Mycenaean War Galley by Woodrat - FINISHED - 1:48 - Shell first Plank on Frame

[woodrat]

Shown is the reconstructed (imagined) steering mechanism. At this stage of evolution only one steering oar would be present.

It was later in the Iron Age that steering oars would appear on both quarters. As it was a requirement that the steering oar have the capacity to be rapidly rotated into a horizontal position during beaching, there must have been a mechanism whereby the steering can be released rapidly from its upright and pulled into a horizontal position by an up haul. I have shown a possible mechanism whereby this could be done.

Dick

 

Edited July 23, 2023 by woodrat

[woodrat]

I have never been happy with the figurehead which appeared cartoonish. So I have gone back the original potterry images and found this excellent image of the tragana ship

The figurehead I couldnt recognise until I suddenly realised that it was in fact a stylised crocodile head with projecting teeth.. I also have done some nose art using an image of a minoan octopus which was much copied by the mycenaeans

The octopus would be an appropriate animal for a ship of Poseidon

So the latest figurhead is much more threatening. The crocodile would be familiar to mycenaeans who regularly traded with Egypt.

Cheeers

Dick

[Louie da fly]

That looks much better, Dick. Very threatening. But I do wonder whether the occy shouldn't be facing the other way, as that's the direction the ship is travelling. Or are the tentacles facing forward, all the better to deal with the enemy?

 

Steven

[Thukydides]

I really like the new figurehead

[woodrat]

Thanks, Steven and Thukydides. The occy is tentacles forward in attack mode so as to intimidate the villagers as the ship roars in. The croc adds to the menace. The mycenaeans were generally not all that nice. They were,after all, pirates.

Dick

[woodrat]

I am really not happy with the octopus. There is no iconographic evidence for its use on galleys or any other ship, so it is gone. I have gone instead for a more austere look. I am happy with the figurehead. Prof Wachsmann has published his thesis that these figureheads reprsent birds' heads and that may be so in most cases but in the case of the Tragana ship the backward curved protuberances on the "beak" resemble no bird I know but would be consistent with a crocodile.

Dick

[Boccherini]

The octopus gave it the look of a sea going food truck. Not very piratical.

 

Regards,

Grant

[Louie da fly]

I think you're right in removing the occy, Dick. It did seem out of place.

 

Steven

[woodrat]

5 hours ago, Boccherini said:

The octopus gave it the look of a sea going food truck. Not very piratical.

 

Too cruel! But true🐙

Dick

[Boccherini]

Dick,

I should've put a "😀" after "van". My apologies if you interpreted my light hearted comment as criticism. It was not intended as such.

 

Regards,

Grant.

[woodrat]

Not at all Grant. I took it in a humorous vein and replied in a jocular fashion. I thought your comment was most apt.

Cheers

Dick 😁

[Ahmose]

On 11/26/2022 at 11:25 PM, woodrat said:

Thanks Ian, Chuck and Steven for your comments and support. I will of course discuss some of the antecedents of mycenaean craft as follows

1.     The Iconography

 

 

Most of the images I will use will come from pottery shards which are confidently dated to the Late Bronze age. Some pottery from the Geometric period will be cautiously referenced. I will not refer to evidence from the Middle Bronze Age as the nature of shipping was markedly different then as evidenced by the remarkable wall frescoes from the minoan island of Thera.

These vessels were crescentic and symmetrical in hull shape and propelled either by paddles or oars and with a mast with a square, boom-footed sail very much as seen in Egyptian and syro-canaanite ships of the era.

There are similarities with the Dahshur boats and the Royal Ship of Khufu but the mycenaean war galley had little in common with these vessels of an earlier era

While I am on the subject, I intend to use the Egyptian evidence sparingly. Also, some will note my lack of reference to Landstrom’s books (which I Iove looking at) because I think his reconstructions may influence me too much.

Many of you will be aware of the Late Bronze Age bas-reliefs carved and painted onto the walls of the mortuary temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu. These depict in graphic detail a battle between the maritime war vessels of Ramses III and a fleet of foreign peoples known as the Sea-Peoples. Much has been made of the Sea-Peoples as a possible cause of the Late Bronze Age Collapse but there is only peripheral evidence for this and the present consensus is that they were an indication of major population shifts in the Mediterranean basin and were one of a number of factors such as climate change, famine, earthquakes and war which created a “perfect storm” and led to the demise of the Myceneans, the Kassites, the Hittites, Mitanni and nearly the Egyptian civilisations of the early twelfth century. For a very readable and logical account of our knowledge of this collapse, may I recommend Eric Cline’s book 1177: The Year Civilization Collapsed. There are also some YouTube clips by him which are useful.
 

 

The ships represented at Medinet Habu have similarities to the mycenaean war-galley and indeed some have included the Mycenaeans in the Sea-Peoples but this is controversial (the list of Sea-Peoples includes the denyen = ?the Danaans of the Iliad).

 

(stop press: the discovery has been announced of the worlds largest ancient shipyard in 2023 on the island of Dana, located off the coast of Mersin province in the Mediterranean region by turkish archaeologists from Selçuk University . This has led to the possibility that the Denyen (danaans) of Sea-peoples fame may originate from this area.)

https://arkeonews.net/underwater-archaeologists-discovered-worlds-largest-and-oldest-ancient-shipyard-on-dana-island-turkiye/

 

The Sea-Peoples ships are rowed, have a crescentic hull, fore and stern-castles and bird heads on both the prow and stern facing outward

 

 

Some speculative reconstructions have been made of the Sea-Peoples ships based on these bas-reliefs but caution is required. The carvings were done by royal Egyptian artists and have doubtless been influenced by the artistic conventions required of them and inevitably some inaccuracies in scale, number of rowers and structure may have occurred. Nonetheless, these images are a very useful first step in resurrecting the mycenaean war galley to which they have some resemblance. Please see Shelley Wachsmann’s excellent monograph for a full discussion of the Medinet Habu reliefs.

The distribution of corpses about the overturned ships give some indication of the nature of the ships’ superstructure

 

 

The next section will discuss the Late Helladic pottery shards and clay models

 

Here is a limited bibliography:

Shelley Wachsman: Seagoing Ships &Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant. Texas A&M. 1998

Lionel Casson: Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World. Princeton University Press. 1971

Paul Johnstone: The Seacraft of Prehistory. Routledge Kegan and Paul. 1980

J R Steffy: Wooden Ship-building and the Interpretation of Shipwrecks. College Station. 1994

John Morrison (ed.): The Age of the Galley. Conway’s History of the Ship. 1995

Basil Greenhill: Archaeology of the Boat. London. 1976

 

Dick

I wonder why Wachsmann insists that the sea peoples' ships depicted at Medinet Habu are galleys, considering that oars are never seen, only side rudders are present, unlike the Egyptian warships in the same relief which are all oared.

On 12/22/2022 at 6:33 AM, woodrat said:

Clay Models:

 

To be honest, I did not find the contemporary clay models from Greece, Cyprus and elsewhere very helpful. In fact they were confusing in their variety. Some were rockered and some were flat bottomed. All were crudely hand-made.

Late Helladic Athens ( from Wachsmann) ( from Wachsmann)

Late Helladic Tyrins ( modified from Wachsmann)

Late Helladic Kynos ( from Wachsmann)

Late Helladic Argos ( from Wachsmann)

However, of note are the models from Kynos and Argos which show, in addition an idea of the cross sections and also the lack of a true keel protruding outside the ship. This strongly suggests to me that in all likeliehood, they had keel planks to which the garboard strakes would have been fixed. Also the keel plank ( width greater than depth) would have protruded internally as in the Uluburun Late Helladic merchant vessel

 

 

So, I am happy to proceed on the premise that at least some Late Helladic war-galleys could have been constructed with keel planks.

Cheers

Dick

 

The Uluburun ship probably wasn't a helladic vessel. Most of the cargo originated from the Levant and Cyprus, the wood used was cedar wood, typical of the Levant and Cyprus, not of Greece, plus even the jawbone of a mouse found on board was that of a species typical of Syria, the Mycenaean objects on board were only a small minority of the total. All these clues combined together hint at the ship having been Levantine. Of course a few Mycenaean passengers might've been on board, it's not impossible, but most of the crew was probably Levantine, as well as the shipwright who built it.

Edited February 11 by Ahmose

[woodrat]

Ahmose welcome to the discussion. You are quite right about the Medinet Habu reliefs. The sea peoples vessels are clearly sail powered and can't be called galleys although auxiliary oar power may have been available. I also accept that much or even most late bronze age sea commerce was syro-canaanite. The vessel I built however is a piratic coasting galley with auxiliary sail power. I would value your thoughts on this putative reconstruction. 

Cheers

Dick

Edited February 12 by woodrat

[Ahmose]

On 2/12/2025 at 12:16 AM, woodrat said:

Ahmose welcome to the discussion. You are quite right about the Medinet Habu reliefs. The sea peoples vessels are clearly sail powered and can't be called galleys although auxiliary oar power may have been available. I also accept that much or even most late bronze age sea commerce was syro-canaanite. The vessel I built however is a piratic coasting galley with auxiliary sail power. I would value your thoughts on this putative reconstruction. 

Cheers

Dick

Congratulations on your model, it looks quite believable and that new figurehead is beautiful. Unfortunately the few Late Helladic depictions of ships that we have are all very poorly detailed, but to be frank there are even fewer depictions of Levantine ships from that time, if it weren't for the Egyptians we'd be almost clueless about the Eastern Mediterranean ships of the period, with only a part of the Uuburun ship's hull to go by, so of course in making a model of a Bronze Age ship there's always a great degree of speculation.
One thing that seems evident to me is that sewn-plank construction was very widespread, ethnographically it's been observed almost all over the world. In the Bronze Age specifically it's attested not only in Egypt, but also in the Zambratija shipwreck off the coast of Croatia, and in Britain at several sites. So, pretty much, in all known Bronze Age sites where significant remains of boats have been found, excluding the Uluburun ship, or, of course, log boats.
Even almost 7 centuries after the Bronze Age collapse, the two archaic shipwrecks from Marseille known as Jules-Verne 7 and 9, were still basically sewn ships, even if tenons and dowels were present. The same applies to the Cala Sant Vicenc¸ wreck, which is also thought to have been built in Marseille.
Even the Mazarrón I boat, discovered off the coast of South Eastern Spain, while Phoenician (although likely built in the Western Mediterranean), dispays sewn seams, in addition to pegged mortise-and-tenon joints.

As for Late Bronze Age commerce, I was talking about the Uluburun shipwreck specifically, but I'm personally of the idea that the Mycenaeans had a huge role in the commerce of the time, especially in that between the Western-Central Mediterranean and the Eastern Mediterranean. In fact, while Adriatic Italy, South Italy, Sardinia and Sicily yielded a lot of Mycenaean materials, only a small quantity of Bronze Age Canaanite vases has been found in these places. I am convinced that before the Early Iron Age the Canaanites didn't have a significant role in the West, if they visited it before then, they did so only sporadically. 
The only "Levantines", if they can be described as such, to have had a significant role in the Western Mediterranean back then, in my opinion, were the Cypriots. Not only for the influence of their metallurgy on the West, or for the great quantity of Cypriot oxhide ingots found in Sardinia (greater than anywhere else, excluding the shipwrecks themselves), but also for the fact that their pottery is also found in significant quantities in the West, albeit not nearly as much as the Mycenaean pottery is. Not only that, but Cypro-Minoan signs have been found etched in the Canaanite amphorae discovered at Cannatello in Sicily.

Another opinion that I hold is that some of the natives of the Western Mediterranean were also sailing during the Late Bronze Age. Certainly, they were sailing along the short-medium range regional trade networks, which had more or less existed since the Neolithic. The natives of Sicily not only had colonized far off islands such as Lampedusa, the Maltese archipelago, Pantelleria, or Ustica, but they had fortified the latter three too during the Bronze Age.

Another Western group that seems to have been significantly active during the Late Bronze Age were the Nuragic Sardinians, lately their pottery has come up in a considerable number of sites, as far as Ugarit. In one of them, the aforementioned site of Canatello in Sicily, Nuragic pottery has been found in great numbers, greater than those of any other kind of pottery except for the native Sicilian type, and significantly it's both imported pottery and locally made with typical Nuragic shapes and techniques, which suggests that a group of Sardinians lived there for some time.

There's also undeniable evidence that the inhabitants of the Italian Peninsula traveled to the Eastern Mediterranean. Handmade pottery with typical Peninsular Italian shapes has been found at several sites in the Aegean, such as Chania in Crete, and as far as Tell Kazel in Syria. Note that we're talking about locally made pottery, implying the presence of "Italian" crafstmen in the Eastern Mediterranean. Whether they made the trip in their own vessels or in Aegean ones is however not possible to say with certainty.

Edited February 17 by Ahmose

[woodrat]

Thanks, Ahmose.

Apart from logboats with side extensions, the only survivong example of sewn construction remain the egyptian boats such as the Khufu barge , Dashur boats etc. Itw ould be interesting experimental archaeology to attempt a sewn bronze age levantine hull 

but I will leave this to someone like you. You may be interested in the model by Sceatha of an egyptian "Byblos" ship:

https://modelshipworld.com/topic/23895-byblos-ship-by-sceatha-finished-25th-century-bc/

I have included some sewn elements in my mycenaean galley including a detachable stern piece a la Khufu barge.

Cheers

Dick

Edited February 14 by woodrat

[Ahmose]

4 hours ago, woodrat said:

Thanks, Ahmose.

Apart from logboats with side extensions, the only survivong example of sewn construction remain the egyptian boats such as the Khufu barge , Dashur boats etc. Itw ould be interesting experimental archaeology to attempt a sewn bronze age levantine hull 

but I will leave this to someone like you. You may be interested in the model by Sceatha of an egyptian "Byblos" ship:

https://modelshipworld.com/topic/23895-byblos-ship-by-sceatha-finished-25th-century-bc/

I have included some sewn elements in my mycenaean galley including a detachable stern piece a la Khufu barge.

Cheers

Dick

Well, there are several surviving examples of Bronze age fully-sewn ships outside of Egypt: The Ferriby boats from Yorkshire; the Dover boat, which is really impressive;  the Zambratija shipwreck in Croatia; also wooden planks belonging to sewn boats which however aren't as well preserved have been found at Goldcliff and Caldicot. There's also the Brigg "raft", which dates from the very beginning of the Iron Age. It is considered to have been a shallow boat with a flat bottom rather than a raft, despite its name.

The Novilara stele you posted is more recent than all of the boats I've mentioned, dating roughly to the late 7th or early 6th century BC, and it depicts an Adriatic ship belonging to the Piceni in all likelihood. Like the Bronze Age Zambratija ship, if I had to guess, the Novilara ships would've also been sewn-plank boats, after all, sewn-planks boats were still built in the Adriatic well into the Roman period, see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331018044_Ancient_Mediterranean_Sewn-Boat_Traditions

A full-scale replica of a Novilar ship has already been made:

https://www.veniceboats.com/it-forum-novilara.htm

[woodrat]

Ahmose, thanks for that. Have you done any models yourself?

Dick

[Ahmose]

22 minutes ago, woodrat said:

Ahmose, thanks for that. Have you done any models yourself?

Dick

No, I haven't made any model yet, I just like nautical history/archaeology.

[woodrat]

On 2/14/2025 at 10:11 PM, Ahmose said:

No, I haven't made any model yet, I just like nautical history/archaeology.

Never mind, Ahmose. We are a very inclusive mob here at MSW and are happy to talk even to non-modellers. With your breadth of knowledge you can keep us from egregious errors😁

Dick

[Louie da fly]

Just came across this on Facebook. Further evidence to support Woodrat's interpretation!

 

Steven

[woodrat]

Thanks, Steven. This tends to confirm that there was some sort of deck in these vessels, they were shallow draft and were indeed sailed.

Dick

[J11]

@woodrat outstanding work! Definitely a museum piece! 

 

[woodrat]

10 hours ago, J11 said:

Definitely a museum piece! 

Thanks J11, most kind. But I don't think so as it breaks too many academic preconceptions .

Cheers Dick