, yeah, Like by adding more people to these ships,
you are creating more problems. You're you're taking pre existing
problems and making them worse again. Up so far we've
been talking about skilled oarsmen as well. These are not
disposable resources. In some sort of a scenario where these
are like you know, captives that have been taken by
(25:26):
the war, they're not seen as disposable by the people
utilizing them. They are seen as skilled labor that you
have to manage and hold on to. And we see
this skewed a little bit with some advancements, So Fagan
and Rancoff point out, we get the quin Creams, which
were still three level vessels, but with two men to
(25:47):
an ore on the top level, two to an ore
in the middle, and then one to an ore on
that bottom level. Again you know more or less down
in the hole where you can't expand too much, so
this would have meant a rowing crew of roughly three
hundred people. And of course all this comes, all this
power comes at a trade off. Well, obviously again you
have to take care of these human beings that are
(26:08):
powering your vessel, if for no other reason out of
self interest, because they are what makes the ship. They
are what makes the ship move. But also by souping
up the vessel like this, it wouldn't have actually been
as fast as the Trirem, but the additional power enabled
these ships to carry more troops as well as ultimately
(26:29):
the latest catapult technology. Hum.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Okay, so you're adding more people unless you're adding more weight,
and thus the ship becomes less nimble and maneuverable and
speedy in battle. But you're increasing it's carrying capacity.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Right, and this change wouldn't have happened all at once.
Cason mentions that if we look at Greek shipyard records
in the fourth century, they indicate that the Greeks probably
were not worried about these advancements that were going on
in Syracuse and shipyards. They probably kept a close eye
on such developments, but the Greek fleet of trirems was
still dominant in the east was and they were mostly
(27:07):
distracted by matters in the west. Still, more and more
larger ships were built and were ultimately incorporated into that
fleet as time passed, So we're getting bigger vessels, and
you know, the age of the trirem of Trirem dominance
is kind of fading out. And Fagan and Rinkoff indicate
that these new ships impacted how warfare at sea was conducted,
(27:29):
and that quote boarding tactics gradually came to be used
alongside and even instead of ramming. So ramming doesn't go away,
but it's kind of like everything became very ramming intensive,
and then things kind of began to diversify a little
bit with these bigger ships.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
Oh, Okay, So the earlier naval warfare warfare tactics we
talked about were more based on boarding. Then ramming became dominant,
then boarding becomes more important yet again right.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Right, And so the Syracusans developed three level sixes or hexories,
and and the Carthaginians developed two level fours or quadrigrims.
And this growth trend continued from the end of the
fourth century BCE onward, while some cities continue to prioritize
trirems or other smaller ord vessels for rating, because I remember,
(28:16):
in a rating scenario, you're gonna you're gonna want that flexibility,
You're gonna want the speed, and so forth. But the
major players in the Mediterranean all seemed to double down
on massive galleys sevens, eights, nines, and tens, And this
of course required increasing number of oarsmen, but allowed the
transport of more troops, more artillery, and siege equipment like
(28:40):
towers and some of the biggest chunkers in this uh
in this area, they point out, were reportedly built to
besiege coastal city walls. So I guess you could almost
think of these as like a full mobile aquatic siege craft.
You know uh. And also sometimes you would utilize a
big vessel like this to break through harbor chains.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
A harbor chain, is that like a defensive measure that
would be used in a harbor.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yes, this would be a navigational barrier.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Now. Casin writes that you would have had multiple options
to upsize your fleet during this growth period. You could
augment existing try reams as we've been discussing to create
these new polyrems, or you could build bigger from the
bottom up. And different powers had different capacities for these changes.
One major factor was apparently the dwindling supply of skilled rowers. Again,
(29:30):
you've got human power at the heart of this, and
they were increasingly in short supply and would become rather difficult.
For example, the Romans later on to source. So ships
were getting bigger, navies were getting bigger, but you still
needed someone to row these things.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Not just someone, you needed lots of people to row
these things. And it was hard work.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
That's right, And they somehow managed to make it harder
in some cases, according to case and many of these
larger designs called for a deeper rowing style. They were
the rower to stand up to dip the blade and
then throw themselves back to pull it, so it became
even more physically demanding in these cases. But it also
apparently meant that only the man at the tip of
(30:14):
the loom needed to be skilled, so the inner oarsmen
in such a setup they could be just muscle power
following his lead. And if a power one of these
naval powers lacked for skilled oarsmen, they could potentially double
down on these new designs. So you could, yeah, we
only have so many skilled oarsmen to utilize, Okay, well,
(30:35):
we can focus on spreading them around around on these
ships and then depend on just unskilled brute force labor
to help them, and these would become the standard long
sweep galleys with multiple rowers that would apparently become the
standard in the into the sixteenth and eighteenth century CE.
In the mediterrane Now, Casein points out that this arms
(31:07):
race what he calls the Age of Titans. This corresponds
with the death of Alexander the Great three twenty three
BCE and the shattering of his vast empire into competing states,
including as we discussed in the first episode, Talemaic Egypt.
And my understanding is that this growth period wasn't just
about growing out of and away from the Triream, but
(31:27):
also a kind of flexibility in the sorts of ships
that a navy might build and use. So the age
of the Trirem was one of a kind of bottleneck perfection. Again,
they think of him as kind of like jet fighters
and with just as much expense and skill tied up
in their use. And now we're dealing with an age
where ship production in naval size is only going up,
(31:49):
and of course something has to give, and it eventually does.
But the arms race of the Titans continued, and the
culmination of this arms race was, of course a vessel
we kicked off with in episode one, the massive Tessaranka
terraces the forty of Ptolemy the Fourth. So, just to refresh,
the Tessaranka terras was the massive war vessel of Ptolemy
(32:11):
the fourth Philopater, lover of his father. His rule lasted
from two twenty one to two oh four BCE.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
Now, the last time this came up, you mentioned the
opinion of historians and various experts that this this was
likely more of a showboat than a functional war boat.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah, yeah, we definitely see that. One of the two
main historical accounts, and even this is you know, centuries
after the boat would have existed, but Plutarch chimed in
and was like this thing was more for show than anything.
It would have been dangerous to use. And it's largely
argue that like this is exactly the sort of ship
that Tallomy the fourth would have because he had this
reputation as being more concerned with the trappings of empire
(32:51):
than the work of empire. You know, this was seen
as a period of decline for the Ptolemys. So getting
back into this question, is is this, in fact just
a huge spruce goose on the sea? Is this just
a complete illogical vessel that with the only possible purpose
being a show of might to say, look at us, Well,
it's basically a big floating parade float for the military.
(33:15):
Or is it something that had some degree of function.
So looking at what Cason has to say about it,
he does follow the basic logic that the Tesla Ranka
Terras was either a king's plaything or a misguided experiment.
You know, how big of a war boat can we make?
But he stresses that the mere concept of a massive,
(33:35):
twin holed catamaran war vessel, because that's what it was.
It was like a twin holed catamaran, big flat top,
kind of like an aircraft carrier for the ancient world,
the ancient Mediterranean. This mere concept wasn't out It didn't
come out of it out of nowhere. He speculates that
(33:56):
tallowing me the fourth's grandfather tlloing me the second, so
we know that he had a pair of thirties and
these may have also been twin holed catamaran vessels. And
he cites another likely twin holed galley one built by
another Alexander successor, and that's Lisimachus, king of Thrace. Cason
(34:17):
writes that these, he calls him super dreadnoughts, would have
been the flag flying command vessel of the large navies
in the days of the Ptolemys. One of Ptolemy the
first chief rivals, by the way, was Antigonus, the One Eyed,
who ruled over Macedonia, and his son Demetrius, the first
(34:38):
Poliocets besieger of cities, was in many ways the instigator
of this super galley arms race between post Alexander states,
as his name implies, Demetrius was heavy into siege craft.
He was a total nerd for siege engines, and so
he was really into the idea of mounting them on
(34:59):
galleys as well. And the emphasis curiously here seems to
have been not just about like bringing siege equipment to
a destination to lay out a siege, but also unship
to ship warfare and anyway. Yeah, so you would actually
have these ships firing at each other, needing to carry
the weight of these catapults and these towers. You know,
(35:21):
so you can have you know, the height advantage, but
potentially and you would need bigger ships with presumably wider
decks to make this possible. M and so the twin
holed catamaran design would be what they ended up exploiting.
Like you can how wide can you conceivably make the whole? Well, okay,
you can do, I guess conceive when we make it
(35:43):
this wide. Or you could just have two holes and
you could have a deck covering both of them. Everyone
knows what a camaran is, I assume if if not,
go out to your local lake and look for the
lounge craft of sort of the pontoon boats, and you
get the basic idea.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Right, Yeah, two holes in the water situated in parallel,
and there's some kind of decks spanning between them.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
So Kison has this wonderful paragraph I want to read
where he talks about what these encounters might have been like.
He writes, artillery and bigger ships naturally had their effect
on naval tactics, and sea battles were different in this
age from what they had been a century earlier. They
still took place near shore. A super galley was even
harder to keep at sea than a trirem, but a
(36:28):
fight now opened with a heavy barrage from catapults and bowmen.
Lighter craft, trirems and quadrarine still maneuvered for position and
the chance for an effective blow with the ram, but
larger units, all of which had massive reinforced snouts, were
not afraid to meet each other prow to prow, and
this often resulted in close packed meles in which the
(36:49):
marines on the decks hurling javelins are thrusting with special
long spears decided the issue To aid in the sort
of fighting, turrets were added to the ship's armament. These
were movable, wooden affairs that could be quickly set up
at bow and stern when a vessel went into action.
And their height gave sharpshooters a chance to fire down
(37:11):
on the enemy's decks.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
It is crazy trying to picture this. Has this ever
been depicted in a movie?
Speaker 1 (37:18):
I mean, it sounds like it would be quite a
spectacle to try and pull this off, right. You'd you'd
kind of have to build these vessels, right, or at
least you would have in sort of like the Golden
Ages centem. I guess you could. You could do it, obviously,
you could do it differently with CGI now. I guess
you could make use of models. But I don't know
that I've ever seen a film that really captures this idea.
(37:39):
Like we talked about how we had battles at sea
essentially being like battles on land, except on boats, and
then we get into the age of sort of dog
fighting trirems, and now we're kind of back to an
even to a combination of both, but an even more
like exaggerated feeling of some sort of a land battle
(38:00):
happening out on the water with towers and so forth.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Yeah, except you can't run away, can you.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Yeah? Yeah, So of course this was all terribly expensive, obviously,
And coming back to ptolomy, the fourth monstrosity. Again, Cason
seems to hold to the idea that the Tessaranka Terrace
was either all for show or a failed project, but
he stresses that it's mostly only through descriptions of it
that we can make in any informed hypotheses about the
(38:27):
form of the other super galleys that preceded it. So
I suppose one could imagine possible examples of this from
far more recent history, like what if you only had
the Spruce Goose to try and understand what functional airplanes
looked like in the years leading up to it, that
sort of thing. But I think this is also interesting
because it kind of potentially puts the Tessaronka Terrace in context.
(38:51):
Like it's not like an outrageous design perhaps that comes
out of nowhere, but like the grotesque leveling up of
a design that was already functional.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Oh okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Now, I'm in the first episode I mentioned another source.
The Tessaronka Terris reconsidered by Christopher E. Choffin This is
from the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies in
nineteen ninety three. He follows up on a lot of
the ideas explored by Case and cites his scholarship the
idea that it was a continuation of a design that
(39:24):
was employed to provide stability for larger payloads and or catapults.
He stresses, however, that we don't really have much that
is comparable to it. So catamarans have been used and
are still used around the world, but not giant war
galleys like this. And again, even though we have reconstructed
a hypothetical trirem, nobody has attempted to, as far as
(39:45):
I know, to reconstruct the Tessaronka Terras. It's just too big.
And obviously I think you can make a strong case
that the efforts involved would be more useful elsewhere in
the pursuit of our understanding of ancient nautical engineering and practices.
But he stresses that, Okay, the ship was clearly very
expensive and it would have required a lot of skilled
(40:07):
labor to operate. So but we might see it as
a practical warship in addition to a flagship to celebrate
or insist upon the naval might of Ptolemy the Fourth,
but one still at the very edge of what was
deemed effective and necessary in a time of almost delirious
competition over ship size, and it would certainly become a
(40:29):
white elephant, he says, during the following age of decline.
So I don't know. I feel like, obviously I'm no
expert on this, and I bow to the experts who
have written on this topic over the years and continue
to write about it. So I don't know if Chafin
is pushing too far into the possibility that it was
a practical warship. I do still like the idea of
(40:49):
seeing it not as this grotesque monster that comes out
of nowhere, but it is the final known extension of
a technological evolution that favored super galleys for a while.
And you know, this is kind of like the evolutionary
dead end for that particular growth pattern. Yeah. Now, I
want to touch briefly on sort of like the end
(41:10):
of the age of the galley. And again we're dealing
with ultimately a long trajectory of history here, and you
see various things survive and so forth. But Fagan and
Rankoff stress that by the latter part of the second
century BCE, the age of the polyren was over. So
Rome's first major fleet, constructed during the First Punic War
(41:33):
that's against the Carthage, was based largely on copying wreckage
of a Carthaginian five, and they also use some larger ships,
but mainly depended on fives. They write that by the
first century CE, the quote mostly unemployed imperial fleet consisted
of fives, fours, and threes, and even smaller two level
vessels and the bigger vessels well. Based on descriptions, the
(41:56):
bigger vessels depended on a single level of above the deck,
and it seems that in time the secret of the
trirem and other three level ships which is simply lost.
The last report of trirems being used occurs during the
Roman Civil War of three twenty four CE, and by
the fifth century CE, Greek historian Zalesamus tells us that
(42:18):
the art of building them was just truly lost, so
nobody knew how to build a trirem anymore. We seemingly
we didn't have any examples of them in full anymore,
and it's left for as an enduring mystery for centuries
and centuries to come. But I guess one of the
crazy parts about all of this is that we could
(42:39):
conceivably change at any moment. I mean, people continue to
keep a lookout for this sort of thing. Marine maritime
archaeology has had tremendous technological strides over the years and
even in recent years, so it's not impossible that we
will find more evidence of trirems. Have just some new
(43:01):
evidence to introduce into that limited data set to try
and figure out exactly what everything consisted of.
Speaker 3 (43:08):
I hope we do. I mean, reading about these hypothetical
reconstructions is really interesting. I would love to ride in
one of them.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Ride or you're gonna You're gonna be down below.
Speaker 3 (43:19):
Not a lot of room for riders. I guess you
gotta help, right, Yeah, so yeah, I'd do some.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Rowing, yeah, or some drumming. I guess somebody needs to
beat the trump. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
I'm more of a navigator myself.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yeah. So we'll have to get into this in some
listener mail, but we have already heard from some people
with rowing experience, and so if we have other oars
menality there that would like to chime in on any
of this, we'd love to hear from you. And I mean,
certainly if you've ever actually been aboard the one reconstruction
that we have of a tr ring and help power,
(43:54):
that would be great. I feel like that's slim possibility,
but just in case putting the call out there for
them also write in with any examples of trirem warfare
in games, in films and so forth. I was looking around,
and I should have thought of this earlier, but some
(44:15):
of the warships space vessels in Warhammer forty thousand have
this kind of ram looking structure on the bottom up
and the like. They clearly kind of pattern the design
a little bit after trirems, and not unsurprisingly, it looks
like there are rules for these ships ramming each other
in like the old Battlefleet, Gothic game and so forth.
So that would make sense when you have a game.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
That is.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Set in a far future, but a lot of it
is sort of patterned after medieval and or ancient warfare.
And we did have a listener writing with some Star
Trek examples, but we'll have to save that for the
listener mail. All right, Well, this has been fun. Just
a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, Core
episodes in Tuesdays and Thursday short form episode on WIN
(45:00):
and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns
to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
Huge Things, As always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. We were off yesterday for the holiday,
so today's episode is another vault episode. This is going
to be part three of our series from last year,
Ancient Oars on the Wine Dark Sea. It originally published
eight twenty seven, twenty twenty four. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
And I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with part
three of our series on the ore powered galleys of
the ancient world. Now, if you haven't heard parts one
and two yet, you should go back check those out first,
but for a brief recap. In the previous episodes, we
talked about the difference between paddling with a paddle and
with an ore. And ore is of course resting on
(01:03):
or connected to part of the boat itself, and you
typically face backwards when you row. We talked about archaeological
evidence of Mesolithic wooden paddles found in Northern Europe. We
talked about some of the pressures leading to the development
of different power mechanisms for ancient boats, wind powered sails
(01:23):
versus human powered ores. We discussed the different designs of
war galleys in the ancient Mediterranean and the considerations that
led to increasing concentration of rowers and ores put more
ores in, starting with single level galleys, the penticonter and
its evolving forms, and eventually the famous Trirem, which had
(01:45):
three levels of oarsmen and was the dominant weapon of
the navies of the Mediterranean Empires for hundreds of years.
We also talked about experimental modern attempts to create replicas
of ancient Greek trirems, such as the Olympias project built
in the nineteen eighties, and we talked about the primary
(02:05):
battle tactics of the Trirem, the main weapon of which
was the ram used for ramming and cracking the hull
of the opposing ships. Oh and of course, back in
part one, we talked about Ptolemy, the fourth of Egypt's
gigantic ancient war boat, which we are going to come
back to today.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, we'll come back to that one again and sort
of revisit it with perhaps a little more context.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Now, there's something I mentioned last time that I wanted
to come back to at the top of today's episode,
which is the idea of the physical remains of rams
from these ancient warships. So we talked about how the
physical archaeological evidence for ancient war galleys is often pretty sparse,
and so modern reconstructions have mostly had to go off
(02:54):
of descriptions in ancient texts and artistic representations that you
might find on or something. So these ships were made
out of wood, and they, according to some sources we
talked about last time, they generally did not sink when
damaged in battle. They might kind of dip in the
water and become immobilized and they could be towed away afterwards,
(03:17):
or if they did sink, the wooden parts mostly decomposed
over time.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Yeah. Yeah, And I was reading a little bit more
about this, this issue of positive buoyancy in try rems.
I was reading a bit by Mark C. Davies really
long titled to this, but I guess I have to
read the whole an investigation into the absence of ancient
Greek tryrems in the archaeological record and a study of
the battlefield deposition at the site of the Battle of
(03:44):
Agati's off the Agatti Islands to determine whether this example
could direct future exploration for evidence of ancient Greek sea battles.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
M that's tight.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Yeah, I would have cut it if they'd just thrown
a colon in there. Anyway, This was a twenty twenty
one publication by Honor Frost Foundation. Anyway, the author here
is ultimately making the case that some tryrems may have
actually sunk, and we should look for more particular environments
where some of the wreckage might have survived the sinking.
(04:14):
But he also outlines the predominant theory as well, that
we already touched on the trirems had positive buoyancy, particularly
during battle, because if you had anything heavy in there,
you had equipment or ballast, you'd throw that out and
then when defeated, they would not have been sunk like
we've been saying, but they would have been left flooded
and floundering. Thus they again, they tended to be dragged
(04:36):
back to port. They tended to be harvested for wood.
But Davies, for his part, stresses that there is disagreement
about how much equipment and or ballast a tryream would carry,
so it's not something we can be one hundred percent
certain of so there remains at least some scholarly disagreement
and discussion on this matter.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Right. But for whatever reason, the wooden components of these
boats have rarely been preserved into the modern archaeological record.
Maybe that's due to positive buoyancy, maybe that's due to
decomposition in the water, or maybe we just failed to
find whatever's there. But for whatever reason, the wooden components
(05:14):
are often lost. But remember that the ram of the
ancient trirem was usually capped with a solid metal sheath
made of bronze, and we do have a number of
these bronze rams in archaeological collections today. So I was
reading about one particular bronze ram from the ancient world
(05:36):
in a source in a book called War at Sea,
A Shipwrecked History from Antiquity to the Cold War, by
James P. Delgado, Oxford University Press, twenty nineteen. And the
section of this book I was reading concerns a ram
called the Athlete ram. This is a bronze ram filled
(05:57):
with wooden timbers, which was discovered by an archaeologist named
Yehoshua Ramone in nineteen eighty while he was snorkeling off
the coast of a town called Athlet, which is near
the Israeli city of Haifa. Apparently, nothing else of real
archaeological significance was found in the bay, so it wasn't
part of a broader shipwreck that anybody found. We just
(06:20):
have the broken off ram with the bronze sheath on
the outside and a wooden protrusion from the prow of
the boat inside. After being recovered from the sea, this
object was subject to extensive study, so a few things
we know about it. It is thought, though this is
not certain, that the ancient warship it belonged to was
(06:41):
wrecked and then drifted close to the shore, and then
was broken apart and disintegrated somehow. They don't say how,
but maybe it was rocked in the waves or hit
against the rocks or something, but somehow it came apart.
So the ram, with its heavy metal sheath, sank to
the ocean floor, and there it was preserved, and the
(07:03):
rest of the boat, the wooden elements, disintegrated over time.
The ram by itself, according to Delgado, weighs about five
hundred kilograms or about eleven hundred pounds, and the bronze
on it is an alloy of about ninety percent copper
and ten percent ten Now I found some slightly different
figures about the weight. I was reading about it also
(07:26):
at the website of the National Maritime Museum in Haifa,
where the object is kept, and they say about its
weight that the bronze casting is four hundred and sixty
five kilograms, and then together with the wood inside when
it was discovered, it was six hundred kilograms. That's about
a third of the weight of a typical mid sized car.
(07:46):
It originally had sixteen timbers from the ship's frame protruding
into the cast bronze fitting, and those timbers were extracted
by an American nautical archaeologist and named J. Richard Steffi.
Now the metal part of the ram is preserved at
that museum, the National Maritime Museum in Haifa. But Stephi
(08:08):
went on to publish important work on the Athlete Ram,
which led him to conclude that these rams and the
ships that bore them were carefully engineered to distribute the
force of an impact into the sturdy bottom of the
ship's hull, so that the ship itself could absorb the
shock of a ramming impact in battle without damaging itself
(08:29):
in the process. There is a quote from Stephie given
in this book. That is quote, the entire bottom of
the ship was essentially the weapon, so not just the
bronze Ram, but you should think of the ship itself
as the weapon. Another place, another source I was reading
in the last episode compared the Trirem's hull to an arrow.
(08:51):
It's designed to hit and absorb the shock and deliver
that punch at its tip.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, listeners should definitely look up images of this ram
and tr rams in general, because I think one of
the most fetching things about them is that there is
this synthesis of elegance and design. Like it is, it's
a beautiful looking artifact, but its function is clear, like
it's function above everything else. That if you were to
(09:19):
compare it to something, you might compare it to like
a can opener, but a very elegant can opener, you know,
with some decorative flourishes.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Yeah, that's right. But I want to get more into
the design of the bronze part itself in just a minute.
But first I want to focus on the way the
ram fits into the battle tactics. So, as we talked
about last time, there is a delicate balance in play
with the idea of ramming. It seems kind of an
(09:48):
oxymoron almost, you know, the ramming and delicacy, but there
is actually there's a sweet spot you need to hit
when you are designing a ship to ram and carrying
out a ramming maneuver talllets that you need to strike
is being able to ram an enemy boat and crack
its hull causing it to take on water without damaging
your own warship through impact stress and without punching a
(10:13):
hole through the enemy's hull and getting your ram stuck,
which was also bad for the attacking ship because getting
stuck means you are immobilized and vulnerable to being hit
on the broadside yourself. And this ties into something we
talked about in the last episode that ramming speed was
not necessarily top speed for these galleys because ramming another
(10:35):
ship at maximum speed was dangerous to the attacking ship
for the previously mentioned reasons. Instead, you wanted to hit
another ship with your prow on their broadside within an
acceptable angle of attack, at just the right speed, and
to illustrate the forces in play with combat based on
ramming STEPI, the archaeologist used the analogy of trying to
(10:59):
knock down a brick wall with a wheeled vehicle. So
he said, you know, if you drive a motorcycle into
a brick wall at one hundred kilometers per hour, you
might knock down the bricks, but the motorcycle itself is
going to be destroyed in the process. But if you
are driving an eighteen wheeler loaded with heavy cargo into
a brick wall, you can limit the risk to yourself
(11:22):
because you only need a relatively low speed with a
vehicle that heavy. The example given is like an eighteen
wheeler full of cargo going at ten kilometers per hour.
You can knock the wall down and maybe not damage
your own truck too much in the process. And of course,
the reason that a larger vehicle can knock down the
wall at a lower speed is that the greater mass
(11:44):
of the truck results in greater kinetic energy and that's
converted into force upon impact. So there was a trade
off with these warships. A heavier ship could do more
damage with a ramming attack at lower speeds. And I
remember last time, one of the books I was reading
had an estimate of a required ramming speed only around
two to four knots, depending on various factors like the
(12:07):
angle of attack, and that's between three point seven and
seven point five kilometers per hour, so it didn't have
to be going amazingly fast. But on the other hand,
a heavier ship was harder to maneuver, and so it's
harder to get behind the enemy, get to where you
need to be, and to outflank the enemy in terms
of the ramming approach. So there was an impetus to
(12:30):
make the ship lighter and more nimble so that it
could maneuver better in battle, but also heavier so that
it could deliver these attacks at lower speed. Now, if
we're thinking about a trireme or any ancient war alley
that executes a ramming maneuver as an arrow, of course,
a very important thing about an arrow is the arrow
(12:50):
head sort of the war head that delivers the force
of the attack. On one hand, if you want to
maximize your damage causing potential, you could have a ram
shaped like a tusk or a tooth, something that narrows
down to a point at its tip, and that of
course really concentrates your impact force over the smallest surface
(13:12):
area and would be really good at punching a hole
in enemy vessels. You would make sure that when you
hit them it punches through and they take on water,
but again that comes at risk to the attacking vessel.
Once again, with a spike, you're likely to punch through
and then get stuck, which means there is a good
chance you're dead as well. So the popular Greek design
(13:34):
for a bronze ram sheath was actually not a spike,
but it was shaped with three narrow horizontal fins in
a kind of rectangular box shape, and this shape delivered
the ship's punch in a relatively small surface area. A
Delgado says that it's less than half of a square meter,
(13:55):
and it was especially effective at cracking the enemy ship's
pl and making it take on water without stabbing through.
So you have to think of this as like they're
kind of trying to design the perfect bronze hammer. They
want a surface texture that will deliver force well, that
will really really concentrate that impact force and damage the
(14:19):
enemy hull, but never get stuck. And for some reason,
this three finned design seemed to work very well, so
they stuck with it for hundreds of years.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Yeah, Like I say, one can imagine a combination of
field experience at sea in battle, and also perhaps some
harbor experiments as well. Let's try different designs out. Let's
see which ones are going to succeed, which ones can
punch that hole without getness stuck.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah, it would be fascinating if we could learn the
design process, like you know, what led to this particular
design that was used over and over. Now, there's been
some disagreement over the years about how this bronze weapon
(15:09):
was made. The fact that it is a single piece
of cast bronze, of course, is very important. That gives
it strength for battle. You can imagine if it were
like two halves riveted together or something, it would be
much more likely to split and fail during an impact.
According to the National Maritime Museum, the idea was once
(15:29):
that it was made using the sand casting method with
a hinged mold, but more recently scholars think that it
was likely made using the lost wax method, which is
itself a fascinating process that we could talk about at length.
Sometimes it's probably come up on the podcast before years ago,
but anyway, it's worth looking up videos of how the
(15:50):
lost wax method works. It's very interesting. Especially I found
a cool video of like a small sort of statuette
of a humanoid figure being made with a lost wax method.
In short, it involves making a wax replica of the
final metal item you want and then tightly encasing that
(16:11):
within plaster or clay with these channels running out of
the mold, and then you pour the molten bronze into it.
The wax melts and escapes into voids created for the process,
and so the bronze replaces the wax mold.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
I recall us talking about this a bit in our episode.
This is from years back on Tallos, the giant Greek automaton,
because I believe in some tellings there's this idea that
he has this kind of iCore in his body, and
there are a lot of comparisons to be made between
this supposed you know, non blood substance running through this
(16:49):
automaton and this method of casting something.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Oh, very interesting. It's funny that actually connects to So
I mentioned this video watching of making a little bronze
statuette with the lost wax method. So when they put
these channels in that are you know, the bronze is
poured through and the and the wax escapes through. It
ends up looking like all these sort of veins and
(17:15):
pipes running out of the figure's flesh. You know, you're
making a bronze aphrodite or whatever, and it's just got
these like pipes coming out of its body. So it
looks a very steampunk and suggests some kind of horrific automaton.
But coming back to the athlete ram, of course, a
good question is when and where does this come from.
(17:38):
We have a few data points here. Delgado sites a
date range between two oh four and one sixty four BCE,
and this is based mostly on a collection of symbols
encoded on the bronze ram. So it has these these
designs on its symbols on the surface. What would these be, Well,
according to the National Maritime Museum, they are first of
(18:00):
all Poseidon's trident. Of course, Poseidon was the Greek god
of the sea and of storms and earthquakes, and his
trident was commonly used as a metonym for his powers.
Like the trident is Poseidon's power that has some relationship
to the power of the sea or power over the sea,
so you can see why sailors might include that on
(18:22):
a vessel for a kind of magical protection. Second symbol
is a helmet with a star overhead. It's sort of
a half egg shape of a helmet. It's got a
star over the top of it. Rob, I've got a
close up of this for you to see. Here. This
helmet is apparently a symbol of the Dioscuri, meaning the
sons of Zeus. These are the twins Castor and Pollux,
(18:46):
who were commonly said to wield power over storms at
sea and to give hope to shipwrecked seamen. There's some
version of the story where they have these special horses
given to them by Poseidon the gallop the waves and
allow them to rescue sailors lost at sea.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Yeah. In Latin, these are the Genini.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
A third symbol is an eagle's head, and the fourth
symbol is the Cadusius. This is the staff of the
god Hermes, which has many meanings. We could probably come
back and have we ever done an episode on the
Cadusius before.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
I don't think we have, But yeah, there's a number
of rich traditions behind it.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Yeah, it is a mini meaning thing, but one of
the meanings of it was that it was regarded as
sort of the wand of the herald and symbolized diplomatic protections.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
On your nautical ram.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
I don't know exactly the best way to interpret it here,
but it might be seen as a kind of general apotropaic,
you know, a general protective symbol. But I don't know,
maybe there's something more specific at work anyway. According to
the National Maritime Museum, this collection of particular symbols means
the ram likely originated on the island of Cyprus between
(19:58):
the dates previously given, because the same collection of symbols
appears on coins minted in Cyprus during this period. So
if this is correct, the galley probably would have belonged
to the fleet of either Ptolemy the fifth Epiphanes or
Ptolemy the sixth Philometer. However, they also mentioned that radiocarbon
(20:19):
dating of the wood that was initially embedded inside the
bronze ram gave an estimate of four hundred BCE plus
or minus one hundred and thirty years, So the estimate
based the radiocarbon estimate based on the wood is a
little bit older than the estimate based on the symbols.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
By the way, if you're keeping score with your Ptolemies,
that would be Ptolemy the Glorious and Ptolemy lover of
his mother.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
These would both be coming after the guy who made
the really big ship. Correct, We're coming back to that
lover of his father. Yeah. Now, multiple sources have also
suggested that this galley was not a trirem. Maybe it was,
but some say it was more likely a four banked
galley called a tetraris or a quadra reem. But then
(21:06):
Delgado also cites another archaeologist, a scholar named William Murray
into quote Delgado here quote analyzing the symbols and pondering
how the ship came to be lost near Athlete. Murray
feels it was a smaller warship based on the Levantine
coast that may have been lost in a storm or
during an unrecorded naval skirmish during Dynastics struggles for control
(21:30):
of Phoenicia. But ultimately, we're probably never going to know
with certainty where and when exactly this ram came from
or how the ship that it belonged to was destroyed.
But we've got some good guesses here.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Yeah. In one of the books that I was sourcing
for this series, Lionel case Ses the Ancient Mariners, he
gets into discussing this ram a bit and using it
to talk about using it as a data point to
try and understand exactly what naval combat consisted of in
like the age immediately following the dominance of the Trirem,
(22:08):
which we'll be getting into here in a bit. But
I guess one thing to keep in mind about all this,
and I guess this. I mean, this is true of
any archaeological endeavor, but they're a finite number of data points,
and a lot of the scholarship it seems to be
about like connecting all of those lines and trying to
sort of triangulate a probable truth based on it.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
But of course, Rob, you mentioned that there was an
age after the age of Trirem dominance when there when
the ships just kept getting more and more extra.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, yeah, this is really fascinating. You're going to see
the Trirem dominance last for a while, but then the
designs begin to get bigger, and this is going to
of course change the way combat occurs at sea and
the way military endeavors in general are carried out in
the Mediterranean. So basically we're looking at some changes beginning
(22:59):
to take in the fourth century BCE. This would be
the development of fours, fives and polyrems, so Brian Fagan
and Boris Rhankoff in their section on these ships in
the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, they point
to Syracuse in Sicily as being the main place where
this innovation is chiefly cited. The innovation here does not
(23:22):
entail the addition of a fourth and fifth level to
a galley, though we talked previously about how it's like
you start with one level and then the next evolution
is you do two levels, and then you got three levels.
Well we're not doing that anymore at this point, no
fourth and fifth levels. Historians have worked this out over time. Instead,
what it constitutes is more men to each or.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
So you could still add additional rows of oarsmen, but
they're just not each getting their own or right.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
And to be clear, this was not necessarily just a
matter of cramming in extra guys, as we discussed, the
tryream was already crammed essentially all human engine lionel case
and in the Ancient Mariners does state that the initial
Greek updates would have still been the same size as
tryrems with an extra rower to each or on the
(24:17):
upper levels. So there's not much you could do basically
down in the hole of the ship, but they did
find a way to squeeze in more people up top.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Now we've talked about how these boats really did not
have a lot of room for cargo. They were not
meant to be, you know, the vessels to stay at sea.
They were sort of out for the day, but had
to come ashore at night to resupply and allow the
crew to rest. But I was just thinking about, like,
you have that many people working that hard in the heat,
you know, operating sort of at the limits of human exertion,
(24:51):
and you would have to get water to them somehow.
So also I'm imagining that, you know, fresh water has
to be stored aboard so that these people can drink
while they're exerting themselves like this. So so like that's
another consideration.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, yeah, Like by adding more people to these ships,
you are creating more problems. You're you're taking pre existing
problems and making them worse again. Up so far we've
been talking about skilled oarsmen as well. These are not
disposable resources. In some sort of a scenario where these
are like you know, captives that have been taken by
(25:26):
the war, they're not seen as disposable by the people
utilizing them. They are seen as skilled labor that you
have to manage and hold on to. And we see
this skewed a little bit with some advancements, So Fagan
and Rancoff point out, we get the quin Creams, which
were still three level vessels, but with two men to
(25:47):
an ore on the top level, two to an ore
in the middle, and then one to an ore on
that bottom level. Again you know more or less down
in the hole where you can't expand too much, so
this would have meant a rowing crew of roughly three
hundred people. And of course all this comes, all this
power comes at a trade off. Well, obviously again you
have to take care of these human beings that are
(26:08):
powering your vessel, if for no other reason out of
self interest, because they are what makes the ship. They
are what makes the ship move. But also by souping
up the vessel like this, it wouldn't have actually been
as fast as the Trirem, but the additional power enabled
these ships to carry more troops as well as ultimately
(26:29):
the latest catapult technology. Hum.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Okay, so you're adding more people unless you're adding more weight,
and thus the ship becomes less nimble and maneuverable and
speedy in battle. But you're increasing it's carrying capacity.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Right, and this change wouldn't have happened all at once.
Cason mentions that if we look at Greek shipyard records
in the fourth century, they indicate that the Greeks probably
were not worried about these advancements that were going on
in Syracuse and shipyards. They probably kept a close eye
on such developments, but the Greek fleet of trirems was
still dominant in the east was and they were mostly
(27:07):
distracted by matters in the west. Still, more and more
larger ships were built and were ultimately incorporated into that
fleet as time passed, So we're getting bigger vessels, and
you know, the age of the trirem of Trirem dominance
is kind of fading out. And Fagan and Rinkoff indicate
that these new ships impacted how warfare at sea was conducted,
(27:29):
and that quote boarding tactics gradually came to be used
alongside and even instead of ramming. So ramming doesn't go away,
but it's kind of like everything became very ramming intensive,
and then things kind of began to diversify a little
bit with these bigger ships.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
Oh, Okay, So the earlier naval warfare warfare tactics we
talked about were more based on boarding. Then ramming became dominant,
then boarding becomes more important yet again right.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Right, And so the Syracusans developed three level sixes or hexories,
and and the Carthaginians developed two level fours or quadrigrims.
And this growth trend continued from the end of the
fourth century BCE onward, while some cities continue to prioritize
trirems or other smaller ord vessels for rating, because I remember,
(28:16):
in a rating scenario, you're gonna you're gonna want that flexibility,
You're gonna want the speed, and so forth. But the
major players in the Mediterranean all seemed to double down
on massive galleys sevens, eights, nines, and tens, And this
of course required increasing number of oarsmen, but allowed the
transport of more troops, more artillery, and siege equipment like
(28:40):
towers and some of the biggest chunkers in this uh
in this area, they point out, were reportedly built to
besiege coastal city walls. So I guess you could almost
think of these as like a full mobile aquatic siege craft.
You know uh. And also sometimes you would utilize a
big vessel like this to break through harbor chains.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
A harbor chain, is that like a defensive measure that
would be used in a harbor.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yes, this would be a navigational barrier.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Now. Casin writes that you would have had multiple options
to upsize your fleet during this growth period. You could
augment existing try reams as we've been discussing to create
these new polyrems, or you could build bigger from the
bottom up. And different powers had different capacities for these changes.
One major factor was apparently the dwindling supply of skilled rowers. Again,
(29:30):
you've got human power at the heart of this, and
they were increasingly in short supply and would become rather difficult.
For example, the Romans later on to source. So ships
were getting bigger, navies were getting bigger, but you still
needed someone to row these things.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Not just someone, you needed lots of people to row
these things. And it was hard work.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
That's right, And they somehow managed to make it harder
in some cases, according to case and many of these
larger designs called for a deeper rowing style. They were
the rower to stand up to dip the blade and
then throw themselves back to pull it, so it became
even more physically demanding in these cases. But it also
apparently meant that only the man at the tip of
(30:14):
the loom needed to be skilled, so the inner oarsmen
in such a setup they could be just muscle power
following his lead. And if a power one of these
naval powers lacked for skilled oarsmen, they could potentially double
down on these new designs. So you could, yeah, we
only have so many skilled oarsmen to utilize, Okay, well,
(30:35):
we can focus on spreading them around around on these
ships and then depend on just unskilled brute force labor
to help them, and these would become the standard long
sweep galleys with multiple rowers that would apparently become the
standard in the into the sixteenth and eighteenth century CE.
In the mediterrane Now, Casein points out that this arms
(31:07):
race what he calls the Age of Titans. This corresponds
with the death of Alexander the Great three twenty three
BCE and the shattering of his vast empire into competing states,
including as we discussed in the first episode, Talemaic Egypt.
And my understanding is that this growth period wasn't just
about growing out of and away from the Triream, but
(31:27):
also a kind of flexibility in the sorts of ships
that a navy might build and use. So the age
of the Trirem was one of a kind of bottleneck perfection. Again,
they think of him as kind of like jet fighters
and with just as much expense and skill tied up
in their use. And now we're dealing with an age
where ship production in naval size is only going up,
(31:49):
and of course something has to give, and it eventually does.
But the arms race of the Titans continued, and the
culmination of this arms race was, of course a vessel
we kicked off with in episode one, the massive Tessaranka
terraces the forty of Ptolemy the Fourth. So, just to refresh,
the Tessaranka terras was the massive war vessel of Ptolemy
(32:11):
the fourth Philopater, lover of his father. His rule lasted
from two twenty one to two oh four BCE.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
Now, the last time this came up, you mentioned the
opinion of historians and various experts that this this was
likely more of a showboat than a functional war boat.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah, yeah, we definitely see that. One of the two
main historical accounts, and even this is you know, centuries
after the boat would have existed, but Plutarch chimed in
and was like this thing was more for show than anything.
It would have been dangerous to use. And it's largely
argue that like this is exactly the sort of ship
that Tallomy the fourth would have because he had this
reputation as being more concerned with the trappings of empire
(32:51):
than the work of empire. You know, this was seen
as a period of decline for the Ptolemys. So getting
back into this question, is is this, in fact just
a huge spruce goose on the sea? Is this just
a complete illogical vessel that with the only possible purpose
being a show of might to say, look at us, Well,
it's basically a big floating parade float for the military.
(33:15):
Or is it something that had some degree of function.
So looking at what Cason has to say about it,
he does follow the basic logic that the Tesla Ranka
Terras was either a king's plaything or a misguided experiment.
You know, how big of a war boat can we make?
But he stresses that the mere concept of a massive,
(33:35):
twin holed catamaran war vessel, because that's what it was.
It was like a twin holed catamaran, big flat top,
kind of like an aircraft carrier for the ancient world,
the ancient Mediterranean. This mere concept wasn't out It didn't
come out of it out of nowhere. He speculates that
(33:56):
tallowing me the fourth's grandfather tlloing me the second, so
we know that he had a pair of thirties and
these may have also been twin holed catamaran vessels. And
he cites another likely twin holed galley one built by
another Alexander successor, and that's Lisimachus, king of Thrace. Cason
(34:17):
writes that these, he calls him super dreadnoughts, would have
been the flag flying command vessel of the large navies
in the days of the Ptolemys. One of Ptolemy the
first chief rivals, by the way, was Antigonus, the One Eyed,
who ruled over Macedonia, and his son Demetrius, the first
(34:38):
Poliocets besieger of cities, was in many ways the instigator
of this super galley arms race between post Alexander states,
as his name implies, Demetrius was heavy into siege craft.
He was a total nerd for siege engines, and so
he was really into the idea of mounting them on
(34:59):
galleys as well. And the emphasis curiously here seems to
have been not just about like bringing siege equipment to
a destination to lay out a siege, but also unship
to ship warfare and anyway. Yeah, so you would actually
have these ships firing at each other, needing to carry
the weight of these catapults and these towers. You know,
(35:21):
so you can have you know, the height advantage, but
potentially and you would need bigger ships with presumably wider
decks to make this possible. M and so the twin
holed catamaran design would be what they ended up exploiting.
Like you can how wide can you conceivably make the whole? Well, okay,
you can do, I guess conceive when we make it
(35:43):
this wide. Or you could just have two holes and
you could have a deck covering both of them. Everyone
knows what a camaran is, I assume if if not,
go out to your local lake and look for the
lounge craft of sort of the pontoon boats, and you
get the basic idea.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Right, Yeah, two holes in the water situated in parallel,
and there's some kind of decks spanning between them.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
So Kison has this wonderful paragraph I want to read
where he talks about what these encounters might have been like.
He writes, artillery and bigger ships naturally had their effect
on naval tactics, and sea battles were different in this
age from what they had been a century earlier. They
still took place near shore. A super galley was even
harder to keep at sea than a trirem, but a
(36:28):
fight now opened with a heavy barrage from catapults and bowmen.
Lighter craft, trirems and quadrarine still maneuvered for position and
the chance for an effective blow with the ram, but
larger units, all of which had massive reinforced snouts, were
not afraid to meet each other prow to prow, and
this often resulted in close packed meles in which the
(36:49):
marines on the decks hurling javelins are thrusting with special
long spears decided the issue To aid in the sort
of fighting, turrets were added to the ship's armament. These
were movable, wooden affairs that could be quickly set up
at bow and stern when a vessel went into action.
And their height gave sharpshooters a chance to fire down
(37:11):
on the enemy's decks.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
It is crazy trying to picture this. Has this ever
been depicted in a movie?
Speaker 1 (37:18):
I mean, it sounds like it would be quite a
spectacle to try and pull this off, right. You'd you'd
kind of have to build these vessels, right, or at
least you would have in sort of like the Golden
Ages centem. I guess you could. You could do it, obviously,
you could do it differently with CGI now. I guess
you could make use of models. But I don't know
that I've ever seen a film that really captures this idea.
(37:39):
Like we talked about how we had battles at sea
essentially being like battles on land, except on boats, and
then we get into the age of sort of dog
fighting trirems, and now we're kind of back to an
even to a combination of both, but an even more
like exaggerated feeling of some sort of a land battle
(38:00):
happening out on the water with towers and so forth.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Yeah, except you can't run away, can you.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Yeah? Yeah, So of course this was all terribly expensive, obviously,
And coming back to ptolomy, the fourth monstrosity. Again, Cason
seems to hold to the idea that the Tessaranka Terrace
was either all for show or a failed project, but
he stresses that it's mostly only through descriptions of it
that we can make in any informed hypotheses about the
(38:27):
form of the other super galleys that preceded it. So
I suppose one could imagine possible examples of this from
far more recent history, like what if you only had
the Spruce Goose to try and understand what functional airplanes
looked like in the years leading up to it, that
sort of thing. But I think this is also interesting
because it kind of potentially puts the Tessaronka Terrace in context.
(38:51):
Like it's not like an outrageous design perhaps that comes
out of nowhere, but like the grotesque leveling up of
a design that was already functional.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Oh okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Now, I'm in the first episode I mentioned another source.
The Tessaronka Terris reconsidered by Christopher E. Choffin This is
from the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies in
nineteen ninety three. He follows up on a lot of
the ideas explored by Case and cites his scholarship the
idea that it was a continuation of a design that
(39:24):
was employed to provide stability for larger payloads and or catapults.
He stresses, however, that we don't really have much that
is comparable to it. So catamarans have been used and
are still used around the world, but not giant war
galleys like this. And again, even though we have reconstructed
a hypothetical trirem, nobody has attempted to, as far as
(39:45):
I know, to reconstruct the Tessaronka Terras. It's just too big.
And obviously I think you can make a strong case
that the efforts involved would be more useful elsewhere in
the pursuit of our understanding of ancient nautical engineering and practices.
But he stresses that, Okay, the ship was clearly very
expensive and it would have required a lot of skilled
(40:07):
labor to operate. So but we might see it as
a practical warship in addition to a flagship to celebrate
or insist upon the naval might of Ptolemy the Fourth,
but one still at the very edge of what was
deemed effective and necessary in a time of almost delirious
competition over ship size, and it would certainly become a
(40:29):
white elephant, he says, during the following age of decline.
So I don't know. I feel like, obviously I'm no
expert on this, and I bow to the experts who
have written on this topic over the years and continue
to write about it. So I don't know if Chafin
is pushing too far into the possibility that it was
a practical warship. I do still like the idea of
(40:49):
seeing it not as this grotesque monster that comes out
of nowhere, but it is the final known extension of
a technological evolution that favored super galleys for a while.
And you know, this is kind of like the evolutionary
dead end for that particular growth pattern. Yeah. Now, I
want to touch briefly on sort of like the end
(41:10):
of the age of the galley. And again we're dealing
with ultimately a long trajectory of history here, and you
see various things survive and so forth. But Fagan and
Rankoff stress that by the latter part of the second
century BCE, the age of the polyren was over. So
Rome's first major fleet, constructed during the First Punic War
(41:33):
that's against the Carthage, was based largely on copying wreckage
of a Carthaginian five, and they also use some larger ships,
but mainly depended on fives. They write that by the
first century CE, the quote mostly unemployed imperial fleet consisted
of fives, fours, and threes, and even smaller two level
vessels and the bigger vessels well. Based on descriptions, the
(41:56):
bigger vessels depended on a single level of above the deck,
and it seems that in time the secret of the
trirem and other three level ships which is simply lost.
The last report of trirems being used occurs during the
Roman Civil War of three twenty four CE, and by
the fifth century CE, Greek historian Zalesamus tells us that
(42:18):
the art of building them was just truly lost, so
nobody knew how to build a trirem anymore. We seemingly
we didn't have any examples of them in full anymore,
and it's left for as an enduring mystery for centuries
and centuries to come. But I guess one of the
crazy parts about all of this is that we could
(42:39):
conceivably change at any moment. I mean, people continue to
keep a lookout for this sort of thing. Marine maritime
archaeology has had tremendous technological strides over the years and
even in recent years, so it's not impossible that we
will find more evidence of trirems. Have just some new
(43:01):
evidence to introduce into that limited data set to try
and figure out exactly what everything consisted of.
Speaker 3 (43:08):
I hope we do. I mean, reading about these hypothetical
reconstructions is really interesting. I would love to ride in
one of them.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Ride or you're gonna You're gonna be down below.
Speaker 3 (43:19):
Not a lot of room for riders. I guess you
gotta help, right, Yeah, so yeah, I'd do some.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Rowing, yeah, or some drumming. I guess somebody needs to
beat the trump. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
I'm more of a navigator myself.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yeah. So we'll have to get into this in some
listener mail, but we have already heard from some people
with rowing experience, and so if we have other oars
menality there that would like to chime in on any
of this, we'd love to hear from you. And I mean,
certainly if you've ever actually been aboard the one reconstruction
that we have of a tr ring and help power,
(43:54):
that would be great. I feel like that's slim possibility,
but just in case putting the call out there for
them also write in with any examples of trirem warfare
in games, in films and so forth. I was looking around,
and I should have thought of this earlier, but some
(44:15):
of the warships space vessels in Warhammer forty thousand have
this kind of ram looking structure on the bottom up
and the like. They clearly kind of pattern the design
a little bit after trirems, and not unsurprisingly, it looks
like there are rules for these ships ramming each other
in like the old Battlefleet, Gothic game and so forth.
So that would make sense when you have a game.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
That is.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Set in a far future, but a lot of it
is sort of patterned after medieval and or ancient warfare.
And we did have a listener writing with some Star
Trek examples, but we'll have to save that for the
listener mail. All right, Well, this has been fun. Just
a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, Core
episodes in Tuesdays and Thursday short form episode on WIN
(45:00):
and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns
to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
Huge Things, As always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com