Warships of the Ancient Mediterranean

Posted on September 24, 2015 by J.M. Ney-Grimm

The ancient Phoenicians were seafarers, and they created the first real maritime civilization in the Mediterranean Sea around 1550 BC.

The ancient Egyptians had mounted various sea expeditions earlier, but the Phoenicians established regular trade routes between their numerous city-states, from Tyre in the east to Tingis in the west on the Strait of Gibraltar, and everywhere in between.

Thus the Phoenicians were the first to develop truly sturdy, seaworthy ships and all the arts that go with shipbuilding and sailing. The later Mediterranean civilizations learned from the Phoenicians, and individual sea captains recognized the Phoenicians – even after their dominance faded – as masters of the sea.

The first warships – needed to protect the sea routes – were slim craft with a shallow draft and propelled by oarsmen, but possessing a sail to take advantage of favorable winds when possible. The ancient Greeks named these warcraft for the number of oars propelling the vessel.

Thus the early 30-oared warship (15 on each side) was the triaconter, from triakontoroi or “thirty-oars.”

And the later 50-oared warship (25 on each side) was the penteconter, from pentekontoroi or “fifty-oars.”

By the time of my novel Fate’s Door (352 BC – 329 BC), warship technology had advanced considerably. The early warships served more as fighting platforms for the warriors, who would seek to board an enemy ship and subdue its warriors in man-to-man combat. Later warships had catapults aboard for assaulting the enemy with missiles. Even more important, their prows possessed bronze-clad rams for ramming enemy ships and sinking them.

This meant that swift maneuvering was essential, as well as increased power and speed. The only way to get that was by adding more oars to the ship. And the best way to add oars was to add another bank of oars, one bank of rowers on a lower level and another bank of rowers on an upper level.

These double-banked warships were soon made obsolete by triple-banked warships. The ancient Romans called them triremes, and that is the name we modern folk use as well. But the ancient Greeks called them triereis or, in the singular, a trieres, literally meaning “three-rower.”

These were peerless warships, and the ancient Greek city-states built fleets of them, cementing the Hellene domination of the Mediterranean Sea.

As history unfolded, the desire for ever more powerful ships grew. Adding a fourth bank of oars was impractical, but adding another man to each oar was not. When the extra man sat on the top bench, the ship was known as a tetreres or “four-rower.”

When one extra man sat on the top bench and another extra man sat on the middle bench, the ship was a penteres or “five-rower.” At the time of Fate’s Door, the penteres was a new development. Most fleets had but one, and it was the flagship of the fleet.

Altairos boasts to Nerine (the protagonist of Fate’s Door) that each of his father’s warfleets has at least one penteres, reassuring her that he will not be in danger when he accompanies the fleets to challenge the pirates preying on their trade ships.

The diagram above shows the rowing arrangement for a trieres. One thranites sat on the top bench with his oar passing through a lock in the side of the projecting outrigger of the ship.

One zygites sat on a middle bench, recessed into the deck, with his oar passing through a lock in the floor of the outrigger.

And one thalamites sat on the lowest bench with his oar passing through a lock in the side of the ship.

In 1985, the reconstruction of an ancient trireme was started by a shipbuilder in Piraeus, using drawings by naval architect John F. Coates. Coates developed his drawings through long consultation with historian J.S. Morrison.

In 1987, the Olympias was launched and put to sea trials. In the most successful of these, the ship achieved a speed of 9 knots (10 mph or 17 km/h). It was able to execute 180-degree turns in less than 60 seconds and within an arc of two and a half ship-lengths.

Given that this maneuverability was achieved with an inexperienced crew of volunteers, there was reason for the enthusiasm of the ancients for the trireme. It was indeed the “Dreadnought of the Mediterranean.”

For more about the world of Fate’s Door, see:
Ground Looms
Lapadoússa, an isle of Pelagie
Merchant Ships of the Ancient Mediterranean
Garb of the Sea People
Measurement in Ancient Greece
Horse Sandals and the 4th Century BC
Knossos, Model for Altairos’ Home

For more about the Olympias, see:
The Olympias on Wikipedia
The Trireme Trust, dedicated to disseminating information about the Olympias
The Sea Trials of the Olympias on YouTube

Calendar of the Ancient Mediterranean

Posted on September 17, 2015 by J.M. Ney-Grimm

The people of the ancient Mediterranean world did not follow a common calendar.

For example, in Athens the year began just after mid-summer. But in Boeotia – a mere 50 miles (80 kilometers) away – the year began in mid-winter. Nor were their names for the months (or moons) the same.

Fortunately, as I wrote Fate’s Door, I found I did not need month names. The people of the ancient world were not nearly as tied to a written calendar or a strict accounting for the passage of time as we moderns are.

The season was a much more relevant concept. The land dwellers needed to know when to plant seed and when to harvest crops. The seafarers needed to know how the weather would behave. My sea numeni – living beneath the waves – were interested in the temperature of the water and the behavior of the currents.

Written calendars of the time tended to get out of sync with the seasons and then require an arbitrary jump to make them match. Paying attention to the natural world, rather than the man-made calendar, was much more useful to the folk who really needed to know what was upcoming.

Thus my characters in Fate’s Door tend to refer to the spring, the summer, the autumn, and the winter. Or the morning, the noontide, the afternoon, and the evening.

I didn’t need month names. Nor did I need precise measures for minutes or hours.

But I did need month and week intervals. A journey might take three months. An event might be planned for next week.

The months were easy. The ancients definitely used the moon to plot the passage of time. Thus they might say that travelling overland from Thérma to the coast of Balder’s Sea (the Baltic Sea) would take three moons.

But the weeks were harder, because the ancients of the Hellenic world didn’t divide their moons into 4 weeks. In my story, I had started out as referring to weeks as sevendays. Halfway through the manuscript, it occurred to me to check my assumption.

In my North-lands stories, the lowlanders have 7-day weeks, but the mountain dwelling Hammarleedings have 8-day weeks. Perhaps the ancients of our world used some number of days other than 7.

Oh, wow, did they ever! It was good I checked. The Athenians, at least, divided the moon (or month) into thirds!

This is how it worked. A moon was either 29 or 30 days long. The short ones were known as “hollow,” while the long ones were known as “full.”

The first day of the month was called noumenia or “new moon.” The next 9 days were called “2nd rising,” “3rd rising,” all the way up to “10th rising.” These first ten days were grouped as the “moon waxing.”

The next 10 days were grouped as the “moon full.” In this group, the numbers of the days ran from 11 to 19, but they were usually called “first over ten” (for the 11th) and “second over ten” (the 12th) and so on, up to “ninth over ten” for the 19th. The 20th day was called “earlier 10th,” not “the 20th” or “tenth over ten.”

The last 10 days were grouped as the “moon waning.” And the numbering of these days is the most confusing to my modern sensibilities. It goes backwards!

The first day of this group was called the “later 10th.” Next came “9th waning” and “8th waning” all the way down to “2nd waning.” The very last day of the month was called hene kai nea, meaning “the old and the new.”

In months with only 29 days, “moon waning” counted down from “later tenth” to “3rd waning” and then went directly to “the old and the new.” A “hollow” moon simply did not have a “2nd waning.”

With this emphasis on tens – “10th rising,” “earlier 10th,” and “later tenth” – it seemed pretty clear to me that the unit of 10 days was the important one. And as I envisioned the communities featured in Fate’s Door as following the lead of dominant Athens, I chose that 10-day unit for my “week.” What general term did the Athenians use when they spoke of their “moon waxing” or their “moon full” or their “moon waning”?

Alas, I could find no mention of such a term. Perhaps a scholar of the classics might be able to enlighten me, but none of my circle of acquaintance – that I know of – has studied ancient Greek.

I thought about choosing tenday, just as I might use sevenday for a 7-day week. But I wanted something a little more evocative of my ancient Hellenic setting. I decided to borrow from the traditional Greek numerical prefixes.

Di- or duo- for 2. Tri for 3. Tetra for 4. And on up. Deka- is 10. So I coined the deka-day.

Then I went through my manuscript replacing every use of sevenday with deka-day! 😀

For more about the world of Fate’s Door, see:
Lapadoússa, an isle of Pelagie
Merchant Ships of the Ancient Mediterranean
Garb of the Sea People
Measurement in Ancient Greece
Horse Sandals and the 4th Century BC
Knossos, Model for Altairos’ Home

Ground Looms

Posted on September 10, 2015 by J.M. Ney-Grimm

When I started writing Fate’s Door – a book in which the three fates who weave the destiny of the world play important roles – I expected that I would need to learn a lot about weaving. What I didn’t expect was that weaving would enter the story before my heroine got anywhere near the cottage of the fates.

But so it was.

Nerine is a young sea nymph. She makes friends with a boy who lives on land: Altairos. And Altairos naturally introduces her to his nurse, Calla. Calla begins teaching Nerine to weave. And there I was, needing to know more about the textile arts. 😀

The culture of the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic era used vertical looms, and I’ll be writing a blog post about them soon. But Calla prefers the more ancient style of loom: the ground loom.

There is archaeological evidence that Neolithic peoples as far back as 6000 BC used ground looms, but the ancient Egyptians used them as well, from 5000 BC until sometime after 1550 BC, when the vertical loom was developed.

Calla could have requested either type of loom for herself. She is greatly honored and loved by the royal family of Zakynthos, and they would have provided whatever she wanted. But the vertical loom requires greater strength from the weaver, as well as a lot of standing, and Calla is old. She wants to weave while sitting.

Calla’s loom is a much finer version of the ground loom than the original instrument used in 6000 BC.

The very first ground looms were simply four sticks plunged into the soil, one pair placed roughly 3 feet apart in front of the weaver and another pair – also 3 feet apart – placed 6 to 10 feet away from the weaver.

Narrow beams at each end were secured to the sticks, and the warp threads were tied to the beams. Two sticks (lease rods) were used to lift the long warp threads on these early looms, allowing the short weft threads to be passed across the warp.

Later on, the heddle was invented, providing a more convenient way to separate the warp strands.

As looms became more sophisticated, so did heddle design. But the heddles for a ground loom were essentially two rods with loops of string attaching every other warp thread to one and the alternate every other warp thread to the other.

The weaver would lift one heddle into the heddle jacks – two Y-shaped sticks, one on either side of the warp threads – and pass the shuttle through. After beating the weft thread firmly against the previous weft thread, she would lift the first heddle down, lift the other heddle into the jacks, and pass the shuttle across again.

Nomadic people still use these simple ground looms, because they are so portable. You just pull the sticks out of the ground and pack the whole kit and caboodle up.

But Calla weaves in the comfort of her own home, and her loom is created by finely smoothed wooden cylinders set into a raised platform faced by tiles. Brackets along the sides of the platform allow her to move the heddle jacks as the fabric progresses. As the working edge of the fabric moves away from her, she can either sit at the side of the loom to continue weaving, or place a cushion below the fabric and sit directly on it.

The fabric in the video below is a very coarse one, woven loosely of coarse thread. But it is possible to weave very fine cloth on such a loom. The ancient Egyptians used flax threads so fine and smooth, and wove it so skillfully, that the resulting linen was fit for royalty. Indeed, it was in great demand for export to Arabia and India due to its high quality.

For more about the world of Fate’s Door, see:
Merchant Ships of the Ancient Mediterranean
Garb of the Sea People
Measurement in Ancient Greece
Horse Sandals and the 4th Century BC
Knossos, Model for Altairos’ Home

For more about ground looms and weaving on them, see:
Nomadic Looms
Flax and Linen in Pharaonic Egypt
Ancient Egyptian Linen
Types of Looms

Lapadoússa, an Isle of Pelagie

Posted on September 3, 2015 by J.M. Ney-Grimm

The first scenes of Fate’s Door take place in the cottage of the fates, in Scandia (Scandinavia). So I didn’t worry too much about the exact location of my sea nymph heroine’s home while I wrote those scenes.

Oh, I knew that she grew up in a reef palace offshore from a Mediterranean island. But precisely which island and where didn’t need to be determined. Not yet.

That changed the instant I finished Part 1 and wanted to begin Part 2.

“Where the heck is Nerine’s island?” I asked myself.

I knew it was not in the eastern reaches, the Levantine basin. Nor the western portion near the Pillars of Herakles (Strait of Gibraltar). Nor right off the coast of Greece itself.

No, it was centrally located and not too near the coast of either Europe or Africa.

I started searching maps and googling locations. And the island cluster I was looking for turned up pretty quickly.

The Isles of Pelagie are located in the broad Strait of Sicily that separates the western basin of the Mediterranean from the eastern. To the north is Sicily, to the south, Tunisia. The waters of the strait are shallower, with a deep current that moves from east to west, and a surface one that moves from west to east.

Honestly, the moment I spotted the Isles of Pelagie in one of the three atlases we have in the house, they felt right. I crossed my fingers that when I checked the details, one of them would be right.

The first thing that caught my attention was the name. It has a French sound to my ear, but it actually derives from the Greek word pélagos, meaning ‘open sea.’ That seemed a promising sign. A name deriving from Greek, rather than French or Italian, might mean the ancient peoples were aware of these islands.

My next step was to look specifically at each island. There were three, and I needed one that could support a sizable population, because Nerine’s friend Altairos is a land-dwelling island prince.

I envisioned his setting as a city-state grown wealthy from trade. The Isles of Pelagie certainly had a great location for trade. The ancient sailors always stuck close to shore. As a narrower section of the Mediterranean, the Strait of Sicily would be a natural place to cross the sea, and the Isles would serve as a natural stepping stone for that crossing.

The island of Lampione (Lamptír to the ancient Greeks) was clearly much too small. Altairos’ city-state might trade for a lot of its food, but some would need to be produced locally. Lampione is a rocky islet with tall bluffs and no good harbor, measuring a mere 656 feet by 591 feet (200 meters by 180 meters). The palace alone would sprawl over the entire ten acres, with no room for either a city or farmland or pasturage.

Strike Lampione.

Linosa looked more promising. It’s considerably larger and, from the photo, looks to have a sheltering cove to serve as a harbor. Even better, Strabo (an ancient Greek philosopher and geographer) referred to it as Aethusa.

During the Punic Wars, the ancient Romans used it as a military base. The ruins from 150 water cisterns from this period still remain. 264 BC to 146 BC is somewhat later than my time period, 352 BC to 329 BC. But if the Romans could set up and run a permanent settlement, that would indicate that my fictional city-state might thrive there as well.

On the other hand, if the Romans took the island in 264 BC, it meant Altairos’ city-state fell to them in what might otherwise be Altairos’ happy old age. My book ends before such a gloomy happening, but why set my characters up for even unchronicled tragedy? I decided to pass on Linosa.

Lampedusa, the third island I considered (Lapadoússa to the ancients), turned out to be perfect. It is the largest of the three, with plenty of room for a modest city, a sprawling palace similar to that at Knossoss, and lots of land left over for orchards, vinyards, farming, and the grazing of livestock.

Apparently the ancient Greeks found it an excellent source for a particularly desired oyster. Historically, it hosted settlements of ancient Phoenicians, Greeks, and so on through the centuries.

My fictional city-state might not be so fictional after all. The Greeks started many colonies throughout the Mediterranean world, and there are many Greek ruins (along with ruins from other civilizations and times in history) on Lampedusa. Just because this particular settlement is not named in the surviving chronicles of the ancients does not mean it did not exist. Indeed, the ruins indicate otherwise.

The island has high cliffs on its western end, so I placed my city-state and its palace along the gentler southeastern shore, with Nerine’s reef palace in the sea farther west beside the southern coast.

This was an exciting moment. I had found the island where Altairos lived and the waters in which Nerine’s reef place was carved!

For more about the world of Fate’s Door, see:
Garb of the Sea People
Measurement in Ancient Greece
Horse Sandals and the 4th Century BC
Knossos, Model for Altairos’ Home