Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb. We were off yesterday for the holiday,
Speaker 1: so today's episode is another vault episode. This is going
Speaker 1: to be part three of our series from last year,
Speaker 1: Ancient Oars on the Wine Dark Sea. It originally published
Speaker 1: eight twenty seven, twenty twenty four. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: 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: with an ore. And ore is of course resting on
Speaker 3: or connected to part of the boat itself, and you
Speaker 3: typically face backwards when you row. We talked about archaeological
Speaker 3: evidence of Mesolithic wooden paddles found in Northern Europe. We
Speaker 3: talked about some of the pressures leading to the development
Speaker 3: of different power mechanisms for ancient boats, wind powered sails
Speaker 3: versus human powered ores. We discussed the different designs of
Speaker 3: war galleys in the ancient Mediterranean and the considerations that
Speaker 3: led to increasing concentration of rowers and ores put more
Speaker 3: ores in, starting with single level galleys, the penticonter and
Speaker 3: its evolving forms, and eventually the famous Trirem, which had
Speaker 3: three levels of oarsmen and was the dominant weapon of
Speaker 3: 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 1: Yeah, we'll come back to that one again and sort
Speaker 1: 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 or something. So these ships were made
Speaker 3: out of wood, and they, according to some sources we
Speaker 3: talked about last time, they generally did not sink when
Speaker 3: damaged in battle. They might kind of dip in the
Speaker 3: water and become immobilized and they could be towed away afterwards,
Speaker 3: or if they did sink, the wooden parts mostly decomposed
Speaker 3: over time.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And I was reading a little bit more
Speaker 1: about this, this issue of positive buoyancy in try rems.
Speaker 1: I was reading a bit by Mark C. Davies really
Speaker 1: long titled to this, but I guess I have to
Speaker 1: read the whole an investigation into the absence of ancient
Speaker 1: Greek tryrems in the archaeological record and a study of
Speaker 1: the battlefield deposition at the site of the Battle of
Speaker 1: Agati's off the Agatti Islands to determine whether this example
Speaker 1: could direct future exploration for evidence of ancient Greek sea battles.
Speaker 3: M that's tight.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would have cut it if they'd just thrown
Speaker 1: a colon in there. Anyway, This was a twenty twenty
Speaker 1: one publication by Honor Frost Foundation. Anyway, the author here
Speaker 1: is ultimately making the case that some tryrems may have
Speaker 1: actually sunk, and we should look for more particular environments
Speaker 1: where some of the wreckage might have survived the sinking.
Speaker 1: But he also outlines the predominant theory as well, that
Speaker 1: we already touched on the trirems had positive buoyancy, particularly
Speaker 1: during battle, because if you had anything heavy in there,
Speaker 1: you had equipment or ballast, you'd throw that out and
Speaker 1: then when defeated, they would not have been sunk like
Speaker 1: we've been saying, but they would have been left flooded
Speaker 1: and floundering. Thus they again, they tended to be dragged
Speaker 1: back to port. They tended to be harvested for wood.
Speaker 1: But Davies, for his part, stresses that there is disagreement
Speaker 1: about how much equipment and or ballast a tryream would carry,
Speaker 1: so it's not something we can be one hundred percent
Speaker 1: certain of so there remains at least some scholarly disagreement
Speaker 1: and discussion on this matter.
Speaker 3: Right. But for whatever reason, the wooden components of these
Speaker 3: boats have rarely been preserved into the modern archaeological record.
Speaker 3: Maybe that's due to positive buoyancy, maybe that's due to
Speaker 3: decomposition in the water, or maybe we just failed to
Speaker 3: find whatever's there. But for whatever reason, the wooden components
Speaker 3: are often lost. But remember that the ram of the
Speaker 3: ancient trirem was usually capped with a solid metal sheath
Speaker 3: made of bronze, and we do have a number of
Speaker 3: these bronze rams in archaeological collections today. So I was
Speaker 3: reading about one particular bronze ram from the ancient world
Speaker 3: in a source in a book called War at Sea,
Speaker 3: A Shipwrecked History from Antiquity to the Cold War, by
Speaker 3: James P. Delgado, Oxford University Press, twenty nineteen. And the
Speaker 3: section of this book I was reading concerns a ram
Speaker 3: called the Athlete ram. This is a bronze ram filled
Speaker 3: with wooden timbers, which was discovered by an archaeologist named
Speaker 3: Yehoshua Ramone in nineteen eighty while he was snorkeling off
Speaker 3: the coast of a town called Athlet, which is near
Speaker 3: the Israeli city of Haifa. Apparently, nothing else of real
Speaker 3: archaeological significance was found in the bay, so it wasn't
Speaker 3: part of a broader shipwreck that anybody found. We just
Speaker 3: have the broken off ram with the bronze sheath on
Speaker 3: the outside and a wooden protrusion from the prow of
Speaker 3: the boat inside. After being recovered from the sea, this
Speaker 3: object was subject to extensive study, so a few things
Speaker 3: we know about it. It is thought, though this is
Speaker 3: not certain, that the ancient warship it belonged to was
Speaker 3: wrecked and then drifted close to the shore, and then
Speaker 3: 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 it also
Speaker 3: at the website of the National Maritime Museum in Haifa,
Speaker 3: where the object is kept, and they say about its
Speaker 3: weight that the bronze casting is four hundred and sixty
Speaker 3: five kilograms, and then together with the wood inside when
Speaker 3: it was discovered, it was six hundred kilograms. That's about
Speaker 3: a third of the weight of a typical mid sized car.
Speaker 3: It originally had sixteen timbers from the ship's frame protruding
Speaker 3: into the cast bronze fitting, and those timbers were extracted
Speaker 3: by an American nautical archaeologist and named J. Richard Steffi.
Speaker 3: Now the metal part of the ram is preserved at
Speaker 3: that museum, the National Maritime Museum in Haifa. But Stephi
Speaker 3: went on to publish important work on the Athlete Ram,
Speaker 3: which led him to conclude that these rams and the
Speaker 3: ships that bore them were carefully engineered to distribute the
Speaker 3: force of an impact into the sturdy bottom of the
Speaker 3: ship's hull, so that the ship itself could absorb the
Speaker 3: shock of a ramming impact in battle without damaging itself
Speaker 3: in the process. There is a quote from Stephie given
Speaker 3: in this book. That is quote, the entire bottom of
Speaker 3: the ship was essentially the weapon, so not just the
Speaker 3: bronze Ram, but you should think of the ship itself
Speaker 3: as the weapon. Another place, another source I was reading
Speaker 3: in the last episode compared the Trirem's hull to an arrow.
Speaker 3: It's designed to hit and absorb the shock and deliver
Speaker 3: that punch at its tip.
Speaker 1: Yeah, listeners should definitely look up images of this ram
Speaker 1: and tr rams in general, because I think one of
Speaker 1: the most fetching things about them is that there is
Speaker 1: this synthesis of elegance and design. Like it is, it's
Speaker 1: a beautiful looking artifact, but its function is clear, like
Speaker 1: it's function above everything else. That if you were to
Speaker 1: compare it to something, you might compare it to like
Speaker 1: a can opener, but a very elegant can opener, you know,
Speaker 1: 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 talllets that you need to strike
Speaker 3: is being able to ram an enemy boat and crack
Speaker 3: its hull causing it to take on water without damaging
Speaker 3: your own warship through impact stress and without punching a
Speaker 3: hole through the enemy's hull and getting your ram stuck,
Speaker 3: which was also bad for the attacking ship because getting
Speaker 3: stuck means you are immobilized and vulnerable to being hit
Speaker 3: on the broadside yourself. And this ties into something we
Speaker 3: talked about in the last episode that ramming speed was
Speaker 3: not necessarily top speed for these galleys because ramming another
Speaker 3: ship at maximum speed was dangerous to the attacking ship
Speaker 3: for the previously mentioned reasons. Instead, you wanted to hit
Speaker 3: another ship with your prow on their broadside within an
Speaker 3: acceptable angle of attack, at just the right speed, and
Speaker 3: to illustrate the forces in play with combat based on
Speaker 3: ramming STEPI, the archaeologist used the analogy of trying to
Speaker 3: knock down a brick wall with a wheeled vehicle. So
Speaker 3: he said, you know, if you drive a motorcycle into
Speaker 3: a brick wall at one hundred kilometers per hour, you
Speaker 3: might knock down the bricks, but the motorcycle itself is
Speaker 3: going to be destroyed in the process. But if you
Speaker 3: are driving an eighteen wheeler loaded with heavy cargo into
Speaker 3: a brick wall, you can limit the risk to yourself
Speaker 3: because you only need a relatively low speed with a
Speaker 3: vehicle that heavy. The example given is like an eighteen
Speaker 3: wheeler full of cargo going at ten kilometers per hour.
Speaker 3: You can knock the wall down and maybe not damage
Speaker 3: your own truck too much in the process. And of course,
Speaker 3: the reason that a larger vehicle can knock down the
Speaker 3: wall at a lower speed is that the greater mass
Speaker 3: of the truck results in greater kinetic energy and that's
Speaker 3: converted into force upon impact. So there was a trade
Speaker 3: off with these warships. A heavier ship could do more
Speaker 3: damage with a ramming attack at lower speeds. And I
Speaker 3: remember last time, one of the books I was reading
Speaker 3: had an estimate of a required ramming speed only around
Speaker 3: two to four knots, depending on various factors like the
Speaker 3: angle of attack, and that's between three point seven and
Speaker 3: seven point five kilometers per hour, so it didn't have
Speaker 3: 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 trireme or any ancient war alley
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: pl 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 finned design seemed to work very well, so
Speaker 3: they stuck with it for hundreds of years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like I say, one can imagine a combination of
Speaker 1: field experience at sea in battle, and also perhaps some
Speaker 1: harbor experiments as well. Let's try different designs out. Let's
Speaker 1: see which ones are going to succeed, which ones can
Speaker 1: punch that hole without getness 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.
Speaker 3: Sometimes 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 1: I recall us talking about this a bit in our episode.
Speaker 1: This is from years back on Tallos, the giant Greek automaton,
Speaker 1: because I believe in some tellings there's this idea that
Speaker 1: he has this kind of iCore in his body, and
Speaker 1: there are a lot of comparisons to be made between
Speaker 1: this supposed you know, non blood substance running through this
Speaker 1: 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 video watching of making a little bronze
Speaker 3: statuette with the lost wax method. So when they put
Speaker 3: these channels in that are you know, the bronze is
Speaker 3: poured through and the and the wax escapes through. It
Speaker 3: ends up looking like all these sort of veins and
Speaker 3: pipes running out of the figure's flesh. You know, you're
Speaker 3: making a bronze aphrodite or whatever, and it's just got
Speaker 3: these like pipes coming out of its body. So it
Speaker 3: looks a very steampunk and suggests some kind of horrific automaton.
Speaker 3: But coming back to the athlete ram, of course, a
Speaker 3: good question is when and where does this come from.
Speaker 3: We have a few data points here. Delgado sites a
Speaker 3: date range between two oh four and one sixty four BCE,
Speaker 3: and this is based mostly on a collection of symbols
Speaker 3: encoded on the bronze ram. So it has these these
Speaker 3: designs on its symbols on the surface. What would these be, Well,
Speaker 3: according to the National Maritime Museum, they are first of
Speaker 3: all Poseidon's trident. Of course, Poseidon was the Greek god
Speaker 3: of the sea and of storms and earthquakes, and his
Speaker 3: trident was commonly used as a metonym for his powers.
Speaker 3: Like the trident is Poseidon's power that has some relationship
Speaker 3: to the power of the sea or power over the sea,
Speaker 3: so you can see why sailors might include that on
Speaker 3: a vessel for a kind of magical protection. Second symbol
Speaker 3: is a helmet with a star overhead. It's sort of
Speaker 3: a half egg shape of a helmet. It's got a
Speaker 3: star over the top of it. Rob, I've got a
Speaker 3: close up of this for you to see. Here. This
Speaker 3: helmet is apparently a symbol of the Dioscuri, meaning the
Speaker 3: sons of Zeus. These are the twins Castor and Pollux,
Speaker 3: who were commonly said to wield power over storms at
Speaker 3: sea and to give hope to shipwrecked seamen. There's some
Speaker 3: version of the story where they have these special horses
Speaker 3: given to them by Poseidon the gallop the waves and
Speaker 3: allow them to rescue sailors lost at sea.
Speaker 1: 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 1: I don't think we have, But yeah, there's a number
Speaker 1: of rich traditions behind it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is a mini meaning 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 1: 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 radiocarbon estimate based on the wood is a
Speaker 3: little bit older than the estimate based on the symbols.
Speaker 1: By the way, if you're keeping score with your Ptolemies,
Speaker 1: that would be Ptolemy the Glorious and Ptolemy lover of
Speaker 1: his mother.
Speaker 3: These would both be coming after the guy who made
Speaker 3: the really big ship. Correct, We're coming back to that
Speaker 3: lover of his father. Yeah. Now, multiple sources have also
Speaker 3: suggested that this galley was not a trirem. Maybe it was,
Speaker 3: but some say it was more likely a four banked
Speaker 3: galley called a tetraris or a quadra reem. But then
Speaker 3: Delgado also cites another archaeologist, a scholar named William Murray
Speaker 3: into quote Delgado here quote analyzing the symbols and pondering
Speaker 3: how the ship came to be lost near Athlete. Murray
Speaker 3: feels it was a smaller warship based on the Levantine
Speaker 3: coast that may have been lost in a storm or
Speaker 3: during an unrecorded naval skirmish during Dynastics struggles for control
Speaker 3: of Phoenicia. But ultimately, we're probably never going to know
Speaker 3: with certainty where and when exactly this ram came from
Speaker 3: or how the ship that it belonged to was destroyed.
Speaker 3: But we've got some good guesses here.
Speaker 1: Yeah. In one of the books that I was sourcing
Speaker 1: for this series, Lionel case Ses the Ancient Mariners, he
Speaker 1: gets into discussing this ram a bit and using it
Speaker 1: to talk about using it as a data point to
Speaker 1: try and understand exactly what naval combat consisted of in
Speaker 1: like the age immediately following the dominance of the Trirem,
Speaker 1: which we'll be getting into here in a bit. But
Speaker 1: I guess one thing to keep in mind about all this,
Speaker 1: and I guess this. I mean, this is true of
Speaker 1: any archaeological endeavor, but they're a finite number of data points,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the scholarship it seems to be
Speaker 1: about like connecting all of those lines and trying to
Speaker 1: sort of triangulate a probable 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.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this is really fascinating. You're going to see
Speaker 1: the Trirem dominance last for a while, but then the
Speaker 1: designs begin to get bigger, and this is going to
Speaker 1: of course change the way combat occurs at sea and
Speaker 1: the way military endeavors in general are carried out in
Speaker 1: the Mediterranean. So basically we're looking at some changes beginning
Speaker 1: to take in the fourth century BCE. This would be
Speaker 1: the development of fours, fives and polyrems, so Brian Fagan
Speaker 1: and Boris Rhankoff in their section on these ships in
Speaker 1: the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, they point
Speaker 1: to Syracuse in Sicily as being the main place where
Speaker 1: this innovation is chiefly cited. The innovation here does not
Speaker 1: entail the addition of a fourth and fifth level to
Speaker 1: a galley, though we talked previously about how it's like
Speaker 1: you start with one level and then the next evolution
Speaker 1: is you do two levels, and then you got three levels.
Speaker 1: Well we're not doing that anymore at this point, no
Speaker 1: fourth and fifth levels. Historians have worked this out over time. Instead,
Speaker 1: 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 1: And to be clear, this was not necessarily just a
Speaker 1: matter of cramming in extra guys, as we discussed, the
Speaker 1: tryream was already crammed essentially all human engine lionel case
Speaker 1: and in the Ancient Mariners does state that the initial
Speaker 1: Greek updates would have still been the same size as
Speaker 1: tryrems with an extra rower to each or on the
Speaker 1: upper levels. So there's not much you could do basically
Speaker 1: down in the hole of the ship, but they did
Speaker 1: 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 so like that's
Speaker 3: another consideration.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Like by adding more people to these ships,
Speaker 1: you are creating more problems. You're you're taking pre existing
Speaker 1: problems and making them worse again. Up so far we've
Speaker 1: been talking about skilled oarsmen as well. These are not
Speaker 1: disposable resources. In some sort of a scenario where these
Speaker 1: are like you know, captives that have been taken by
Speaker 1: the war, they're not seen as disposable by the people
Speaker 1: utilizing them. They are seen as skilled labor that you
Speaker 1: have to manage and hold on to. And we see
Speaker 1: this skewed a little bit with some advancements, So Fagan
Speaker 1: and Rancoff point out, we get the quin Creams, which
Speaker 1: were still three level vessels, but with two men to
Speaker 1: an ore on the top level, two to an ore
Speaker 1: in the middle, and then one to an ore on
Speaker 1: that bottom level. Again you know more or less down
Speaker 1: in the hole where you can't expand too much, so
Speaker 1: this would have meant a rowing crew of roughly three
Speaker 1: hundred people. And of course all this comes, all this
Speaker 1: power comes at a trade off. Well, obviously again you
Speaker 1: have to take care of these human beings that are
Speaker 1: powering your vessel, if for no other reason out of
Speaker 1: self interest, because they are what makes the ship. They
Speaker 1: are what makes the ship move. But also by souping
Speaker 1: up the vessel like this, it wouldn't have actually been
Speaker 1: as fast as the Trirem, but the additional power enabled
Speaker 1: these ships to carry more troops as well as ultimately
Speaker 1: 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 it's carrying capacity.
Speaker 1: Right, and this change wouldn't have happened all at once.
Speaker 1: Cason mentions that if we look at Greek shipyard records
Speaker 1: in the fourth century, they indicate that the Greeks probably
Speaker 1: were not worried about these advancements that were going on
Speaker 1: in Syracuse and shipyards. They probably kept a close eye
Speaker 1: on such developments, but the Greek fleet of trirems was
Speaker 1: still dominant in the east was and they were mostly
Speaker 1: distracted by matters in the west. Still, more and more
Speaker 1: larger ships were built and were ultimately incorporated into that
Speaker 1: fleet as time passed, So we're getting bigger vessels, and
Speaker 1: you know, the age of the trirem of Trirem dominance
Speaker 1: is kind of fading out. And Fagan and Rinkoff indicate
Speaker 1: that these new ships impacted how warfare at sea was conducted,
Speaker 1: and that quote boarding tactics gradually came to be used
Speaker 1: alongside and even instead of ramming. So ramming doesn't go away,
Speaker 1: but it's kind of like everything became very ramming intensive,
Speaker 1: and then things kind of began to diversify a little
Speaker 1: bit with 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 1: Right, And so the Syracusans developed three level sixes or hexories,
Speaker 1: and and the Carthaginians developed two level fours or quadrigrims.
Speaker 1: And this growth trend continued from the end of the
Speaker 1: fourth century BCE onward, while some cities continue to prioritize
Speaker 1: trirems or other smaller ord vessels for rating, because I remember,
Speaker 1: in a rating scenario, you're gonna you're gonna want that flexibility,
Speaker 1: You're gonna want the speed, and so forth. But the
Speaker 1: major players in the Mediterranean all seemed to double down
Speaker 1: on massive galleys sevens, eights, nines, and tens, And this
Speaker 1: of course required increasing number of oarsmen, but allowed the
Speaker 1: transport of more troops, more artillery, and siege equipment like
Speaker 1: towers and some of the biggest chunkers in this uh
Speaker 1: in this area, they point out, were reportedly built to
Speaker 1: besiege coastal city walls. So I guess you could almost
Speaker 1: think of these as like a full mobile aquatic siege craft.
Speaker 1: You know uh. And also sometimes you would utilize a
Speaker 1: big vessel like this to break through harbor chains.
Speaker 3: A harbor chain, is that like a defensive measure that
Speaker 3: would be used in a harbor.
Speaker 1: Yes, this would be a navigational barrier.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: Now. Casin writes that you would have had multiple options
Speaker 1: to upsize your fleet during this growth period. You could
Speaker 1: augment existing try reams as we've been discussing to create
Speaker 1: these new polyrems, or you could build bigger from the
Speaker 1: bottom up. And different powers had different capacities for these changes.
Speaker 1: One major factor was apparently the dwindling supply of skilled rowers. Again,
Speaker 1: you've got human power at the heart of this, and
Speaker 1: they were increasingly in short supply and would become rather difficult.
Speaker 1: For example, the Romans later on to source. So ships
Speaker 1: were getting bigger, navies were getting bigger, but you still
Speaker 1: 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 1: That's right, And they somehow managed to make it harder
Speaker 1: in some cases, according to case and many of these
Speaker 1: larger designs called for a deeper rowing style. They were
Speaker 1: the rower to stand up to dip the blade and
Speaker 1: then throw themselves back to pull it, so it became
Speaker 1: even more physically demanding in these cases. But it also
Speaker 1: apparently meant that only the man at the tip of
Speaker 1: the loom needed to be skilled, so the inner oarsmen
Speaker 1: in such a setup they could be just muscle power
Speaker 1: following his lead. And if a power one of these
Speaker 1: naval powers lacked for skilled oarsmen, they could potentially double
Speaker 1: down on these new designs. So you could, yeah, we
Speaker 1: only have so many skilled oarsmen to utilize, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: we can focus on spreading them around around on these
Speaker 1: ships and then depend on just unskilled brute force labor
Speaker 1: to help them, and these would become the standard long
Speaker 1: sweep galleys with multiple rowers that would apparently become the
Speaker 1: standard in the into the sixteenth and eighteenth century CE.
Speaker 1: In the mediterrane Now, Casein points out that this arms
Speaker 1: race what he calls the Age of Titans. This corresponds
Speaker 1: with the death of Alexander the Great three twenty three
Speaker 1: BCE and the shattering of his vast empire into competing states,
Speaker 1: including as we discussed in the first episode, Talemaic Egypt.
Speaker 1: And my understanding is that this growth period wasn't just
Speaker 1: about growing out of and away from the Triream, but
Speaker 1: also a kind of flexibility in the sorts of ships
Speaker 1: that a navy might build and use. So the age
Speaker 1: of the Trirem was one of a kind of bottleneck perfection. Again,
Speaker 1: they think of him as kind of like jet fighters
Speaker 1: and with just as much expense and skill tied up
Speaker 1: in their use. And now we're dealing with an age
Speaker 1: where ship production in naval size is only going up,
Speaker 1: and of course something has to give, and it eventually does.
Speaker 1: But the arms race of the Titans continued, and the
Speaker 1: culmination of this arms race was, of course a vessel
Speaker 1: we kicked off with in episode one, the massive Tessaranka
Speaker 1: terraces the forty of Ptolemy the Fourth. So, just to refresh,
Speaker 1: the Tessaranka terras was the massive war vessel of Ptolemy
Speaker 1: the fourth Philopater, lover of his father. His rule lasted
Speaker 1: from two twenty one to two oh 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 1: Yeah, yeah, we definitely see that. One of the two
Speaker 1: main historical accounts, and even this is you know, centuries
Speaker 1: after the boat would have existed, but Plutarch chimed in
Speaker 1: and was like this thing was more for show than anything.
Speaker 1: It would have been dangerous to use. And it's largely
Speaker 1: argue that like this is exactly the sort of ship
Speaker 1: that Tallomy the fourth would have because he had this
Speaker 1: reputation as being more concerned with the trappings of empire
Speaker 1: than the work of empire. You know, this was seen
Speaker 1: as a period of decline for the Ptolemys. So getting
Speaker 1: back into this question, is is this, in fact just
Speaker 1: a huge spruce goose on the sea? Is this just
Speaker 1: a complete illogical vessel that with the only possible purpose
Speaker 1: being a show of might to say, look at us, Well,
Speaker 1: it's basically a big floating parade float for the military.
Speaker 1: Or is it something that had some degree of function.
Speaker 1: So looking at what Cason has to say about it,
Speaker 1: he does follow the basic logic that the Tesla Ranka
Speaker 1: Terras was either a king's plaything or a misguided experiment.
Speaker 1: You know, how big of a war boat can we make?
Speaker 1: But he stresses that the mere concept of a massive,
Speaker 1: twin holed catamaran war vessel, because that's what it was.
Speaker 1: It was like a twin holed catamaran, big flat top,
Speaker 1: kind of like an aircraft carrier for the ancient world,
Speaker 1: the ancient Mediterranean. This mere concept wasn't out It didn't
Speaker 1: come out of it out of nowhere. He speculates that
Speaker 1: tallowing me the fourth's grandfather tlloing me the second, so
Speaker 1: we know that he had a pair of thirties and
Speaker 1: these may have also been twin holed catamaran vessels. And
Speaker 1: he cites another likely twin holed galley one built by
Speaker 1: another Alexander successor, and that's Lisimachus, king of Thrace. Cason
Speaker 1: writes that these, he calls him super dreadnoughts, would have
Speaker 1: been the flag flying command vessel of the large navies
Speaker 1: in the days of the Ptolemys. One of Ptolemy the
Speaker 1: first chief rivals, by the way, was Antigonus, the One Eyed,
Speaker 1: who ruled over Macedonia, and his son Demetrius, the first
Speaker 1: Poliocets besieger of cities, was in many ways the instigator
Speaker 1: of this super galley arms race between post Alexander states,
Speaker 1: as his name implies, Demetrius was heavy into siege craft.
Speaker 1: He was a total nerd for siege engines, and so
Speaker 1: he was really into the idea of mounting them on
Speaker 1: galleys as well. And the emphasis curiously here seems to
Speaker 1: have been not just about like bringing siege equipment to
Speaker 1: a destination to lay out a siege, but also unship
Speaker 1: to ship warfare and anyway. Yeah, so you would actually
Speaker 1: have these ships firing at each other, needing to carry
Speaker 1: the weight of these catapults and these towers. You know,
Speaker 1: so you can have you know, the height advantage, but
Speaker 1: potentially and you would need bigger ships with presumably wider
Speaker 1: decks to make this possible. M and so the twin
Speaker 1: holed catamaran design would be what they ended up exploiting.
Speaker 1: Like you can how wide can you conceivably make the whole? Well, okay,
Speaker 1: you can do, I guess conceive when we make it
Speaker 1: this wide. Or you could just have two holes and
Speaker 1: you could have a deck covering both of them. Everyone
Speaker 1: knows what a camaran is, I assume if if not,
Speaker 1: go out to your local lake and look for the
Speaker 1: lounge craft of sort of the pontoon boats, and you
Speaker 1: get the basic idea.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, two holes in the water situated in parallel,
Speaker 3: and there's some kind of decks spanning between them.
Speaker 1: So Kison has this wonderful paragraph I want to read
Speaker 1: where he talks about what these encounters might have been like.
Speaker 1: He writes, artillery and bigger ships naturally had their effect
Speaker 1: on naval tactics, and sea battles were different in this
Speaker 1: age from what they had been a century earlier. They
Speaker 1: still took place near shore. A super galley was even
Speaker 1: harder to keep at sea than a trirem, but a
Speaker 1: fight now opened with a heavy barrage from catapults and bowmen.
Speaker 1: Lighter craft, trirems and quadrarine still maneuvered for position and
Speaker 1: the chance for an effective blow with the ram, but
Speaker 1: larger units, all of which had massive reinforced snouts, were
Speaker 1: not afraid to meet each other prow to prow, and
Speaker 1: this often resulted in close packed meles in which the
Speaker 1: marines on the decks hurling javelins are thrusting with special
Speaker 1: long spears decided the issue To aid in the sort
Speaker 1: of fighting, turrets were added to the ship's armament. These
Speaker 1: were movable, wooden affairs that could be quickly set up
Speaker 1: at bow and stern when a vessel went into action.
Speaker 1: And their height gave sharpshooters a chance to fire down
Speaker 1: 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 1: I mean, it sounds like it would be quite a
Speaker 1: spectacle to try and pull this off, right. You'd you'd
Speaker 1: kind of have to build these vessels, right, or at
Speaker 1: least you would have in sort of like the Golden
Speaker 1: Ages centem. I guess you could. You could do it, obviously,
Speaker 1: you could do it differently with CGI now. I guess
Speaker 1: you could make use of models. But I don't know
Speaker 1: that I've ever seen a film that really captures this idea.
Speaker 1: Like we talked about how we had battles at sea
Speaker 1: essentially being like battles on land, except on boats, and
Speaker 1: then we get into the age of sort of dog
Speaker 1: fighting trirems, and now we're kind of back to an
Speaker 1: even to a combination of both, but an even more
Speaker 1: like exaggerated feeling of some sort of a land battle
Speaker 1: happening out on the water with towers and so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, except you can't run away, can you.
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, So of course this was all terribly expensive, obviously,
Speaker 1: And coming back to ptolomy, the fourth monstrosity. Again, Cason
Speaker 1: seems to hold to the idea that the Tessaranka Terrace
Speaker 1: was either all for show or a failed project, but
Speaker 1: he stresses that it's mostly only through descriptions of it
Speaker 1: that we can make in any informed hypotheses about the
Speaker 1: form of the other super galleys that preceded it. So
Speaker 1: I suppose one could imagine possible examples of this from
Speaker 1: far more recent history, like what if you only had
Speaker 1: the Spruce Goose to try and understand what functional airplanes
Speaker 1: looked like in the years leading up to it, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. But I think this is also interesting
Speaker 1: because it kind of potentially puts the Tessaronka Terrace in context.
Speaker 1: Like it's not like an outrageous design perhaps that comes
Speaker 1: out of nowhere, but like the grotesque leveling up of
Speaker 1: a design that was already functional.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Now, I'm in the first episode I mentioned another source.
Speaker 1: The Tessaronka Terris reconsidered by Christopher E. Choffin This is
Speaker 1: from the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three. He follows up on a lot of
Speaker 1: the ideas explored by Case and cites his scholarship the
Speaker 1: idea that it was a continuation of a design that
Speaker 1: was employed to provide stability for larger payloads and or catapults.
Speaker 1: He stresses, however, that we don't really have much that
Speaker 1: is comparable to it. So catamarans have been used and
Speaker 1: are still used around the world, but not giant war
Speaker 1: galleys like this. And again, even though we have reconstructed
Speaker 1: a hypothetical trirem, nobody has attempted to, as far as
Speaker 1: I know, to reconstruct the Tessaronka Terras. It's just too big.
Speaker 1: And obviously I think you can make a strong case
Speaker 1: that the efforts involved would be more useful elsewhere in
Speaker 1: the pursuit of our understanding of ancient nautical engineering and practices.
Speaker 1: But he stresses that, Okay, the ship was clearly very
Speaker 1: expensive and it would have required a lot of skilled
Speaker 1: labor to operate. So but we might see it as
Speaker 1: a practical warship in addition to a flagship to celebrate
Speaker 1: or insist upon the naval might of Ptolemy the Fourth,
Speaker 1: but one still at the very edge of what was
Speaker 1: deemed effective and necessary in a time of almost delirious
Speaker 1: competition over ship size, and it would certainly become a
Speaker 1: white elephant, he says, during the following age of decline.
Speaker 1: So I don't know. I feel like, obviously I'm no
Speaker 1: expert on this, and I bow to the experts who
Speaker 1: have written on this topic over the years and continue
Speaker 1: to write about it. So I don't know if Chafin
Speaker 1: is pushing too far into the possibility that it was
Speaker 1: a practical warship. I do still like the idea of
Speaker 1: seeing it not as this grotesque monster that comes out
Speaker 1: of nowhere, but it is the final known extension of
Speaker 1: a technological evolution that favored super galleys for a while.
Speaker 1: And you know, this is kind of like the evolutionary
Speaker 1: dead end for that particular growth pattern. Yeah. Now, I
Speaker 1: want to touch briefly on sort of like the end
Speaker 1: of the age of the galley. And again we're dealing
Speaker 1: with ultimately a long trajectory of history here, and you
Speaker 1: see various things survive and so forth. But Fagan and
Speaker 1: Rankoff stress that by the latter part of the second
Speaker 1: century BCE, the age of the polyren was over. So
Speaker 1: Rome's first major fleet, constructed during the First Punic War
Speaker 1: that's against the Carthage, was based largely on copying wreckage
Speaker 1: of a Carthaginian five, and they also use some larger ships,
Speaker 1: but mainly depended on fives. They write that by the
Speaker 1: first century CE, the quote mostly unemployed imperial fleet consisted
Speaker 1: of fives, fours, and threes, and even smaller two level
Speaker 1: vessels and the bigger vessels well. Based on descriptions, the
Speaker 1: bigger vessels depended on a single level of above the deck,
Speaker 1: and it seems that in time the secret of the
Speaker 1: trirem and other three level ships which is simply lost.
Speaker 1: The last report of trirems being used occurs during the
Speaker 1: Roman Civil War of three twenty four CE, and by
Speaker 1: the fifth century CE, Greek historian Zalesamus tells us that
Speaker 1: the art of building them was just truly lost, so
Speaker 1: nobody knew how to build a trirem anymore. We seemingly
Speaker 1: we didn't have any examples of them in full anymore,
Speaker 1: and it's left for as an enduring mystery for centuries
Speaker 1: and centuries to come. But I guess one of the
Speaker 1: crazy parts about all of this is that we could
Speaker 1: conceivably change at any moment. I mean, people continue to
Speaker 1: keep a lookout for this sort of thing. Marine maritime
Speaker 1: archaeology has had tremendous technological strides over the years and
Speaker 1: even in recent years, so it's not impossible that we
Speaker 1: will find more evidence of trirems. Have just some new
Speaker 1: evidence to introduce into that limited data set to try
Speaker 1: and figure out exactly 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 1: 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 do some.
Speaker 1: Rowing, yeah, or some drumming. I guess somebody needs to
Speaker 1: beat the trump. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm more of a navigator myself.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So we'll have to get into this in some
Speaker 1: listener mail, but we have already heard from some people
Speaker 1: with rowing experience, and so if we have other oars
Speaker 1: menality there that would like to chime in on any
Speaker 1: of this, we'd love to hear from you. And I mean,
Speaker 1: certainly if you've ever actually been aboard the one reconstruction
Speaker 1: that we have of a tr ring and help power,
Speaker 1: that would be great. I feel like that's slim possibility,
Speaker 1: but just in case putting the call out there for
Speaker 1: them also write in with any examples of trirem warfare
Speaker 1: in games, in films and so forth. I was looking around,
Speaker 1: and I should have thought of this earlier, but some
Speaker 1: of the warships space vessels in Warhammer forty thousand have
Speaker 1: this kind of ram looking structure on the bottom up
Speaker 1: and the like. They clearly kind of pattern the design
Speaker 1: a little bit after trirems, and not unsurprisingly, it looks
Speaker 1: like there are rules for these ships ramming each other
Speaker 1: in like the old Battlefleet, Gothic game and so forth.
Speaker 1: So that would make sense when you have a game.
Speaker 3: That is.
Speaker 1: Set in a far future, but a lot of it
Speaker 1: is sort of patterned after medieval and or ancient warfare.
Speaker 1: And we did have a listener writing with some Star
Speaker 1: Trek examples, but we'll have to save that for the
Speaker 1: listener mail. All right, Well, this has been fun. Just
Speaker 1: a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, Core
Speaker 1: episodes in Tuesdays and Thursday short form episode on WIN
Speaker 1: and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns
Speaker 1: 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 at stuff to Blow
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