The eastern Mediterranean is a relatively calm sea, especially in summer, with fairly limited tides and prevailing winds from the northwest. Except for parts of North Africa, its shores have an abundance of natural harbors and beaches, without much in the way of shoals, including on the many islands, some substantial, that break up the open sea-lanes. It is, in short, amenable to navigation even in ships of limited technological sophistication. In ancient times, the lands bordering the Mediterranean to the north and east possessed abundant forests—notably, the cedar forests of Lebanon—that produced good wood for ship building. Egypt, while short of wood, grew reeds that could be dried and bundled into material suitable for building small craft, at least, while its flax could be turned into linen for sails. Though the earliest boats in any area were paddled, both rowing and sailing were more efficient, especially for ships of any size. The calmn waters of the eastern Mediterranean meant that oared propulsion was an option, and it could be combined with sails to overcome the problem of winds that tended to blow from the same direction the boats travelled.
The economic stimulus for taking advantage of this potential highway came from the rise of two substantial areas of civilization—or state-level, hierarchical societies with specialized economic activity—on or near its shores, in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The growth of these centers, in turn, stimulated the rise of numerous small states around the edges and on the islands of the Mediterranean. Of these, Egypt initially led the way in the development of maritime technology and activity. This is probably because, unlike the unpredictable and often rocky Tigris and Euphrates in southwest Asia, the Nile offers a broad, flat run of navigable water uninterrupted by rapids or falls for nearly 500 miles from its mouth to the First Cataract. The Nile also flows north, into the prevailing winds, so boats could drift or row downstream with the current and then sail back upstream, making round-trips easy. Early on, the Nile became the central highway of the Egyptian kingdom, and by the late third millennium BCE, the ships developed to exploit it ventured out into the Mediterranean to carry Egyptian trade up the coast of Palestine.
Meanwhile, small states along the coasts of Syria and Asia Minor, on Crete, and in Mycenaean Greece also ventured across the waters seeking commerce and wealth. Trade contacts meant political contacts, and Egyptian oared ships soon carried armies and their supplies as well as trade goods into Palestine. In this way, the basic conditions for naval warfare were already in place, for, at this early stage, a warship was simply a ship full of soldiers. Actual fighting was, as far as we know, still confined to land, not only for Egyptian armies but for the Mycenaeans whose warriors sailed their own ships to Asia Minor to besiege and sack the city of Troy. But that war, immortalized in Homer’s Iliad, reminds us of the close connection that had arisen by 1500 bce in ancient maritime activity between trading and raiding—a connection that would persist and was often determined by the preparedness of a coastal settlement to resist violence. It also presaged a time of troubles for eastern Mediterranean societies that led to the emergence of true naval warfare. Unidentified Sea Peoples raided widely throughout the area in the decades around 1200 bce, and a substantial contingent even entered the mouth of the Nile around 1190. A fleet of ships sent by Pharaoh Ramses III seems to have surprised them there, however, and, in ship-to-ship fighting, the invaders were slaughtered, a feat Ramses immortalized in a temple relief, the first known depiction in history of a naval battle. The age of naval warfare had arrived.
Tactics
By the time the disruptions begun around 1200 had settled down around 900, two new peoples and a crucial new technology had entered the picture. The peoples were the Greek heirs of the Mycenaeans (see also Chapter 3) and the Phoenicians of coastal Syria. Both lived in city-states, and their close maritime trade connections are indicated by the Greek adoption of a form of that then-unique Phoenician invention—the alphabet. Both made a living partly from trade, and both, when faced with population pressures in their home cities, turned to sea-borne colonization as a means of relieving that pressure and extending their mercantile connections. Greek settlements appeared all around the Aegean and into the Black Sea, as well as in southern Italy and France; Phoenician settlements spread along the coast of North Africa, most famously at Carthage, and into Iberia. The technology was the ram.
The galley, a long, narrow ship powered primarily by oars, had emerged as the main vessel of Mediterranean trade and warfare by the mid-second millennium BCE. Two types had already developed. Broader, heavier, and slower versions carried bulkier goods or large groups of people. Lighter, narrower, and thus faster versions tended to be used by raiders (whose warriors manned their own oars) and navies (who loaded a contingent of marines on ships with separate rowers). The lighter galleys were favored for military purposes because their speed enabled them to run down slower ships, whether merchant vessels or other warships, thus giving birth to both piracy and the possibility of blockading ports. But naval combat on such ships consisted exclusively of coming close enough to enemy craft to fire missiles at the opposing crews and, ultimately, to grapple and board the enemy ships. This was because such ships could not carry missile weapons large or accurate enough to do damage to the enemy ships themselves. (The only other way to sink an enemy ship would have been to burn it, and no safe and reliable system of projecting combustible material onto enemy decks yet existed.) In short, naval combat was land warfare aboard ships.
Rams, first used in the mid-ninth century BCE, introduced a radical new option. Now, the ship itself had become a weapon that could disable or even sinkan opposing vessel. But delivering the right sort of blow introduced new tactical imperatives. Rowing crews needed to be more highly trained, so as to be able to change speed and direction more rapidly, including being able to backwater and extricate the ship from its victim after ramming it. And they needed to be directed by experienced captains who could judge the speed and direction of their own and enemy ships accurately. This created the potential for some navies to gain a skill advantage, which, in turn, meant that divergent tactical traditions could develop, as less skilled navies had some incentive to continue to rely on the brute-force method of boarding. In addition to skill, the rams now put an even greater premium on speed and maneuverability, which led to further technological developments in the galleys themselves.
Technology
The obvious solution to the need for greater speed under oars, given that galley hulls were already narrow and streamlined, with length-to-beam ratios of as much as ten to one, was to add more rowers. Simply lengthening the hull and adding more rows of seats rapidly reached a practical limit, however. Longer light and narrow hulls became structurally weaker and thus more vulnerable to the effects of ramming, and beyond a certain length (about twenty- five rows of rowing benches) tended to hog, or sag at the ends and threaten to break in the middle, especially in any sort of rough seas. Adding more men per oar was certainly an option, and one that would be pursued later, but it seems to have been a secondary option at first because doing so necessitated widening the hull, thereby impairing its performance. (Putting more than two men on an oar also necessitates a completely different style of rowing, one that requires the oarsmen to stand at the start of each stroke and then fall back onto the bench, rather than remaining seated the whole time.) The solution that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean in the eighth century bce was to add a second tier or bank of rowers above the first. Galleys had relatively low freeboard (the amount of exposed hull between the waterline and the gunwale, or top of the hull); building up the sides enough to add a second bank of rowers proved relatively easy. The top row, after a period of experimentation, rowed over the raised gunwale, and the bottom row through portholes cut in the side.
Given more power behind them, rams evolved as well. At first fairly pointy, so as to maximize the chance of puncturing the target hull, rams became blunter and heavier. Not only did this sort of battering ram design allow for a crushing and perhaps extended blow that would spring more seams and do wider damage, it lessened the chance that the ramming ship would drive so deeply into its target as to impale it on the ram and be unable to withdraw, leaving it easy prey to other enemy ships. The bow end of ramming galleys was also now massively reinforced to withstand the impact of the collision.
The end result was a one- or two-tiered war galley carrying around fifty rowers (Greek, pentekonters, or “fiftyers”), a small crew, and a variable number of marines. No longer could just any galley serve as a warship with the addition of a contingent of soldiers. Instead, naval warfare was now the province of specialized warships that were both weapon and fighting platform. Variations on the oared ramming galley would dominate the Mediterranean until the 1580s and the advent of full-rigged sailing ships with masses of inexpensive cannon capable of firing massive broadsides.
Strategic and Economic
Implications The emergence of this sort of specialized warship had a number of strategic and economic implications for the prosecution of naval warfare. First, building and manning them required at least some concentration of economic and administrative resources. Pentekonters, the main fighting ship between about 800 and 500 bce, were still small and cheap enough to be affordable by almost any city-state with trade connections and a maritime infrastructure. However, developments that further raised the cost of individual ships (see below) ensured that naval power in the Mediterranean would become and remain closely tied to the demographic, fiscal-economic, and political strength of states. This is in contrast with some areas, such as the North Sea and south India, where significant naval activity arose in the context of weak or barely emergent states (see Chapter 10).
Second, oared-galley warships directly shaped the strategies of naval warfare. A large part of this stemmed from the logistics of galleys. Long, narrow, and stuffed with rowers and crew, they had limited cargo capacity even for necessities such as food and, above all for rowers in hot Mediterranean summers, water. Thus, galley fleets had extremely limited cruising ranges and had to put into shore almost every night when on campaign so the crewmen could find food and water. Galleys were light enough to be simply drawn up on a beach, but they were then vulnerable to attack by an enemy fleet or land force. Therefore, regularly projecting naval power to any distance from a fleet’s home required a series of safe ports within easy reach of one another. In other words, unlike the sailing ships of the seventeenth century and later, which could stay at sea for weeks at a time, galley fleets could not cruise open waters.
This meant that control of the sea in any modern sense was simply not possible. Ships could not be blockaded in port by an enemy fleet sitting offshore and occupying the sea-lanes. Even when galley fleets took part in the close siege of a port city, they had to be based on a nearby beach or port, which meant that fast enemy galleys stood a fair chance of running the blockade into or out of the besieged port. Even merchant sailing ships could sometimes evade the besiegers. In a larger sense beyond close sieges, naval dominance meant having a navy capable of successfully challenging the appearances of rival fleets, but not of effectively preventing them. Nor could galley fleets shut down merchant activity as effectively as later sailing ships could.
Indeed, naval operations throughout the age of galleys were essentially amphibious, combined-arms affairs entailing close cooperation between fleets and armies. Strategy focused of necessity on establishing and defending bases, especially major ports and key islands that dominated heavily traveled trade routes, and on attacking the bases of an enemy. Such bases allowed a state to use the sea-lanes to project military force and to defend its economic interests. Ultimately, the only way to control the seas was to control the lands surrounding them, thus depriving potential enemy fleets of any possible base of operations. We will see this strategy pursued several times with great success by states initially at a significant disadvantage in naval power.
The search for speed and power did not stop with two-tiered pentekonters. The next development in the naval architecture of specialized warships ushered in the first great age of naval warfare in history.