Ep. 015 – The Advent of the Mycenaean Galley

Today we discuss the rise of the Mycenaean galley, a style of ship characterized by oared propulsion and  a long, narrow hull built for speed and power rather than for transport. Depictions are numerous, so we focus on a few main items from around the Mycenaean world. We also discuss the 'Aegean List' of Amenhotep III, a list of foreign cities in the Aegean, cities which one professor believes were visited by the New Kingdom Egyptians. Finally, we also discuss a Mycenaean galley model found in a tomb in Gurob Egypt, making connections between the style in which it was decorated and the Homeric references to Achaean galleys during the Trojan War. This episode is filled to the brim with great info, so don't miss out!

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Episode Transcript

Introduction

In our last episode we looked at the Amarna letters, dated to around 1350 BCE. They gave us some insight into the devolution of the commercial ties and the balances of power that had existed previously in the Bronze Age. We had a smattering of glimpses of the Mycenaeans, a people who had emerged as a maritime power in the late Bronze Age. Today, we take a closer look at the Mycenaeans and the archaeological and written evidence for their maritime exploits during the latter stages of the Bronze Age.

The Mycenaeans: A Brief Orientation

To get the ball rolling today, let’s again set a timeframe on where we are in history. The Minoans began to peter out within a century of the Thera eruption, which has been roughly dated to 1628 BCE. The Mycenaean people, or their predecessors if we’re being technical, had been present in small numbers on mainland Greece since Neolithic times. However, it wasn’t until around 1600 BCE, after the Thera eruption, that the mainland occupant began to expand in earnest. This timeframe marks the transition from the Middle Bronze Age to the Late Bronze Age. In Greece itself, we call this period the Late Helladic Period.

As has been the case with the Minoans, the Hittites, and several other civilizations from this period, next to nothing was known about the Mycenaeans until the archaeology boom of the mid 19th Century. We’ll consider the accounts of the Trojan War at some point in our discussion, but for now it suffices to say that the mythos of the Trojan War led first to the discovery of the city of Troy in Anatolia, the famous discovery made by Heinrich Schliemann. After finding the city that had until then been considered mythical, Schliemann turned his attentions toward discovering the opponents of Troy as they were described in the Homeric epics. He began to dig in Mycenae in 1874 and, although other archaeologists had previously unearthed artifacts belonging to the Mycenaean people, Schliemann was the first to uncover the shaft graves whose occupants were buried in golden war armor and lavish decor that could only have belonged to a royal personage.

Although Schliemann famously mistook those artifacts as belonging to Agamemnon himself, the Mycenae shaft graves are now accepted as dating to the 16th century BCE, making them the first indication of a Mycenaean civilization that had blossomed into a true power. By 1500, the Mycenaeans had begun establishing power centers on the Greek mainland. Their culture was that of a warrior people, but this did not stop them from trading with the other cultures around the Mediterranean, a trend that saw them expand trade throughout the same period that the Minoan influence began to wane. By 1450 BCE, the Mycenaeans had fully supplanted the Minoans on Crete, and had even begun to establish colonies around the Aegean.

You could almost say that the Mycenaeans stepped into the shoes of the Minoans. The Minoans had at one time connected the early Mycenaeans to the culture and trade of those around the Mediterranean. This helped the Mycenaeans in their early development. Sadly for the Minoans, the Mycenaeans repaid the favor by kicking the Minoans when they were down and taking control of their cities and their trade routes. Such is the natural order, I suppose. Knowing the extent of Minoan trade and maritime reach, we shouldn’t then be surprised to learn of the extent to which the Mycenaeans were known in the Late Bronze Age world, even though they’d only been on the scene for a relatively short time. To get an idea of the Mycenaean’s reach, lets again return to a name and time we’ve visited a few times already.

Amenhotep III ruled in Egypt in the early 14th century BCE, and the Colossi of Memnon bear his image as they stand imposing at the entrance to Amenhotep’s mortuary temple. We’ve talked about these same enormous statues once already, back in Episode 010 where we considered how exactly the Egyptians would have been able to transport 720 ton statues. Anyway, I mention the Colossi of Memnon again for an altogether different reason, that is, because the temple that they overlook also contains evidence of the Mycenaean people. This evidence exists on what was once the base of a smaller statue of the pharaoh, a base that now sits in a row with five other similar bases of stone block. The base we’re interested in is the last in the row, a bearer of two time-beaten stone feet supporting nothing but air. It’s the inscription on the base that we’re focused on, anyway, so the pharaoh’s absence isn’t too important.

The "Aegean List"

For some help in explaining the purpose and significance of this statue base, I turn to the words of professor Eric H. Cline of George Washington University. In his book ‘1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed,’ Professor Cline says the following:

“Each of the five bases is inscribed with a series of topographical names carved into the stone within what the Egyptians called a “fortified oval” – an elongated oval carved standing upright, with a series of small protrusions all along its perimeter. This was meant to depict a fortified city, complete with defensive towers, hence the protrusions. Each fortified oval was placed on, or rather replaced, the lower body of a bound prisoner, portrayed with his arms behind his back and bound together at the elbow, sometimes with a rope tied around his neck attaching him to other prisoners in front of and behind him. This was a traditional New Kingdom Egyptian method of representing foreign cities and countries; even if the Egyptians didn’t actually control these foreign or were not even close to conquering them, they still wrote the names within such “fortified ovals” as an artistic and political convention, perhaps as symbolic domination.”

Cline, Eric H., 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014).

Whether it was intended as a symbolic domination or not, similar New Kingdom “fortified oval” lists mentioned all of the big civilizations and cultures of the time. The Hittites, Canaanites, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Nubians were all on the main landmasses of Africa and the Middle East, up into Asia Minor. These names fill the first four bases found at Amenhotep’s Temple, but base number 5 contains names that were a bit further removed, not by pure distance necessarily, but removed because of the water barrier. I hope you’ll agree with me by now that water wasn’t all that much of a barrier to these ancient peoples, and in many cases it was a tool they used to accomplish things they couldn’t otherwise achieve, but it’s still surprising to see the names that were chiseled into Base number 5. The names are arrayed along two sides of the base: on the front we find the head names, separated by a dividing line. These two main names are Keftiu and Tanaja, the Egyptian terms for Crete and mainland Greece. These names appear in other places from a similar time period, so their correct interpretation is pretty much accepted across the board. After the dividing line, the base lists a handful of specific cities within the main regions of Keftiu and Tanaja: in order, they are Knossos and Amnisos, followed by Phaistos and Kydonia, all cities that were tied to Minoan palaces on the island of Crete. The island of Kythera is then names, an island that lies in the Cyclades, roughly equidistant between Crete and mainland Greece. The list then names Mycenae and a Greek mainland port city, Naupliaon, followed by Messenia and what is possibly a reference to Thebes. The list concluded with more names from Minoan Crete.

Cline calls this list the "Aegean List," and he interprets it as being evidence of an Egyptian voyage during Amenhotep III’s reign. Because the first list of Cretan cities progresses from east to west, and the second list of Cretan cities progresses from west to east, he feels that the list is evidence that Egyptian ships made a round trip voyage to mainland Greece and back to Egypt. If true, the Aegean List would be our oldest indication of a major Egyptian voyage to the Aegean. Although we know that the two civilizations had traded frequently, it’s been generally thought that the Minoans and other merchant classes from coastal cities were responsible for the actual shipping. Anyway, Cline buttresses his argument for the Egyptian round-trip interpretation by pointing to the presence of numerous Egyptian objects at four of the cities mentioned in the Aegean List. These objects, objects like scarabs, seals, and a vase, are important because they all bear the cartouche of either Amenhotep III or that of his queen, an imprint that ties them directly to the temple base inscriptions of the Aegean List. Perhaps even more significant are the presence of nine foundation deposit plaques at Mycenae, all nine bearing the royal title of Amenhotep III. Foundation deposit plaques were likely used as objects to bury inside building foundations as a reminder to the gods of the identity of the builder or the patron who provided the finances, along with a record of the building’s date. Now, these foundation plaques at Mycenae are highly significant, for this reason: no other such plaques bearing Amenhotep III’s title have been found anywhere else outside Egypt.

Ultimately, we can only draw thin conclusions from the Aegean List and from the foundation deposit plaques at Mycenae. They don’t give us much insight into the extent of the contact between Egypt and Mycenaean Greece during the early 14th century BCE, nor do they illuminate the impetus behind the contact, but they do tell us, simply by virtue of their existence, that the contact between Egypt and Mycenae at this point was unique and that it existed. I’ll leave the discussion of the Aegean List and the foundation deposits with Cline’s final thought on the matter. He reminds us that the dynamic at this time, roughly 200 years removed from the Thera Eruption, was that Minoan power was almost completely gone and that Mycenaean power had newly arrived and begun to spread. Archaeology reveals that trade and the import of Egyptian and Near East good had shifted from Crete to mainland Greece, almost entirely. Could the Aegean List indicate an Egyptian diplomatic voyage to “affirm connections with an old and valued trading partner, the Minoans, and to establish relations with a new and rising power, the Mycenaeans?" It is an intriguing interpretation, no doubt, though the dating of events that I’ve encountered thus far seemed to indicate that the Minoans had declined and that the Mycenaeans had taken over operations on Crete by the time of Amenhotep III. Either way, dating and relative chronologies in the Bronze Age are hard to wrap my mind around, so Cline’s interpretation is instructive, at the very least, and provides a nice, tidy way to view things.

The Oared Galley

Now I’d imagine that if you chanced to read the title of today’s episode before you jumped in, you might be wondering about the absence of galleys to this point in the discussion. I am here to allay your fear and to inform you that the wait is over. Let’s now talk about the galley. First things first. I can’t put enough emphasis on this main point, and with time as we see how it plays out in the ancient world, I’m sure you’ll see why I feel it to be so important. The point I’m so bluntly emphasizing is this: the invention of the Helladic oared galley is seen by many to be “the single most significant advance in the weaponry of the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean.” As we start to look at some of the pictographic evidence for the Mycenaean galley from the Late Helladic period, you’ll begin to see how the structure and function of the galley differed from the structure and function of the more graceful, multi-purpose ships like those depicted in the Akrotiri Fleet Frescoe.

As we now move to look at some iconographic depiction of Mycenaean ships, I feel I need to give you this caveat. The Mycenaean period is a bit messy when it comes to chronology and placing things in a specific context, so this discussion will be a bit more broad than some of the other peoples and periods thus far. However, once we have talked about the depictions as a whole and seen the advent of the galley as a style of ship, the transition from Mycenaean Bronze Age to the Iron Age will give us plenty of fodder for further discussion.

Ship depictions and artistic representations from Mycenaean locales are numerous enough that we can’t really hope to cover them all, so I think that we can talk about the common traits shared by the numerous depictions to help give us a good overview, and perhaps zoom in on one or two specific items to get some detail. What it all comes down to with the Mycenaean contribution to maritime technology though is this: they seem to be the originators of the oared galley style ship, the penteconter that is synonymous with Greek maritime culture of classical antiquity. I’m sure the penteconter will pop up more frequently in the episodes of the near future, so I’ll not dwell on it heavily right now but let’s at least get our feet wet by talking about the transition from Minoan to Mycenaean ship types.

In terms of concrete proof, the period of transition from Minoan to Mycenaean dominance in the Aegean is a bit murky when it comes to proving which ship types emerged when and, relatedly, when the earlier types began to fall out of favor. We remember that the Minoan ships were predominantly crescent shaped, the sleek and graceful ships of the Akrotiri Fleet Fresco. The Mycenaean galley is certainly not an adaption of the Minoan ships, as it’s design radically differs from the Minoan style, so we’re left a bit in the dark about how and why the Mycenaean galley style originally emerged. At the least, we can safely assume that it was not the outgrowth of a gradual evolution in style, since the style is such a drastic departure from anything previous. If anything, the Mycenaean galley seems to indicate a shift from the all-purpose ships of the Minoans to a more purpose-built galley. The Minoan ships were adaptable to both the purpose at hand and to the conditions, with various purpose ranging among the transport of troops, goods, or even simply the fast movement of a lightly loaded ship. Sails took advantage of good weather conditions, but oars were available if necessary for entering and leaving harbors, or surmounting foul weather. The Mycenaean galley style ships, however, were engineered to serve a more narrow purpose. Yes, they contained a mast and sail, but the lengthy, narrow hull and the prevalence of the oar-powered propulsion emphasized speed while sacrificing wind power and storage capacity, making them important parts of the warring pursuits of the Mycenaeans. With this main distinction in our mind, let’s now look at some examples to see just how the structure differed and how the Mycenaean artists normally depicted their ships.

The common depiction style for the Mycenaean galley, at least early on in it’s lifespan use, has come to be known as the “horizontal ladder” depiction. This label is quite apt, as some of the more earlier depictions are centrally focused on what is just a ladder, drawn horizontally. Now, obviously the artists added a sail and the necessary rudder or steering oar, and generally also included a prow with some type of decoration, but the horizontal ladder section is what typifies the Late Helladic depictions of the galley. Take, for instance, a ship that is depicted on the side of a larnax that was discovered at Gazi on Crete and dated to the 12th century BCE. This ship depiction is little more than a large sail added atop a horizontal ladder, but it conveys the idea quite clearly: the horizontal ladder itself sits atop a more thickly drawn hull. There are 27 vertical ‘rungs’ to the ladder, one of which is the mast itself, so in total, the artists seems to have been depicting a galley-style ship with 28 rowing stations, perhaps the artists’s loose and somewhat inaccurate depiction of a penteconter, a galley rowed by 50 men (25 to a side if we assume the depiction to only be showing one side of the ship).

Maybe the Gazi larnax depiction was not the best one to look at, though, despite it’s place as the largest depiction of such a ship found to date. (and a small interjection here, if you’re curious: a larnax is a small coffin-box, or an “ash chest” used a container for cremated remains throughout ancient Greek and Macedonian history.)

Anyway, a more informative depiction was found on a Late Helladic period pyxis, a type of pottery container that was usually cylindrical and decorated with an elaborate design. The specific depiction was found in a Tholos tomb at Tragana, a location on the southern part of the Peloponnese. I wasn’t able to locate a decent photo of the actual pyxis, but I was able to find a good copy of the ship that is depicted on the artifact, so if you didn’t see the episode artwork for today, head to the website to check out what the ship looks like. Anyway, the best way I can think to describe it is as being both beautiful and crude, if those two traits can coexist, which I think they can. The horizontal ladder structure contains 24 vertical rungs, which would give 25 rowing stations to the ship, here, a perfect depiction of a penteconter. There is a steering oar, or quater rudder, on the stern, which appears rather large in comparison to the ship itself, though as usual, the artist’s rendition doesn’t necessarily equate with an accurate rendition of the artists’s subject. Realism wasn’t quite in vogue yet, if you know what I mean. Also worth noting, though it isn’t our focus today, is the bird figure on the ship’s stem, a theme that we’ll begin to see more and more frequently as we further into classical antiquity. Lastly, the ship does also contain a sail with rigging lines coming from the stern near the quarter rudder up to the sail and mast.

A final iconographic depiction, though certainly not the only other one out there, comes from the archaeological site of Kynos in Central Greece. The Iliad in particular names Kynos as the home of Ajax the lesser, the same man who led a 40-ship contingent of Locrians against Troy during the Trojan War. Actually, Kynos and Ajax are listed as part of the ‘Catalogue of Ships’ in Book II of the Iliad, and, well, why would I pass up an opportunity to read from the Iliad. This is what Homer said about Kynos and the Locrians, and then we’ll look at the depiction unearthed at the site: “Of the Locrian forces was the fleet-footed son of Oileus, the lesser Ajax, by no means so much man as Telamonian Ajax, but the lesser by far. He was slight of build and the corselet he wore was of linen, but with the spear he surpassed all Hellenes and Achaeans. His followers lived in Cynus, Calliarus, and Opus, in Bessa and Scarphe and delightful Augeiae, Tarphe and Thorium, and about the waters of Boagrius. With Ajax came forty black ships of the Locrians, who live just over the straits from holy Euboea.”

As now for the depiction itself, it could be said to be the best depiction of a Mycenaean galley that we have discovered yet. The ship depiction on a potsherd shows close to the entirety of a galley, though the stem and any decoration it may have held is cut off. We can see the nearest end of the quarter rudder, but that too is cut off. What we’re left with is still very revealing. A helmsman, apparently unarmored, stands near the stem of the ship, while two armored warriors are shown on the deck of the ship, shields and spears raised. These warriors reveal what we know to be true from the later use of the galley: it was a fearsome weapon of war and continued to be so during the whole of Greek history. Structurally, the ship on the Kynos sherd is close to what we’ve seen: a thick hull in the typical galley fashion is the base, while the warriors and helmsman stand upon the ship’s deck and what appears to be a small forecastle.

Again, the things that sit between the hull and the deck are what deserve the most attention. They appear to be almost half-circle shapes, some attached to vertical rungs like those on the horizontal ladder type depictions. While they might be confusing or vague in and of themselves, we are aided by the fact that oars are projecting from beneath the ship’s hull, presumably beginning at the bottom of these semicircle shapes and extending into the water below. Now, I don’t want to get lost in the minutiae of the arguments behind this theory, but some archaeologists have theorized, based on later depictions of similar nature, that these semi-circle depictions were intended to show the men rowing the galley itself. There are 19 in total, so we could assume that the artists set out to depict a penteconter but made poor use of his canvas. The completion of the theory is that the heads of the rowers would have extended up to where the deck is shown, so the artists chose to leave them out, and there are similar later Greek depictions of galley rowers with their heads behind screens, giving the impression that their heads have disappeared. I think the rower theory for this depiction is pretty valid, but if you’re curious, you can read more in the Mycenaean chapter of “Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant,” a marvelous resource.

The Gurob Ship Model

To this point, then, we’ve seen three iconographic depictions of the galley that developed following the emergence of the Mycenaean peoples. They were nice, and they were helpful, but the hands-down best source for info about the galley during this period comes from, where else, but Egypt! Maybe you’re tired of hearing about things from or connected to Egypt, but the region is a key area for info from the ancient world and, I’m sure you’re aware of this, but the arid Egyptian climate and the ancient occupant’s penchant for entombing all sorts of things has been of great benefit to our modern attempts to illuminate the past.

This latest item from Egypt was discovered in tomb in Gurob, a city on the Nile in Lower Egypt. As has been the case with a few different Egyptian artifacts so far, this ship model was originally discovered in 1920 and briefly written about at that time, being described as a model boat of a pirate ship on wheels, perhaps to serve as a child’s toy. Now, one major aspect of this model, aside from being the oldest model of an Aegean-style galley, is the fact that it was painted before being buried, giving us a rare insight into the way in which ships may have been decorated in the ancient world. The structural characteristics of the ship are fairly similar to the depictions we’ve already talked about, though the practical building of a physical representation required the builder to a make some adaptions. There are stanchions along either side of the hull, and although there aren’t 24 of them to accurately depict a penteconter, nor are there 25 oars on either side, dots along the hull are thought to represent oarports, as the number and spacing align with the 25 oars-per-side layout of the Aegean penteconter galley. This model also contains a stempost, like the depictions already discussed, although it’s not entirely clear that an animal was part of the design as it frequently was in other depictions.

The coloring, as I mentioned, is more important on this model. The hull was painted with a white base layer, while black was then painted over the bottom half of the hull, and a red stripe sat above the black half and dissected the white portion. The significance of this ‘paint job’ I guess I’ll call it is discussed by Jeffrey Emmanuel in his lecture entitled “Odysseus’ Boat? New Mycenaean Evidence from the Egyptian New Kingdom.” Emmanuel is a CHS Fellow in Aegean Archaeology and Prehistory at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies. In the lecture, as you may have gathered from the title, he makes some very insightful connections between this ship model and the Homeric references to the ships of Odysseus and the Achaeans. This is another topic that’s been written about heavily, and part of me wants to spend hours talking about the Iliad, the Odyssey, and how we can use them to inform our view of Mycenaean and later Greek history, but I’ll try to hit the high points.

As Emmanuel points out, Homer describes the Achaean ships as ‘black,’ while he calls the ships of Odysseus ‘red-cheeked.’ Homer refers to ‘black-ships’ at least 80 times throughout both the Iliad and Odyssey, so it must have been a common appearance of ships on the Aegean and the Mediterranean at the time. Emmanuel takes these references to ‘black-ships’ to allude to the dark colored pitch that would have been used to coat and seal the hull planking of the wooden galley ships, and as we’ve discussed the ways in which various peoples and cultures did the same with with various substances, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Pitch sealing of the hull became a necessary part of keeping a ship sea-worthy and was done in one form or another for the entire future history of wooden ships on the seas. Think back to the bitumen coating on the reed boats of the Ubaid people, way back in our first episode, and you have the same idea here.

There we have the bitesize importance of the Gurob ship model and it’s tie to Homeric references to Achaean galleys. Dr. Shelley Wachsmann is a scholar of nautical archaeology of the near east and has written an entire book covering his theories about the ship model and it’s possible relation to the infamous Sea Peoples. I’ll leave those possible ties until we talk about the Sea Peoples, but in a nutshell, it seems that the Sea Peoples adopted the Achaean galley ship style as their own and used it to devastating effect in the century and a half following on the heels of 1275 BCE or so. That would certainly be a tough pill to swallow for the Mycenaeans though, since they were the original developers of the galley that was apparently used later on by the Sea Peoples. We’ll get to that in time, however, and really, it won’t be too far off now. The Late Helladic period, which covers most of the Mycenaean presence and disappearance from the Aegean, is a tough one to look at chronologically. Today we’ve seen the main purpose of the galley and its main methods of depiction in historical record, but dating and a coherent narrative for the historical period are perhaps better left to other podcasts.

Sources

• Braudel, Fernand, Memory and the Mediterranean (2001).
• Casson, Lionel, The Ancient Mariners: Seafarers and Sea Fighters of the Mediterranean in Ancient Times (1959).
• Cline, Eric H., 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014).
• Cline, Eric H. & Steven M. Stannish, Sailing the Great Green Sea? Amenhotep III’s “Aegean List” from Kom el-Hetan, Once More, Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, Vol. 3:2, pp. 6–16, 2011.
• Emmanuel, Jeffrey P., Cretan Lie and Historical Truth: Examining Odysseus’ Raid on Egypt in its Late Bronze Age Context, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2012.
• Emmanuel, Jeffrey P., Odysseus’ Boat? New Mycenaean Evidence from the Egyptian New Kingdom, Department of the Classics at Harvard University Lecture Series, 2013–14.
• Homer, The Iliad.
• Paine, Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2013).
• Phillips, Jacke, & Eric Cline, Amenhotep III and Mycenae: New Evidence, Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, 9 November 2005.
• Tartaron, Thomas F., Maritime Networks in the Mycenaean World (2013).
• Shelley Wachsmann, Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant (2008).
• Shelley Wachsmann, The Gurob Ship-Cart Model and Its Mediterranean Context (2013)