Water was the most efficient means of transportation and travel in the ancient Greek world. Evidence of the movement of commodities and people comes from a combination of literary, iconographical, and archaeological sources

Hirschfeld, Nicolle E

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Trinity University

Trinity UniversityDigital Commons @ TrinityClassical Studies Faculty Research Classical Studies Department2007Navigation and TransportationNicolle E. HirschfeldTrinity University, nhirschf@trinity.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/class_facultyPart of the Classics CommonsThis Contribution to Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Classical Studies Department at Digital Commons @ Trinity. It has beenaccepted for inclusion in Classical Studies Faculty Research by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Trinity. For more information,please contact jcostanz@trinity.edu.Repository CitationHirschfeld, N. (2007). Navigation and transportation. In T. J. Sienkewicz (Ed.), Ancient Greece (Vol. 2, pp. 583-586). Pasadena, CA:Salem Press.Navigation and TransportationWater was the most efficient means of transportation and travel in theancient Greek world. Evidence of the movement of commodities andpeople comes from a combination of literary, iconographical, andarchaeological sources.Date: 3000-31 b.c.e.Category: Daily life; science and technology; trade and commerceHardships of Travel The poet Hesiod, singing in the eighth centuryb.c.e., cautioned his brother against the perils of making a living by sailingthe seas. A man who ventured on the waves faced not only the dangers ofnatural elements—storms, contrary winds and currents, hidden shoals,harborless shorelines—but also the uncertainties of human encounters. Pi-rates infested the seas, and travelers who made it safely to foreign shoreshad to negotiate strange languages, currencies, and customs. Having ar-rived and eventually transacted business, travelers might be stranded on theforeign shore, waiting for the “safe” sailing season to resume. Merchantfleets and navies alike left the seas virtually empty between late Octoberand early May.Travel on land was also dangerous and difficult. Roads were not built un-til Roman times, and the routes between city-states were at best paths with asingle pair of ruts to guide wheeled vehicles. Most travelers walked or usedpack animals. The occasional encounter between two wheeled vehicleswould require one to back up or be laboriously moved off-track, in order toallow the other to pass. Oedipus’s violent encounter with his father on a ma-jor route from the important sanctuary of Delphi is perhaps the earliest attes-tation of “road rage,” when each refused to budge for the other. The myths ofthe civilizing hero Theseus in his encounters with various monsters on hisway to Athens reflect the constant danger of brigandage, even along well-traveled routes. As late as the nineteenth century, the intrepid archaeologistHeinrich Schliemann, excavator of Troy, was initially forced to call off hisexploration of Homer’s Mycenae because of attacks by highway robbers.583The difficulties of travel remained constant throughout the course of theClassical period, and most people rarely, if ever, left home. The one volun-tary journey that many might undertake would be a pilgrimage to one of thereligious festivals, such as the Olympic Games or the mysteries of Demeterat Eleusis, or a healing sanctuary, such as the famed center of Asclepius onCos.Costs and Efficiency of Transport These pilgrims—whose dailyexperience with architecture would have been small, dark buildings—surely stopped in their tracks in awe at the sight of the monumental stonetemples that served as the sanctuaries’ focal points. The building accountsfor some temples, inscribed in stone for public display, are still preserved.They are the primary sources for the logistics and costs of materials and la-bor involved in the building of civic monuments. Here one learns, for ex-ample, the number of oxen and weight limits per cartload of stone or tim-ber, as well as the time and cost per unit of distance traveled.It is much more efficient to haul bulk commodities in a ship than on thebacks of pack animals or the beds of wheeled vehicles, and the ancient ac-counts reflect that fact. Prices varied over time, place, and situation, but thegeneral rule of thumb was that land transport cost ten times more than ship-ment by sea. Much of the Classical Greek world was resource-poor, andtherefore most of her great cities were coastal, developed and supplied onthe strength of their merchant fleets and the navies that patrolled the sea-lanes.Ships Until World War II, reconstructions of Classical Greek ships werebased primarily on scattered references in literature and inscriptions andrepresentations on vases and coins, which are often schematized and thusdifficult to interpret. Today, shipwrecks provide a unique window into theancient world because they are the single example of an archaeological fea-ture that was deliberately assembled, was for contemporary use, and can becompletely excavated. Ancient shipwrecks consist primarily of their car-goes—the imperishable, heavy items that settle to the seabed.Amphoras, the standard shipping container for all cultures of the ancientMediterranean, mark most classical wrecks. These terracotta jars were de-signed specifically for stacking in the rounded cargo space of a ship’s hull.Because amphoras vary in the details of their features, archaeologists are584Navigation and Transportationable to use these jars to identify the origins and dates of shipwrecks. Am-phoras might carry a variety of commodities, though they were particularlyuseful in the transportation of wine and olive oil. Analysis of the numbersand varieties of amphoras on a shipwreck and their contents, labels, andstacking patterns provides much information about ancient trade: theroutes, stops along the way, and quantities and kinds of cargo taken on ateach stop. Other types of finds characteristic to ancient Greek shipwrecksare ceramic tablewares and stone sculpture and architectural elements. Theoccasional discovery of cargoes of ancient statuary are extremely signifi-cant, since most metal objects were melted down and recycled in antiquity.Almost every ancient Greek bronze sculpture on exhibit in any museumhas been recovered from the sea. Occasionally, amphoras or sandy seabedspreserve perishable items of cargo or some of a ship’s hull. The bits of re-covered hull have proven to be tremendously important to understandingancient technological expertise.Archaeologists do not expect to find warships. Classical warships weredesigned for speed and carried little weight other than the men who pow-ered them. Contrary to the Hollywood image, rowers were not chained totheir benches; they jumped off sinking ships. The empty wooden hullsfloated just below the surface until they were salvaged by the victors, or un-til they eventually became waterlogged and sank. Without cargo, there wasnothing to keep the hull from disintegrating. Only the bronze ram might befound on the seabed.Navigation Stars are important for navigating longitude—not a factorin the narrow confines of the Mediterranean. Ancient navigation manualswhich have survived indicate that ships steered their course by landmarks,sailing close to the shores. Recent discoveries of deepwater wrecks haveproven that more direct shipping lanes were regularly used by the Romans,but whether this applies also to the Greek period is as yet unknown.Further ReadingCasson, Lionel. Travel in the Ancient World. Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1994.Coates, J. F., J. S. Morrison, and N. B. Rankov. The Athenian Trireme: TheHistory and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship. 2d ed. NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2000.585Navigation and TransportationDelgado, James P., ed. Encyclopedia of Underwater and Maritime Archae-ology. Princeton, N.J.: Yale University Press, 1997.Korres, Manolis. The Stones of the Parthenon. Los Angeles: J. Paul GettyMuseum, 2000.Meijer, Fik, and Onno van Nijf. Trade, Transport and Society in the An-cient World: A Sourcebook. New York: Routledge, 1992.Nicolle HirschfeldSee also: Trade, Commerce, and Colonization; Trireme; Warfare BeforeAlexander; Warfare Following Alexander.586Navigation and Transportation

Navigation and Transportation

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