We cannot ascertain when Man ventured in the open sea; this question will never be plausibly answered. The great navigator and pioneer in nautical experimental archeology, Thor Heyerdahl rightly said that: “Man learned to use a paddle and a sail well before he rode on an animal back and made a saddle”. Man’s venture on […]

The sources for our understanding of the ancient ship For the Paleolithic and Mesolithic there are no written sources or representations of water-crafts, nor do we have any archaeological finds that can help us understand the type of crafts used and the methods of construction of our ancestors. We only rely on learned guessing and […]

With the spreading of the use of bronze tools the shipwrights kept improving their techniques and performance and the evolution of ship-construction culminated with the Cycladic, Minoan and Mycenaean surprising planked vessels that date from the 16th to the 12th century B.C. The earliest representation of Early Bronze Age vessel date from the 3rd millennium […]

The Polyremes of the Geometric period From the Geometric, and the archaic periods some superb examples of vase painting with representations of beautiful sleek ships have been preserved. This is the period of the development of the longship which is pictures with a mpaddingultitude of oars and sometime with more than a bank of oarsmen. […]

The Athenian Trireme (Triere) and the Athenian hegemony When we think of polyremes, warships with more than a bank of oars, the triere, the most famous of these vessels, comes to our mind. The superiority of this Athenian ship — that was developed in Corinth, with three banks of oars — is confirmed in more […]

The Hellenistic Age spreads from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to 30 B.C. the year of the death of the last of the Ptolemies, Cleopatra VII, (some historians however consider that the Hellenistic World in the East continues up to the third, even the fourth century A.D. until to the end […]