Hellenistic-era warship

[John W Davison]

Apologies if this has been picked up elsewhere but I couldn't see it on the site....

Today's Guardian has an article about excavation in Egypt, the lead headline majoring on the preserved ancient fruit, but of more relevance to this site is the fact that nearby a Hellenistic-era warship was located:

Fruit baskets from fourth century BC found in ruins of Thonis-Heracleion | Archaeology | The Guardian

Not a huge amount of detail on the Guardian but a quick search located this recent article:

 Archaeologists find ancient Egyptian warship sunk near Alexandria | Ars Technica

From the brief details here, the vessel seems to be optimised for river and coastal use with a flat bottom, so perhaps closer to the ships of the Rhine fleet rather that the sea-going Marsala warship.

John

[Praefectusclassis]

Yeah, I saw a discussion about that ship on Twitter. It's interesting, but not entirely clear why they classify it as a warship, other than the length-width proportion. There doesn't seem to be a keel, so ramming is not an option. We'll have to await more information.

[John W Davison]

A really exciting possibility (and I think it is unlikely to be the case here) would be preservation of any evidence of the arrangement of multi-level seating as the Marsala ship does not have this I think, so the 3-tier arrangement that is generally assumed for triremes and quinqueremes remains unsupported by any actual discovery of a bona fide bit of wood anywhere!

At 25m, this seems to be around the size of the Mainz ships rather than something bigger.  I think a trireme is usually reconstructed as having length in the range 35-40m (circa 30 sets of 6 rowers at circa 1m per set plus length of stern and bow), so much bigger than this one and sadly this is unlikely to be a great leap forward in terms of evidence for configuration of the rowers.

John

[Praefectusclassis]

No, that seems unlikely indeed. As I said: no keel apparently, so no ram, so no 'classic' war galley. Sad trombone...