Greece’s Olympias offers taste of life in the galleys
ATHENS, Oct 17, (Agencies): For a NATO-member warship, Greece’s Olympias is pretty unusual. It’s got a zero carbon footprint, no whale-zapping sonar and an antiquated propulsion system.
The 37-meter (121-foot) wooden vessel moored off southern Athens is an experimental reconstruction of the trireme, the sleek ancient Greek warship that halted a Persian invasion of Europe and ruled the Mediterranean for centuries.
Every summer, visitors can get a whiff of life in the galleys 2,500 years ago by joining the crew of the Olympias – and work up a sweat rowing it.
The long, narrow ships carried two small sails, but propulsion was mostly provided by 170 oarsmen, seated in three rows below deck. Lower ranks got to smell the upper ones’ feet.
Visitors do all the rowing on the Olympias’ two-hourlong public trips, conducted near Salamis island where, in 480 BC, outnumbered Athenian triremes vanquished a Persian armada in one of the world’s most famous sea engagements.
A small navy contingent under Commander Nikos
Polychronakis handles the sails and gives commands and the beat. Originally, a flute-player would have provided the rhythm – ancient Greek navies didn’t use whips, and the oarsmen were free citizens.
Polychronakis said prospective rowers worry that they’re unfit, too old, or lack rowing skills. “None of this is so important,” he told The Associated Press. “We just aim to get people to know the trireme and have fun.”
For safety reasons, the 47-tonne replica’s sorties are accompanied by navy speedboats and a firefighting ship.
With a top speed of 9 knots, it’s armed with a bronze ram that could smash through the thin planking of enemy vessels. No substantial ancient wrecks have been found.
Triremes dominated Mediterranean naval warfare from the 5th century BC and were used until early Christian times.
In the 4th century BC, Greek states experimented with progressively bigger galleys with more than one person per oar, but never more than three banks.
One twin-hulled behemoth probably had up to eight men per oar. According to one ancient writer, it carried 4,000 oarsmen, 400 other sailors and 3,000 marines.
Ancient wrecks, pottery found:
Greece’s culture ministry says a Greek-US team has located traces of three more ancient shipwrecks with pottery cargoes, and two from later times, in a rich ships’ graveyard in the eastern Aegean Sea.
All were found last month off Fourni island and its surrounding islets, between the larger islands of Ikaria and Samos. The older ones date to the 4th and 2nd centuries BC and the 5th-6th centuries AD.
The find raises to 58 the number of wrecks located since 2015 around Fourni, a notoriously dangerous point on the ancient shipping route.
Egypt farmed fish over 3K years ago:
Egyptians practiced fish farming more than 3,500 years ago, the earliest evidence of such activity worldwide according to a joint German-Israeli study released on Tuesday.
Scientists studied 100 fish teeth found at archaeological sites across modern-day Israel to conclude they had been plucked from a lagoon in Egypt’s Sinai thousands of years ago.
“The sample of teeth covered a chronological period extending over 10,000 years, from the early Neolithic period through to the early Islamic period,” said a statement from Israel’s Haifa University, one of the participants in the study.
Of those samples, some were from about 3,500 years ago. Farmers at the time found a lagoon which fish were entering and barricaded it for a few months, Guy Bar-Oz, one of the authors of the report and archaeology professor at the University of Haifa.
Afterwards “you can easily harvest them,” the academic explained of a method still used in the same Sinai lagoon.
Find rewrites Vesuvius eruption date:
A newlydiscovered inscription at Pompeii proves the city was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius after Oct 17, 79 AD and not on Aug 24 as previously thought, archaeologists said Tuesday.
Archaeologists recently discovered that a worker had inscribed the date of “the 16th day before the calends of November”, meaning Oct 17, on a house at Pompeii, the head of archaeology at the site, Massimo Osanna, told Italian media.
Pompeii and Herculaneum were previously thought to have been destroyed by the massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius on Aug 24, based on contemporary writings and archaeological finds.
Nevertheless, evidence such as autumnal fruits on branches found in the ashen ruins had suggested a later date since the 19th century, Osanna said.
“Today, with much humility, perhaps we will rewrite the history books because we date the eruption to the second half of October,” said Italy’s Minister of Culture Alberto Bonisoli.
Norway discovers viking ship traces:
Archaeologists said on Monday they have found what they believe are traces of a viking ship buried in southeast Norway, a rare discovery that could shed light on the skilled navigators’ expeditions in the Middle Ages.
The boatlike shape was detected about 50 centimetres underground in a tumulus, a burial mound, with the use of a ground-penetrating radar in Halden, a municipality located southeast of Oslo.
“In the middle of the mound, we discovered what is called an anomaly, something that is different from the rest and clearly has the shapes and dimensions of a viking ship,” Knut Paasche, an archaeologist at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU), told AFP.
“What we cannot say for sure is the condition of the conservation. Yes there was a boat there, but it’s hard to say how much wood is left,” Paasche said.
The vikings, Northern European warriors and merchants who sailed the seas between the 8th and 11th century, would bury their kings and chiefs aboard a boat hoisted onshore and left under a mound of earth.