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