The inscription on a drinking cup found at a Euboean entrepôt on the island of Pithecoussae (Ischia) in the Bay of Naples and dated to about 775 BCE has been translated: “Nestor had a fine drinking cup, but anyone who drinks from this cup will soon be seized with desire for fair-crowned Aphrodite.” This is of interest not only because of its antiquity, but because it parallels or alludes to Homer’s description of Nestor’s drinking cup in the Iliad. Several Greek cities claimed Homer for their own, most of them in Ionia in Asia Minor, yet textual and linguistic analysis of the Iliad and Odyssey suggests that he was from Euboea and that he lived in the early 700s BCE. The background to his epics is the Trojan War fought at Troy (Ilium) in modern Turkey in the mid-twelfth century BCE during the period of widespread upheaval that convulsed the palace economies of the Mycenaeans, the Hittites, and the Levant. As a result, the poems combine anachronistic survivals from the more prosperous Mycenaean age with details of daily life that reflect the reality of Homer’s eighth-century audience, one just emerging from several centuries of declining population, technological regression, and relative insularity.
Homer’s depiction of Phoenicians, whom the Greeks view with a mixture of envy and mistrust, is especially relevant for understanding the maritime dynamic of the age. While the Euboeans may have been striking out on their own at this point, the Phoenicians had been responsible for maintaining and renewing the post-Mycenaean trade between the Levant and Greece, and for introducing Greek traders to lands farther west. Homer’s portrayals of Phoenicians could reflect resentment of their success or a nascent struggle to wrest control of local trade from non-Greeks. The prophet Isaiah, Homer’s near contemporary, may have written of Tyre, “whose merchants were princes, whose traders were the honoured ones of the earth,” but on the Aegean frontier the Phoenicians could be pretty tough customers not above raiding for slaves. When Odysseus returns to Ithaca and swaps stories with his old retainer Eumaeus, he tells how he spent seven years in Egypt, “amassing a fortune” before a Phoenician—“a scoundrel, swindler, an old hand at lies who’d already done the world a lot of damage”—enlisted his help to “ship a cargo there for sale but in fact he’d sell me there and make a killing!” Eumaeus counters with a story of how as a child he was kidnapped by Phoenicians and escaped from them while anchored off Ithaca. Such piratical raiding for slaves was not limited to the Phoenicians, and even Eumaeus, poor swineherd that he is, owns a slave whom he “purchased for himself … bought him from Taphians, bartered his own goods.” Indeed, according to Thucydides, piracy, “so far from being regarded as disgraceful, was considered quite honorable” in archaic Greece.
Although the Iliad focuses chiefly on the land campaign at Troy, the poem reveals a considerable amount about ships and shiphandling in Homer’s day. Large ships were often rowed, the crews sitting on benches that spanned the open hulls—hollow ships, Homer calls them—and in general ships were distinguished only by the number of rowers they carried. Homer writes of twenty-, fifty-and hundred-oared ships, and images on vases of the twelfth to eighth centuries BCE depict vessels that fit his descriptions. The number of oars corresponds roughly to the number of total crew, although additional hands could also be carried; the Boeotian contingent included fifty ships with 120 men each. This we know from Homer’s “catalogue of ships,” which enumerates the captains and crew (by town or region) of the 1,186 Greek ships at Troy. Yet the epics include neither ship-to-ship encounters nor fleet engagements, because the vessels at Troy were essentially troop transports propelled alternately by sails and oars. Homer describes the actions of a crew as their ship enters a harbor:
they furled and stowed the sail in the black ship,
they lowered the mast by the forestays smoothly,
quickly let it down on the forked mast-crutch
and rowed her into a mooring under oars.
Out went the bow-stones [anchors]—cables fast astern—
and the crew themselves climbed out in the breaking surf.
The landing here is a brief one in a sheltered bay, but when weather threatened or for longer stays ships were drawn onto the beach and shored up with timbers or stones.
Despite the great number of large ships at Troy, most vessels of the age were small, required only a handful of crew, and depended more on sails (most carried only one) than oars for propulsion, not unlike one that features in the earliest account of shipbuilding in Greek literature. When the Odyssey begins, Homer’s hero is a virtual prisoner on Calypso’s isle and everyone in his crew is dead. With Athena’s help, Odysseus builds himself a small ship, felling and squaring the trees for planking, then boring holes through the planks before “knocking them home together, locked with pegs and joints”—that is, mortise-and-tenon joinery characteristic of ancient Mediterranean practice. Whether the planks would have been fastened with mortise-and-tenon joinery, sewn, or both, is unverifiable. With the outer shell of the hull complete, Odysseus inserts close-set frames to stiffen the hull and rigs a mast supported by forestays and a backstay, with a single yard fixed at the top from which is set a single square sail. The ship is turned by a steering oar or quarter rudder.
Homer’s account of how Odysseus sailed from Calypso’s isle for seventeen days and nights offers a brief but telling glimpse of the sort of celestial observation required of navigators in this early period. Racing across the night sea, Odysseus maintains his course by reference to the Pleiades, Boötes, and especially Ursa Major: “Hers were the stars the lustrous goddess told him / to keep hard to port as he cut across the sea.” With their low freeboard and lack of decking, Greek vessels of this period were exposed to the elements and sailors preferred to land at night if they could. But days-long offshore voyages were by no means exceptional.
Since antiquity, commentators have made valiant efforts to match Odysseus’s itinerary with real landmarks in the Mediterranean. One difficulty is Homer’s seductive if indiscriminate mixing of real places and place names—Troy, Athens, and Sidon—with places invented, otherwise unknown, or identified only by their monstrous inhabitants—the Lotus Eaters, Cyclops, or Scylla and Charybdis. The matter is further complicated because Homer draws on the geography of earlier stories such as Jason and the Argo (which he describes as “sung by the world,” that is, already well known), the action of which takes place in the Black Sea, and on Near Eastern antecedents such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, but transposes them to the west. This reorientation makes sense from an Odyssean perspective because Ithaca is off the west coast of Greece. It is also consistent with the new orientation of Homer’s Euboean audience, which included sea traders who had been out west and returned with their appraisals, frank or embellished, of the new lands seen and people encountered.
Among the first places settled by the Euboean pioneers of westward expansion was Pithecoussae, where colonists from the town of Chalcis focused on the iron trade, importing ore from the Etruscan island of Elba. Pithecoussae was not an exclusively Greek enclave, and Phoenicians comprised roughly 15 percent of the population. By about 740 BCE, relations between the colonists and the Etruscans were friendly enough for the Greeks to settle on the mainland at Cumae (near Naples). Other settlements soon followed, notably at Rhegium (Reggio Calabria) and Taras (Taranto) in southern Italy, and on Sicily. These colonies, whose founders hailed from different cities, lay along the sea road between Greece and Etruria rather than in the western Mediterranean, which was within the Phoenician sphere of influence. (Greeks and Phoenicians occupied Sicily’s eastern and southern coasts, respectively.)
At the end of the eighth century BCE, decades of war had exhausted the Euboean cities of Chalcis and Eretria and the mantle of Greek expansion passed to a new generation of city-states, notably Corinth, on the isthmus that joins the Peloponnese to northern Greece. To avoid sailing around the Peloponnese, many traders frequently used the isthmus as a shortcut, moving their cargoes and often their ships overland from the Saronic Gulf (or Gulf of Aegina) to the Gulf of Corinth. To facilitate t
his, the Corinthian tyrant Periander built a six-kilometer-long ship track, or diolkos, across the isthmus. This was probably an improvement on a preexisting path, and it remained in use for more than a millennium; a ninth-century CE Byzantine admiral hauled a hundred war galleys over it en route to lift a Muslim siege of Ragusa. The diolkos was, in effect, an alternative to a canal that Periander had contemplated, the Roman emperor Nero attempted in the first century ce, and which was finally cut in 1893.
Beyond the Mediterranean, Seventh–Fifth Centuries BCE
Seafarers of the ancient Mediterranean were by no means confined to that sea. The Phoenicians had long since exited the Strait of Gibraltar to settle Atlantic ports from Lisbon to Lixus, and there are several credible if distorted reports of voyages and attempted voyages around Africa and to northwest Europe. Unlike the Phoenicians, who expanded only to the west, the Greeks also turned north into the Black Sea, possibly as a last resort; they initially knew the Black Sea as the Pontos Axeinos (“Unfriendly” or “Inhospitable” Sea), but later dubbed it Euxeinos (“Friendly”). The Black Sea extends about 290 nautical miles from north to south and 540 miles from east to west. To the south and east, the coast rises quickly into the mountains of northern Greece, Turkey, and Georgia, while the north and west are bounded by the flat steppe and broad river plains of Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Bulgaria, and the Volga, Don, Dnieper, and Danube Rivers provide channels of communication with northern and eastern Europe.
At some point around 700 BCE, Anatolia was thrown into turmoil by tribes native to the shores of the Black Sea who sacked the Lydian capital of Sardis in 652 BCE and attacked a number of Ionian Greek cities. Hard-pressed as they were, Ionian Greeks looked abroad for secure places to resettle. Various Ionian cities had long been interested in the northern Aegean, the Hellespont, and the Sea of Marmara, but the people of Miletus were the first to establish a permanent settlement on the Black Sea in the seventh century BCE, on the island of Berezan in the Dnieper-Bug estuary in what is now Ukraine. Since antiquity, the assumption has been that the impetus for this wave of colonization was a quest for grain and metals, including gold. According to the first-century CE geographer Strabo, there was gold in Colchis (modern Georgia), and the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece was based on the Colchians’ practice of using sheep’s wool to strain gold from the waters of the Phasis River, a view repeated by many scholars and an aspect of Georgian popular culture today. In fact, gold is not found in Colchis. Greek goldsmiths did not reach there until three centuries after the Milesians established themselves in Berezan. When they did they worked with imported gold, and their handiwork was intended probably as tribute to local rulers in exchange for the right to settle on the coast. The Milesians established seventeen Black Sea colonies that became important centers of trade in their own right. Olbia, on the mainland near Berezan, was close to central Europe; the harbor at Theodosia (Feodosiya, Ukraine) was said to have room for a hundred ships; and Panticapaeum (Kerch) was on the Sea of Azov near the Crimean granaries that accounted for the bulk of Milesian trade with Greece, especially Athens, for three hundred years. In exchange for Black Sea goods, the Aegean cities exported finished bronze goods, pottery, wine, and olive oil.
Greeks also migrated to North Africa, though in modest numbers. Population pressures compelled colonists from Thera to establish Cyrene, near Benghazi, Libya, around 630 BCE. Cyrene grew so strong that it was invaded by the Egyptians, whose defeat led to a civil war that the pharaoh lost, despite having at his command thirty thousand Carian and Ionian Greek mercenaries. These had been recruited first during the seventh century, and in 620 BCE the pharaoh Psammetichus settled them at Naukratis near his capital, Saïs, in the Nile delta. Naukratis became a major grain port, but as always intangibles were also in circulation. The most distinctive of these were Egyptian notions of religious architecture, temple complexes, and statuary, the influence of which animated Greek practice starting in the early 500s BCE.
The Egyptians remained as dependent on the sea as ever, and Herodotus gives accounts of three maritime initiatives undertaken by Psammetichus’s successor, Necho II: the digging of a canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, the establishment of a fleet on the Red Sea, and an effort to circumnavigate Africa. The canal was intended to facilitate trade between the Red Sea and the Nile (not the Mediterranean), but it was only completed during the reign of the Persian Darius I a century later. Necho halted the project because of “an oracle which warned him that his labour was all for the advantage of the ‘barbarian’ ”—that is, non-Egyptians—and by that point the project had cost the lives of 120,000 laborers. Herodotus continues: “He then turned his attention to war; he had triremes built, some on the Mediterranean coast, others on the Arabian gulf [Red Sea], where the docks are still to be seen, and made use of his new fleets as occasion arose.” Necho probably sought to defend Red Sea shipping against attacks by pirates. Whether the vessels were built and manned by Greeks, Phoenicians, or Egyptians is unknown, but Greek crews and shipwrights were doubtless available at Naukratis. There was ample precedent for Tyrian collaboration in Red Sea ventures, and the antipathy of Phoenician merchants to their Assyrian and Babylonian neighbors may have convinced many to seek their fortunes there, as their ancestors had.
Herodotus has been accused of gullibility and worse, especially with respect to his account of the circumnavigation of Africa ordered by Necho. But he was a keen observer and faithful recorder who logged thousands of miles traveling around the Black Sea and Aegean, in Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt, mainland Greece and Italy. A native of the bustling Carian seaport of Halicarnassus (Bodrum, Turkey) in southwest Anatolia, he spent considerable time at sea and was fully aware of what ships and seamen of his day could do. According to Herodotus, the voyage around Africa took three years during which the sailors stopped each fall to plant crops for the following year. He also tells, in some disbelief, how in the course of their voyage from east to west, the sailors had the sun on their right.
The Phoenicians sailed from the Red Sea into the Southern [Indian] Ocean, and every autumn put in where they were on the Libyan [African] coast, sowed a patch of ground, and waited for next year’s harvest. Then, having got in their grain, they put to sea again, and after two full years rounded the Pillars of Hercules [Strait of Gibraltar] in the course of the third, and returned to Egypt. These men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun on their right—to northward of them.
This last detail lends credence to the story, for when sailing east to west along the southern coast of Africa, the sun is to the right—that is, the north. Although many have considered Herodotus’s account to be the product of a fecund imagination, the fact that it would take more than two thousand years for another such passage to be completed does not put it beyond the realm of possibility in antiquity. Even allowing for two harvest seasons of four months each, a three-year voyage around Africa—about sixteen thousand nautical miles—required an advance of no more than twenty miles per day. Herodotus follows this story with one about a failed circumnavigation of Africa in the fifth century BCE. Sentenced to death for rape, a cousin of Persia’s king Xerxes named Sataspes was offered a reprieve if he would sail counterclockwise around Africa—from Egypt, through the Pillars of Hercules, and then south. Sataspes sailed along Africa’s Atlantic coast for several months but was forced to turn back because “his ship was brought to a standstill and was unable to make headway.” On such scant details, it is impossible to know how far he might have sailed, but contrary currents and winds in the Gulf of Guinea would have impeded the square-sailed vessels of antiquity. As a Persian noble, Sataspes almost certainly lacked the requisite experience to contemplate, much less complete, such a voyage. Whatever excuses Sataspes may have offered for his failure, Xerxes was unmoved and had his cousin impaled.
Other sources report similar undertakings. Shortly b
efore the time of Sataspes, a Carthaginian merchant named Hanno sailed south of Mogador perhaps as far as Cape Juby, Mauritania (27°58′N), possibly to Cerne Island (16°45′N), off the coast of Senegal, or maybe even to the equatorial coast of Cameroon in the Gulf of Guinea. A sixth-century BCE periplus (mariner’s guide) from Massilia (Marseille) suggests that some sailors reached Finisterre in northwest Spain, and it refers also to Albion, or England. The fifth-century BCE sailor Himilco took four months on a voyage north of Gibraltar that may have taken him as far as Brittany or southern England, and in the fourth century BCE a Massilian Greek named Pytheas explored the Bay of Biscay, the British Isles, and perhaps unidentified lands farther north, a voyage discussed below in Chapter 9. Most Mediterranean sailors, however, remained in their home sea—“like frogs round a pond,” in Plato’s phrase—perfecting their trades, their navigational skills, and, above all, their ships.
The Trireme
Archaeological finds of merchant ships from 1000 to 400 BCE are rare, and while the remains of their cargoes have yielded valuable clues about trade and traders, most of the hulls have disappeared and what survives adds little to our understanding of shipbuilding techniques. Although no warships have survived, these were the largest and most complex—and are today the most intensely studied—vessels of the early first millennium BCE. The Phoenicians and Greeks were the first people to make a hard distinction between vessels intended for trade and those built for combat. The idea of using ships to disable other ships rather than as simple troop carriers to be turned into floating platforms for hand-to-hand combat came to the fore around the ninth century BCE, the date of the earliest pictorial evidence of the ship’s ram. This may have originated as a forward extension of the keel. In its more developed form it was capped with a heavy bronze fitting, thereby creating what was in essence a massive torpedo of great strength, speed, and hitting power, and designed to punch holes in enemy ships. The only surviving example of a ram itself, found on the Israeli coast near Athlit and dating from the second century BCE, measures 2.25 meters long and was fitted to an armature of cedar, elm, and pine. To support the ram—the one from Athlit weighs 465 kilograms—and prevent the ramming ship from being shattered by the impact of driving into other vessels, ships’ hulls had to be heavily constructed.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 13
