Posted on 10/19/2018 11:33:55 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Oar-driven ships could be propelled by slaves or free sailors - it varied quite a bit from time to time, and one culture to another.
The ships themselves varied quite a bit also, from sleek warships to more tub-like or barge-like cargo ships. Most of the larger ships would have sails as well.
Greek triremes, like those of the Athenian fleet, were the racehorses of ancient maritime vessels. They were crewed by free men - well trained sailors who were like rowing athletes. Design features were considered State secrets, and it was a death penalty to reveal them. Athens specialized in nautical expertise, like Sparta specialized in land combat. Every earlier ship design would be slower.
I think that your estimate of 4-5 knots under oar, in good conditions, is a good estimate for typical high end (like Navy) vessels over the preceding thousand years.
“Did the Israelites have slave galleys?”
Ancient coastal cities in Lebanon like Byblos (modern day Jibayl), which has been continuously occupied for 7,000 years; and Tyre, just 15 miles from the current Israeli border; were the very heartland of Phoenician civilization - the greatest shipbuilders of late Bronze Age.
So the ancient Israelis would have easy access to the technology, but I have no idea if they made much use of them or not. The Phoenicians kind of ruled the seas. 1,200 to 800 BC were the high point of Phoenician power and influence, conventionally associated with the reigns of King David and King Solomon (his son). The Phoenician heartland was finally conquered by Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 B.C., who also conquered Babylon, releasing the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity, and funded the reconstruction of the temple in Jerusalem.
About 80 years after the Persian Empire reached the Mediterranean, the Athenian Greeks defeated Xerxes, the grandson of Cyrus the Great, at the epic naval battle of Salamis (480 BC - the same major conflict that made famous the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae), establishing Greek Naval dominance in the region for centuries to come. The Greeks had been a naval power since the decline of Phoenicia, but were the naval super-power after Salamis.
The last major City-State of the Phoenician culture, Carthage, was finally conquered by Rome in 146 BC.
Ancient Israel almost certainly would have been well served by Phoenician trade vessels. The Port of Haifa itself was part of Phoenicia.
So maritime trade in the Mediterranean was dominated first by the Phoenicians, then by the Greeks, and then by the Romans. Israel was never a Naval power. The Romans effectively crushed Israel as an independent kingdom around 70 AD, destroying the Temple in Jerusalem, and forcibly dispersing chunks of the population around their empire, as far away as Spain.
“I was questioning the logistics since long distance sailing is something I know a bit about”
A logistical consideration is that most of the Red Sea maritime trade could stay in sight of the coast, and pull in to shore anytime for shelter, rest or replenishment. A worst case straight shot across the widest point is 220 miles. In the Northern or Southern extremes, it is more like 10-20 miles across.
Additionally, all those dates are wrong, and there was no longterm kingdom of Saba -- it's a modern myth invented to solve a couple of artificially created questions.
The Periplus of Hanno -- voyage of exploration and colonization along western Africa -- recorded in ancient Carthage describes Mount Cameroon in eruption, and was displayed alongside a gorilla skin. The ancient maritime peoples were maritime peoples precisely because they were good at what they did.
“all those dates are wrong”
What dates?
I think one day that Velikovsky will rank with Copernicus. His reconstruction of Egyptian history makes it all come alive. Should I mention that he makes most Egyptologists look like idiots. Kind of like us Conservatives and the Liberal Left...
Well, not quite all, but in your message, which you posted, #39 -- there was no 1200 BC collapse, no "Sea Peoples" in 1200 BC, no 1177 BC collapse for that matter, and the Hyksos weren't overthrown until the time of King Saul of Israel. Hugging the seacoasts was not a navigational technique in ancient times.
Well said.
“there was no 1200 BC collapse, no “Sea Peoples” in 1200 BC, no 1177 BC collapse”
“1200 BC” is simply a rounding - “Circa” 1200 BC, if you like.
The term “Sea Peoples” may be a modern term for a collection of peoples (Ekwesh, Teresh, Sherden, the Sheklesh, Lukka, Tursha and Akawasha) who attacked and destroyed many of the cities/societies of the region - but the term not being contemporaneous is very different from them not existing.
Starting about a hundred years before 1177 BC, three great pharaohs recorded their conflicts and victories over the “Sea Peoples” - Ramesses II (The Great, 1279-1213 BCE), his son and successor Merenptah (1213-1203 BCE), and Ramesses III (1186-1155 BCE). All three claimed great victories over their adversaries and their inscriptions provide the most detailed evidence of the Sea Peoples - including on prime real estate in Karnak, and on Pharaonic funerary steles.
“Circa” 1200 BC the Hittite State was destroyed, and cities in the region continued to be overrun and laid waste by this coalition, until their culminating defeat by Ramses III in a naval battle off of the city of Xois in 1178 BCE - which left the Egyptian treasury depleted, unable to pay their workers, and their traditional regional trading partners in ruins and political chaos.
The next year, 1177 BC, began a generations-long period of relative isolation and low trade levels around the Eastern Mediterranean, until societies and economies rebuilt themselves.
The "Sea Peoples" were non-existent, in that they have left behind no distinctive weapons, graves, written language, forts, towns or other construction, and most oddly, no shipwrecks. Anywhere. Regurgitating erroneous dates from wikipedia etc is meaningless.
Dr. Velikovsky points out (p. 35) that "in the hieroglyphic texts of the Persian era... Persia is always called P-r-s" and that in the Canopus Decree, cut in stone, in 238 B.C., the Persians are referred to as P-r-s-tt. (There were no vowels in the alphabet.) The Canopus Decree is written both in Egyptian and in Greek. In Egyptian it describes the carrying off of the sacred images of Egypt by the Pereset and in Greek it tells of them being carried off by the Persians. But Dr. Velikovsky did not limit his identification of the Pereset as Persians to this evidence, although it would have been enough for a less careful and exacting scholar. In addition, he compares the clothing, armaments and appearances of the Persian soldiers and officers, as they are depicted in the bas reliefs in Persepolis and Nakhsh-i-Rustam, with those of the Pereset as depicted in the murals of the temple at Habinet Habu. The striking similarities are unmistakable. Finally, Dr. Velikovsky compares, step by step, the events described in annals left by Ramses III of his war with the Pereset and the Peoples of the Sea, with the descriptions by Diodorus of Sicily of the details of the war of Nectanebo I against the Persians and the Greek mercenaries. This comparison is made in such meticulous detail that the only logical conclusions are that both were describing the same war; that the Pereset and the Persians were the same people and that Ramses III was the Pharaoh whom the Greeks called "Nectanebo I." Incidentally, Dr. Velikovsky, quoting E. Wallis Budge, The Book of Kings (London 1908) Vol. II p. I, points out that one of the "Horus names" of Ramses III was Nectanebo (Nekht-a-neb).
Letter to the Editor of the New York Times Book Review by E. R. Langenbac, May 2, 1977
“Hyksos weren’t overthrown until the time of King Saul of Israel”
I did not say otherwise. I said:
“Egypt had a standing navy during the 17th and 18th Dynasties (Hatshepsut reigned during the 18th), AS DEMONSTRATED BY The Siege of Avaris in the Nile delta, against the Hyksos”
The record of that battle documented that they had an organized Navy at that time, with sea-worthy ships (as opposed to strictly river ships). It was about establishing the nautical technology/capability that was available to the Egyptian State during the 18th Dynasty. That they were capable of navigating the Red Sea was the point, not that they had eradicated Hyksosism from the face of the Earth at that time.
“Hugging the seacoasts was not a navigational technique in ancient times.”
Hugging the seacoast was a navigational technique at all times. Keeping sight of the shore is the most basic navigational technique of all.
OF COUIRSE you said otherwise, because you gave the dates to the fall of the Hyksos used in the conventional pseudochronology. If you didn't want the Hyksos discussed, you should not have brought them up!
Shore-hugging results in ship contact with shoals, iow shipwrecks, so, no.
“Dr. Velikovsky”
The same Russian psychiatrist who asserted (in his “Worlds in Collision”) that around 3,500 years ago the planet Venus was somehow ejected from the planet Jupiter as a comet. That Comet Venus then started wandering through the solar system, its gravitational field pushing other planets out of their orbits, changing their rotation, causing the Earth to rock on its axis, stopping and starting its rotation. Then in the eighth century B.C., the Venus comet pushed Mars out of its proper orbit and into a close encounter with Earth, which caused earthquakes to shake the world, and shortened the year so that ancient astrologers were forced to develop a new calendar.
That Velikovsky?
“Shore-hugging results in ship contact with shoals, iow shipwrecks, so, no.”
If you are running at 20 knots with a diesel engine, or thrown forcefully by a storm, running into a submerged rock is likely to wreck a ship.
If you are rowing at 3 or 4 knots, it is not.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, it did wreck them. That's why so many are piled up in just a few places, near the shores, where jagged rocks lurk just beneath the surface. Get serious.
Obviously. He got interested in that due to running into catastrophes as he researched the ancient chronologies. While there is evidence for catastrophes, lots of things can cause them, including impacts from space (which are observed, observable, and well documented ) and I'm much more interested in his reconstruction of ancient chronology, which is also directly based on ancient sources and archaeology. The Old Testament is a major chronological document bridging Egypt and the Middle East events; the need to undermine the Divine Right of Kings led to a bunch of lawyers founding a society of geology, part of a long and still ongoing campaign to debunk everything in the Bible.
Ages in ChaosAddudani (also spelled Addadani) of the el-Amarna letters is called in the Scriptures Adna. But the inscriptions of Shamshi-Ramman, who became the Assyrian king after Shalmaneser in -825, contains a reference to a gift he received from Ada-danu, prince of Gaza (Azati). The 'son of Zuchru' of the el-Amarna letters is called the 'son of Zichri' in the Bible. Iahazibada of the el-Amarna letters is Iehozabad (Jehozabad) in the Scriptures... In the scriptural list of the five chiefs of Jehoshaphat, only one is called by the name of his father: Amaziah, son of Zichri... Zichri of the (Massorete) Bible is Zuchru of the el-Amarna letters, Amaziah, the son of Zichri, is the 'son of Zuchru,' the captain who wrote to the pharaoh on matters relating to the security of his district.
by Immanuel Velikovsky
1952
some topics related to anciient chronology problems, sorted:
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