Seafaring on the Ancient Mediterranean: New Thoughts on Triremes and Other Ancient Ships

Ancient seafaring and especially our fascination with the trireme have fuelled many vooks and debates, many of which are revisited and critiqued here. Alec Tilley takes his lead from the evidence itself, whether depictions on pottery or stone, or literary references, and seeks some semblance of objectivity in a field of research that, he argues, frequently indulges itself in the subjectivity of the evidence. Critiquing previous interpretations of the iconography of seafaring, he looks again at some of the iconography of of the trireme and other warships, discusses the orthodoc trireme debate and especially the Olympias , a recent reconstruction of an Athenian trireme. Along the way he argues that the number in the name of ancient oared ship refered to the number of files of oarsmen, highlighting the fact that many of the ancient artists who depicted ships were knowledgeable about the subject they portrayed, presents thoughts on the development of sailing and draws a series of distinctions between different types of vessels, and reviews the corpus of evidence for seafaring from pre-trireme days to the Phoenicians.