"Galleys In the Iliad" Topic

Hey:

I am intrigued with the Hittite empire, and I know that it is contemporaneous with the time of the Iliad – GREAT book!!! However, in the Iliad they talk about the "hollow" ships, the "black" ships, and once in a while the ships with "rows" to ?sit on?. Can you all learned war-gamers tell me what the difference was? How many by your guess – or can you conjecture, as no one in our time can positively know – warriors would have been in each?

Reading on the Hittite Empire, they may have been going to the rescue of Troy, but did not make it.

Swab Jockey

I know each ship was supposed to hold 50 or so fighters, but don't know about crew.

The main difference between "hollow" and "black" ships was how Homer could get the line to scan as he was chanting it.

Please do not expect ancient texts to satisfy every wargamer's "need to classify".

BTW, where did you get the idea that the Iliad and the Hittite Empire were "conttemporaneous"?
The Iliad was written several hundred years after the events it purports to describe. By then the Hittites were a barely remembered… thingie.

Almost every expert agrees that the Iliad described warfare as the Poet understood it in his times.

But that does not negate its divine inspiration nor that it is literally true in every line.

Most sources I've read refer to the ships of this era as pentakonters (50 oars) or ships of 30 oars. Therefore 1000 ships = 50,000 men.
Although the poet related the story 400 years after the battle there are some interesting facts. He described the location of the city, because Schliemann found it. The boars tusk helmets that Homer describes have never been found in his time, but several have been found in the era of the Iliad.

I am of the belief that Homer was a lot closer to the time than the "experts" in academia would have us believe.

All of the Mycenean ages are dated based upon Egyptian timelines, but no one has ever convincingly shown that the Egyptian timelines were accurate.

You folks can (and I know many will) roll your eyes when I mention Velikovsky. I don't buy his "Worlds in Collision" argument/thesis, but he seems to have some pretty doggone good arguments that the Egyptian timeline was conflated by 500 extra years.

If you take those away, it moves all of the Trojan War period 500 years closer to us, and makes it pretty clear how Homer could so accurately describe the events, persons, etc, from an age that many argue was 5 centuries before his time.

His arguments, presented under the title "The Dark Age of Greece" are worth at least your time to read and consider. I found them to be fascinating.

varchive.org/dag/index.htm

"hollow" "black" – poetic adjectives…..

I am pretty sur that Swab Jockey is saying that the events of Illiad were contemporaneous with the Hittite Empire, not Homer's composition.

I agree that black ships, hollow ships, etc are poetic descriptions, not neccessarilly differerent types of ships. The count of fifty warriors per ship is mentioned a couple of time.

TKkindard has some interesting comments here,I too believe that Homer wrote his poem closer to the actual events than previous believed!

For what it's worth, in the catalogue of ships in Iliad 2, the number of crew are specified twice: at lines 509-10 there are 120 men in each of fifty Boeotian ships; at 719-20 Philoctetes' (seven) ships have 50 men each.

Thucydides clearly read the catalogue carefully, and (in 1.10) took these numbers to indicate the largest and smallest ships respectively, and that the average was somewhere in between. He also inferred that the crews were basically all fighting men as well as rowers. (He rounds up the total number of ships to 1200, from a total of 1186).

Most modern scholars assume that the fifty figure was more typical, on the basis that penteconters were common later, and that the Boeotian bit of the catalogue is exceptional in other ways too. But who knows? There is worse company to be in than Thucydides', if you want a bit more variety in your ships and crew sizes.

Hey Guys;

Thanks, but it seems that most of the responders don't have a clue, as I don't have, but I am willing so say so. I have read many books on the Hittites, and indeed they are VERY contemporaneous with Ilios. But, I think you are confirmed in your beliefs, so be it. I just wanted to know the difference in the types of galleys. I want to war game it, but I think that it is encapsulated in the anachronistic feelings of the 21st century that ya'll have.

Adios

Well, we answered the question you asked as well as we could.

We can tell you what Homer said, we can tell you what Thucidides said about what Homer said, we can even tell you what modern scholars think of both of those sources.

We are all perfectly willing to say that we don't know for sure and that probably no-one else does either.

Now if you are really interested in which set of rules and what miniatures to use for gaming something approximating naval warfare of the period, by all means start a new thread and ask that question.

But don't be too upset with us when we tell you that the "black ships", the "hollow sips", and the "ships with rows to sit on" are probably all the same ships. Or that the numbers from Illiad are the only numbers we really have to go on.

Fair enough.

A small footnote to John the OFM's accurate observation, in the unlikely event that anyone cares:

In the catalogue it actually looks as though the choice between the 'black' and 'hollow' epithets is determined as much as anything by the size of the contingents. So there are nine occasions where '40 black ships followed' whichever leader it is (and another two where the same formula is used with the metrically-equivalent 80 ships, and one with 50). On four occasions a different formula is used, where '30 (or 90, once) hollow ships lined up' with their leader – different epithet, but also different verb (and, incidentally, different spelling of the word for 'ships'), to fit the number in the metre.

(No contingent has 70 ships, probably because ἑβδομήκοντα won't scan at all.)

There are, I think, good reasons why relatively few people in universities take Velikovsky any more seriously as an archaeologist than as an astronomer. The less extreme position (basically, an adjustment of 200-250 years, rather than 500) of Peter James et al. has also failed to get much traction over the last twenty years, again for good reason, in my view. But, while realising that this takes us way off topic, I'd be interested to hear more about why people here think that these radical re-datings are convincing.

Well, to start with, I would offer this: Read the short piece by Velikovsky, linked below, that summarizes his argument with current dating. It takes maybe 10-15 minutes to read through to understand how he arrived at his hypothesis. I find him to be quite convincing, and have since I first read his idea for this in the mid-70's.

varchive.org/dag/reconst.htm

V/R

Hi:

I don't dismiss those who feel that Hittites are not in any way contemporaries with the Ilians. Unless archeologists find the diary of Hattusilis I (or II) , it will always be a "fog." I want to just posit that I believe the Hittites knew, and we very aware of the people of Troy. As a belief, I can not be swayed, though those who do not believe in my views are most welcomed. I believe if you books talking about the fragments found, that they were very aware of the men of Troy (GO USC!) and the Achaiens. After all, the Pharaoh of Egypt asked to marry one the scions of the Hatti. So they were well established in the world of the Illiad.

But, that say (and bloviated), I really just wanted to know the diffence in the galleys, and I think have have gotten several very salient answers. I thank all of you very much, and will say, "Go Hittites, beat the Achieans!" I have them minus 7 this weekend.

Swab Jockey

Ok, a couple of things. It's not that the posters on this thread are ignorant (well, that's sometimes debatable). The fact is, we don't have written records for the late Helladic period (potential period of the war with Troy). The texts attributed to Homer were jotted down in the Geometric period, at the time writing was adopted by the Greeks although aspects of the stories suggest that they existed in an oral form for a long time before that (several hundred years).

Black and hollow are simple poetic terms. Penteconters (50 oared ships) do seem to have been the norm by the Geometric period at least.

If you want pictorial evidence for Trojan war period ships, you have to decide between Middle Minoan exampls from the House of the Admiral on Thera (200-300 years before the presumed date of the Trojan war):

Or Geometric depictions on Greek ceramics (300-400 years after):

There seems to be a discrepancy between the Egyptian king lists and C14 dates by about 100 years – not 500.

And yes, as the Hittites were erudite imperialists, they would have been aware of all the kingdoms on their periphery, including Troy. Whether they were aware of a Trojan war as told by Homer is another matter altogether.

I'd also throw out this: I have thought that the term "hollow" ship might be referring to cargo, or logistics ships, vessels carrying food, weapons, etc to support the rest of the campaign.

The term "black" might also be descriptive, referring to pitch-coated hulls, of the darkened appearance of oiled/stained wood with pitch caulking between the planks.

Just my observations, and nothing more.

Thanks for the link TKindred. I read it with interest, and had a look at your first link too.

Again, I'm interested why you (and Bob?) find that account convincing. Even though some of his criticisms of traditional chronologies are fair, I have great difficulty accepting all of them, or any of his positive recommendations.

To start with, it is simply not the case that Mycenaean chronology is based solely on an Egyptian chronology which in turn is derived purely from Manetho and/or Sothic calendrical calculations. The chronologies of places to the north and west of Mycenaean Greece are not any longer (as they often were in the first half of the twentieth century) based on finds of Mycenaean and Minoan pottery and so ultimately with dodgy Egyptian historical data. The chronologies of prehistoric Europe are now indepedently established on the basis of tree-ring and radiocarbon data. There was (some) contact between these areas and the Bronze Age Aegean – and that actually makes arguing convincingly for a radical downdating of the Mycenaean civilisation virtually impossible.

Workable Egyptian chronology has been the result of assembling and organising the masses of relevant evidence, from which clear successions of kings and officials emerged. The necessary correlations to fix the relative sequence for the New Kingdom in absolute time came in a couple of places from astronomical data, but purely historical ones also come from Assyrian and Hebrew chronology. About Assyrian king and eponym lists Velikovsky seems to have strangely little to say, and that does not inspire confidence (apologies if I just missed a section). As an aside, it is not at all clear that Velikovsky has command of many of the languages in which the relevant textual material for his argument is written.

It has also been clear since at least the early 1970s that previously-constructed historical chronologies would have to be compared with the data being produced by radiocarbon dating. By and large Egyptian chronology has proven to be fairly consistent with radiocarbon data – certainly it is vastly more compatible with the radiocarbon dates than Velikovsky's scheme or even Price et al.'s. Adjustments have had to be made, but if anything these adjustments have been the opposite of those suggested by Velikovsky – some traditional dates looked a little too low, rather than drastically too high.

The existing evidence from a wide area across Europe, the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East still generates significant chronological headaches (and much scholarly activity), but the schemes to be found in academic publications seem to make much better sense of it than Velikovsky's suggestions.

The remaining scope for genuine uncertainty about Egyptian chronology is a matter of only a few decades as far back as the start of the New Kingdom, and even further back into the second millennium. To get discrepancies of a century or more you'd need to go back a lot further than anything Homer could conceivably be talking about.

There are also some peculiarities of argument. I confess I don't see why it is so important to provide an identity for the Queen of Sheba, but identifying her with Hatshepsut causes all sorts of problems. Ramesses II has to be identified (on V's own account) with Necho II, but Shoshenq III then ends up having to travel 200 years into his own future to cut up a statue of Ramesses for his burial complex at Tanis. And so on…

But what I really don't get goes all the way to the basic premises of the argument. The 500-year 'gap' after 1200ish BC is only a gap in written records from Greece: there is plenty of archaeological evidence for this period, some of it from deeply-stratified deposits. There are twelve successive, clearly identifiable, Aegean pottery styles from this period (early LHIIIC; later LHIIIC; 'Submycenaean'; Early Protogeometric; Middle Protogeometric; Late Protogeometric: Early Geometric I; Early Geometric II; Middle Geometric I; Middle Geometric II: Late Geometric I; and Late Geometric II). Fixing their absolute chronology is a colossal headache, to be sure – but they fit more convincingly into a period of centuries than into Velikovsky's scheme, which effectively forces them into what? A single generation – at most? Sometimes people just aren't writing things down on durable materials, or constructing monumental buildings all over the place – and that isn't a problem that needs to be solved.

As for Homer, the apparent Mycenaean survivals (including the boars' tooth helmet, Ajax's big shield, and the preeminence of Mycenae itself as Agamemnon's home) don't need to be explained by the Mycenaean civilisation being in his own recent past – they make just as much (in fact, rather more) sense as a feature of a mature epic tradition in oral poetry that took a long time to develop. Apart from these scattered details, Homer's stories of the heroes at Troy and their world actually bear very little resemblance to the world of the Mycenaean Bronze Age as we understand it (albeit imperfectly) through its archaeological remains and the testimony of the Linear B tablets. Even in this limited context, collapsing the Greek 'Dark Age' to nothing creates more problems than it solves.

Well, those are my observations, anyway. Sorry if it comes across a bit ranty. As I say, I am genuinely interested about the appeal of Velikovsky's model; if all the criticisms levelled against it have been convincingly addressed by his supporters then it would be good to know that before the next time I teach a survey course in Greek history…