In 1933, Spyridon Marinatos, a meticulous and well-informed historian, compiled a catalogue of sixty-nine drawings of the ancient ships of the Aegean; in 1957, Diana Woolner listed and reproduced thirty-eight graffiti showing ships carved on a pillar in the great megalithic temple of Hal Tarxien in Malta. So we have about a hundred representations of vessels at our disposal – and yet the result is disappointing. The drawings are all too often schematic and inaccurate, and do not obey any rules of perspective. Any models that havesurvived, generally made of clay, are only very approximately shaped. There is nothing here like the accuracy of the Egyptian drawings. Apart from the Maltese graffiti, which were scratched on to stone with a metal tool, these pictures of boats are illustrations from the sides of vases or other utensils, from seals or cylinders, rings, or hieroglyphic tablets. Their dates are generally uncertain and are spread out across more than a thousand years.
Nevertheless, since naval design did not substantially change for centuries on end (and in any case new types of ship co-existed with old ones), it would not be out of order to assume that in a sense all these ships were sailing the sea at roughly the same period, whatever the actual dates of the vessels. They can be seen as the available pool of shipping, if you like, as if they could all have sailed to the Egyptian Delta, or to the quayside at Ugarit, in response to the appeal from the king of the Hittites for grain for his starving cities in izoo BC.
What questions should we ask of these images? Quite elementary ones. First of all, we ought to be able to tell bows from stern, so that we can see which way the boat was travelling. This can be worked out by the position of the oars, when there are any. Greek oarsmen, like their Mycenaean and Cretan predecessors, rowed with their backs to the direction of travel, unlike the Venetian gondolier for instance, who stands in the stern of the boat facing the way he is going. Another way to tell is from the width of the vessel, if it can be gauged, as it can in at least one model: in that case, the forward end, the bow, will be the wider, since the boat was always narrower at the stern (a rule which aeroplanes also respect because of air-currents: this is the ‘fish-shaped body’ theory). And of course, when the vessel has a rudder, made of one or two moveable paddles, these naturally indicate the stern. The reader will notice that the poop of Aegean ships was often higher than the bows, but the rule was not absolute, and it is often difficult to tell which end is which.
There are other questions too: did the vessel have a deck, and if so was it a whole one or a half-deck? Did it have oars, benches, masts and sails? Ships in the Aegean, since they had plenty of oars, did not always carry sails as an extra means of locomotion. Where sails existed, they seem to have been square, carried on a yardarm. Sometimes two square sails were attached side by side to the same yard and mast. This kind of rigging was tending to disappear, but a late example is found in a ship from Pompeii.
The number of oars, usually accurately represented (up to a maximum of fifteen) enabled Marinatos to calculate the possible lengths of some boats (by estimating the distance between two oarsmen as 90 cm). He concluded that the maximum length was about 20 metres (allowing for the area without oars), in the case of the largest vessels with fifteen oars, but much less than that on average, since most boats had no more than five. So most of these vessels were quite small, long and light, with a single mast, propelled by oarsmen and using sails only as an extra aid.
But the important point to note is that from early times, from the middle Minoan period (before 2000 BC) there were also to be found alongside these ships others with no oars at all but a full deck, as is conclusively proved by a clay model dating from about 1500 BC. These ships were much broader than the other kind and suggest the possibility of cargo vessels under sail, perhaps larger than other Cretan ships and thus a very early case of the traditional division in the Mediterranean between the rapid longships with their banks of oarsmen, used for war or piracy, and the rounded sailing vessels, carrying merchandise. I agree with Kirk that the alternation we find at different periods between artistic images of long and rounded ships does not necessarily point to a preference by the sailors of that time for one or the other, and may merely reflect changing artistic fashion. Both forms must have co-existed in the shipping of the Aegean: the longships generally had a low-lying bow with a kind of ram and a raised poop. The roundships had both bow and stern raised and curved, as can still be seen on some late pottery from Cyprus.
The ram and keel: a possible evolution
The origin of the ram is a key problem. When its development had reached completion in the first millennium BC, the entire force of the warship, Phoenician or Greek, was concentrated on this dangerous weapon, prolonging the ship’s keel forward into a sharp point. The ram seems to have been an Aegean refinement to the longship.
On the earliest models we know of, in the Cyclades (depicted on the‘frying pan’ pottery of Syros), the bow of the ship is prolonged in a curious shape strongly reminiscent of a battering ram. This projection is found in a series of drawings and clay models. Kirk, writing in 1949, was no doubt right that this was the ancestor of the battering ram, but also correctly surmised that it was not conceived of at this stage as an instrument of war. The initial function of this spar (which might project from either end of the boat) was to consolidate the ship’s structure, in particular the bows, which were exposed to the shock of the waves and also suffered whenever the vessel was hauled up on a beach (hence the upward curve of the early versions.) The first straight ram was simply the extension of the keel, the backbone of the ship on which the whole structure of the Aegean vessel was based.
This was an original development. Egyptian boats and the Canaanite boats of the second millennium had no keel, no ram and no ribs. And while it is possible that the Cretan roundship, which appeared in the second millennium, was a copy of the Syrio-Egyptian kind of boat, it is clear that ‘the Aegeans made great progress when they added to this very practical design those essential elements of naval construction, the keel and ribs. Thus was created a stable and solid type of vessel, still found today’ along the Greek coast. It was indeed the first transport ship truly adapted to sea-going.
What about the ‘Phoenicians’?
It is no surprise to find that those born intermediaries of the Levant, the coastal traders of the Syrian coast, long accustomed to the Egyptian crossing, should rapidly have taken over the Aegean type of ship. They had seen it come into being, since Cretan vessels were frequenting the Syrian seaports long before they went to the Nile Delta. As the centuries went by, there would hardly be a type of vessel known in the Mediterranean which had not been adopted – and adapted – by the Phoenicians, the direct descendants of the Syrians of the second millennium. The Aegean longship, with its oarsmen and keel, now fully developed, appears for the first time on a bas-relief in Karatepe, a zone of Phoenician influence in the former Hittite region, in about the eighth century BC. Were the Phoenicians or perhaps the Mycenaeans responsible for its perfected design? Thanks to this design it became the classic longship of the Mediterranean, the kind depicted on a Spartan ivory as well as on so many geometric vases with black figures; the design, too, which Sidon chose to put on its coins in the fifth century BC, as did the Greek island of Samos. This kind of ship would be further improved by the Greeks, who made a lighter version by taking out the decks. They were therefore able to extend its length to 30 or 35 metres and put up the number of oarsmen to fifty: this was the famous pentecontor on which the Athenian fleet relied, according to Thucydides, down to the battle of Salamis (480 BC). After that came the reign of the trireme with its three tiered banks of oarsmen.
It is a mistake, however (derived from a few Greek vases with faulty perspective), to credit the Greeks with the invention of the bireme. A perfectly unambiguous document proves otherwise. On the walls of the palace of Nineveh, the Phoenician fleet is shown fleeing the port of Tyre before the city was attacked by Sennacherib (700 BC): roundships with symmetrically raised ends are shown alongside l
ongships with pointed bows. The lessons of the Aegean had evidently been fully assimilated by the Phoenicians, but with one innovation: all these ships had two banks of tiered oarsmen. This was the bireme, the importance of which may in any case have been exaggerated. According to Kirk, the Greeks borrowed the design from the Phoenicians later on, in the sixth century, but only for a short while, preferring the pentecontor which was safer at sea. The Phoenicians themselves used the bireme only in calm weather and close to shore.
At the same period, for the coastal convoys of timber mentioned earlier, the Phoenicians were using other boats of more mysterious origin, known to the Greeks as hippoi because their bows were decorated with a horse’s head. It was on such a ship that King Assurbanipal went hunting on the Tigris, and this kind of boat may have been taken by the Phoenicians all over the Mediterranean if we can place credence on a Phoenician jewel found at Aliseda in Spain. According to Strabo, it was still in use in the Mediterranean at the end of the first century ad, and only fifty years ago or so, fishermen on the coast near Cadiz used to carve a horse’s head on the bows of their boats.
Malta: a meeting point
The graffiti in the third temple of Hal Tarxien in Malta have played little part so far in our account. That is because they are not easy to interpret. The sailors who scratched these exvotos on a stone pillar, in a chapel which was probably abandoned some time after 1500 BC4 were giving thanks after a dangerous voyage or a shipwreck to some mother-goddess, an early Stella maris. The temple is near the large natural harbour on which the city of Valletta was much later founded, a port which provided a refuge every autumn as winter approached for ships which had been surprised at sea by bad weather.
Unfortunately these drawings are partly effaced and overlap with one another: each grateful sailor drew his boat at the height he could reach, like those who had come before him and those who would come after. And on limestone, any new scratch mark shows up as white, instantly obliterating any previous graffiti. As time passes, it merges with the rest.
Taken as a group, these forty-odd drawings do make sense: they prove that from the first half of the second millennium BC, Malta was being reached by ships which, for once, we do not have to imagine. Whether or not they were tempest-tossed, ships were arriving at Malta and putting in there. The ones which made the voyage in good weather and without incident are probably not represented in the ranks of the thank-offerings. But they must have existed too.
One could linger at length over the designs of these boats. Their key feature is diversity. I agree with Diana Woolner, who has made a study of the graffiti, that we have here a certain number of Aegean, Cretan, and Mycenaean ships, with raised bows and sterns. Like Woolner, I also recognize at least one boat of Egyptian type, perhaps more. But we should not therefore conclude that Egyptian vessels were actually reaching Malta. Even Eduard Meyer’s hypothesis of some time ago, that the Egyptians reached Crete, is today seen as very doubtful: the Egyptian vases and sculptures found on Crete were probably carried there by Cretan ships, either directly from Egypt or from the Syrian coast. So it is even more unlikely that the Egyptians ventured as far as Malta. But during the first half of the second millennium, as we have already noted, Syrian ships had imitated Egyptian designs. We know that they were trading with Egypt and had an active trade in the Levant. They may also have begun, alongside the Aegean ships, to explore the western basins of the sea. Once more we face the thorny problem of relations between east and west Mediterranean.5 If the Aegeans and the Syrians were putting in at Malta at the beginning or middle of the second millennium, they were surely not stopping short there. Was the island not the centre of a trading system, notably in obsidian from Pantelleria and the Lipari islands, a stone which is also found in southern Italy, as far up as Lucera? Mycenaean pottery has also been found both in the Lipari islands and in Italy.
The landfall made by so many ships at Malta does not invalidate these archaeological clues; quite the contrary. And it also fits the general hypotheses which have been suggested by that extremely curious phenomenon, the megaliths.
Ill Can the spread of megaliths explain the early history of the Mediterranean?
I do not propose to tackle the difficult topic of megaliths simply for the pleasure of presenting a few images from a strange world which has remained mysterious. My concern is with the sea itself, unknowable and untamed. The reader has seen that the quest for the earliest ships does not really enable us to grasp much about the early periods of the sea, and that the current of evidence carries us ceaselessly onward towards later eras much easier to understand. Will the megaliths be able to take us further back in time?
Unfortunately, any dispassionate attempt to trace the history of megaliths leaves one with the impression of a vanished dream, a problem that may never be solved. This is the more regrettable since this widespread phenomenon concerns the entire Mediterranean area, with similarities between one place and another that suggest some unified movement. But the data at our disposal are far from clear.
Are we even talking about a single problem? To regard megaliths, those large and sometimes enormous blocks of crudely hewn stone, as the symbol of a particular culture is not a priori problematic. But eventhen the symbol has to to be found in association with the same cultural elements.
As regards the stones themselves, we are all familiar with the terminology of French, or rather Breton, origin: menhirs are vertical standing stones, dolmens are walls made of several cut stones topped with horizontal slabs. The reader may have seen lines of standing stones or stone circles (cromlechs) made up of menhirs, and will almost certainly be familiar with pictures of Stonehenge near Salisbury in England, an impressive site, although now in ruins, dating from between 1700 and 1500 BC: it is made up of several concentric circles of bluestones and large boulders with slabs over each lintel, brought from quarries in the Welsh mountains many miles away. These stones, traditionally supposed to be of sacred nature, were always thought to have been linked to Celtic history and Druid rites. Only very recently have they been recognized as possibly belonging to a much more widespread culture, probably of Mediterranean origin.
Other signs of this culture are found in the multiple burial chambers, sometimes covered by cairns made of overlapping stones and sometimes accessible only via a long low tunnel. Readers familiar with classical archaeology will recall the Mycenae tombs (inaccurately described as Agamemnon’s treasure): a circular tomb (tholos), reached by a corridor (dromos). These multiple tombs might of course vary in overall design.
The last and crucial series of signs are as follows:
1) Megalithic monuments are linked to the cult of earth-mother goddesses, represented in many forms, sometimes as schematic faces where the eyes have a special place, or as stone columns with only a notional face but two curved arms indicating body shape.
2) Megaliths are usually linked to copper and bronze-working, as the example of eastern Spain clearly shows.
3) These megaliths are also connected in the west to early kinds of farming, which often preceded them. There is therefore some link between settlement and the establishment of villages on one hand and on the other a new cult and the technology of metal-working, brought by immigrant populations (possibly travelling smiths) or spreading from several centres by mere imitation.6
This being so, one can foresee considerable difficulties of interpretation: uncertainty about chronology – but then that is normal in prehistory – and gaps in the picture, as certain elements may not be where one would expect them, or may appear in an unusual form.
Sea passages
And yet one general feature seems to be clear. Since thousands of megalithic monuments have already been found, a huge number of positions can be charted on the globe, from Thailand, India or Madagascar to northern Europe. Within this huge and chronologically incoherent area, if we concentrate on the European and Mediterranean sector, one conclusion seems inescapable: this phenomenon must have spread by means of sea crossings
. The monuments are overwhelmingly found in coastal areas, and in particular on islands: Malta, Sardinia, the Balearics, Britain, Ireland, Zeeland (the Danish island where some 3500 monuments of this type have recently been inventoried), and the coasts of North Africa, Provence, Spain and Brittany. In Brittany, where they are plentiful, they may be the consequence, somewhere between the second and the first millennia BC,7 of voyages undertaken to fetch gold from Ireland and tin from Cornwall, since Brittany was the indispensable waystation. In the Mediterranean, the zone in question reminds one of the more limited zone dating from two thousand years earlier, defined by cardial pottery.
This civilization of huge stones was therefore propagated by sea, and not, as was thought in the past, by conquerors on horseback. Since the sea is now recognized as the prime route, it is tempting to suggest that the Mediterranean played the role of initiator. This hypothesis has the support of a conference held in Paris in 1961. The suggestion is that once more the Middle East, both on land and sea, was the origin of the phenomenon. Professor M. Stekelis’s excavations, which have dated the menhirs of Palestine and Lebanon to between the fifth and sixth millennia BC, provide us, at least until more data is available, with a plausible centre from which it might have spread.
The Mediterranean in the Ancient World Page 14