SYRACOUSIA II

Just what Hieron II wanted with a monster grain freighter requires some explanation.
Why should an hellenistic monarch seek to extol his own and his kingdom's power and virtue by means of a massive maritime corn carrier ? 

South eastern Sicily is fertile. It was also under peaceful control of Hieron. It was a grain basket of the ancient world.  In the mid 3rd century BC there was much money to be made from selling corn abroad or largesse to be shown by giving it away to places with poorer agriculture or smitten by war pestilence or earthquake. If Hieron could safely despatch corn around the Mediterranean there was a fortune to be made.

Hieron made a name for humself by attacking the Mamertines. This was a public service because these were a collection of brigands slaves pirates and freebooter who had settled in the city of Messana. The Mamertines called themselves 'the people of the war god' after Mamers an Oscan war god.The menfolk of Messana were descendents of mercenaries hired by the tyrant Agathokles, himself an infamous  fore-runner of Hieron at Syracuse. They gained the city by murdering the citizens one night and siezing their women and treasure. Their subsequent behaviourtowards the neighbours was no better. Forget ideas about Johnny Depp in big boots and a bandana. Mediterranean pirates of the classical world ranked with the lowest form of humanity to emerge anywhere.

Mamertine warrior c. 220AD - could be Mamer?

Being an island and a colony of Corinth it was vital for Syracuse to keep the sea lanes open. If piratical activity became to intense the island was effectively blockaded. Mamertine and Tyrrhenian pirates harassed Hiero's trade but they were difficult to eradicate.

a pirate galley intercepts a grain freighter : Attic vase c.450BC

So for Hieron moving his grain safely was a big deal.

To move grain safely by sea requires certain things of the transporter.


Size : better to move a lot in 1 go - the hamster foraging  principle.

 

Speed- do it fast to avoid predators - again a lesson from hamsters. A longer hull gives higher speed .

Stability - bulk cargo is dangerous to move in bad weather. A broad stable hull is better. (Also for wealthy passengers...)

Bulk carrier Stellar Banner after cargo of ore shifted

Defence - pirates could descend in hoards. Any freighter had to be able to defend itself against several other ships and perhaps hundreds of attackers.

Manouverability - this would be limited by the size of the ship but the ability to manoeuvre into harbour was vital,  or to evade pursuers.

Servicability - the hull and rig should be robust and not require anything out of the ordinary to keep it in running order.

All of these factors mitigate for a large ship rather than a small fast one or a flock of small ones.

Galleys were reliably fast and could sail through calm but they had a limited freight capacity in their slim shallow hulls and so the ship should obviously be a sailing ship or 'round ship' 'strongylos'.

THE DIMENSIONS OF THE SHIP

Just how big was this 'monstrous mass' ?

From Athenaeus we get to know the following:

• it required the wood for 60 triremes to construct the whole thing
•  the sacred trireme built by Antigonos and victorious off Kos was not a quarter of Syracousia

In addition we can note that

• the Nemi vessels, the largest found, are 70mx30m and 73m x24m 
• grain freighter Isis from Lucan's poem 'The Wishes' , 55m by 13.5m or so, hold 4 - 5m deep
• Caligula's obelisk-transporter was 104m long -  but only made 1 voyage
• Ptolemy II's '40' could have been about 100 metres long 
• Ptolemy IV's Thalemagos was 30 cubits by half a stadion i.e c.15m by 90m !!
• longest wooden ships without steel bracing < 80m WIKI LIST HERE

Largest wooden ship - Wyoming in 1917 - 140m x 15.5m : ships this big had steel hull bracing (still failed)

Taking the wood used first. If we consider the project as a 3 dimensional mass of wood with a similar density of wood involved within the whole structure then 60 times the mass of a trireme from Coates this would be about 30 tonnes of wood.So...30 x 60 = 1800 tonnes.

The trireme occupies circa 35m by 6m by 4 m of space.840m3

840 cubic metres x 60 is 50,400.

If we take the cube root of this we can get the block equivalent of the monster...Yes, very simplified...
 

The cube root is 36.Double the length to half the width and get the profile more elongate.

Interestingly, if we double the length we get about the length of the Nemi ships. And the longest modern era wooden ships.

We must then halve another dimension, shall we use the height, to get an 18m high structure.

This ballpark model is a block 72metres long by 36metres wide and 18metres high.

Very rough, and we should expect more wood goes to strengthening the hull and reducing the interior volume. If we reduce the interior volume by a quarter, conservative, to allow for a heavier structure, we have our block model as 65metres by 32metres by 16metres. Or so.

Now, typically, sailing freighters have a length to breadth ratio around 4:1. As per the Nemi ships which were for use on a confined lake, this falls to 3:1 or less.

VIKING ERA SHIPS ILLUSTRATE THIS WELL

WARSHIPS  L:B RATIO                                   CARGO SHIPS   L:B RATIO
Ladby                   7.4                                         Klåstad                          4.4
Hedeby 1              11.4                                       Skuldelev 6                   4.48
Roskilde 6             9.3                                        Skuldelev 3                   4.24
Skuldelev 5          7                                            Skuldelev 1                   3.44
Sludelev 2            7.5                                         Hedby 3                        3.55

Aslak - Ladby replica and Nidhug( L:B 4)

ANCIENT EXAMPLES
CARGO

Kyrenia Ship   2.5
Isis                   4.5
Nemi 1              3
Nemi 2              3.5
WAR GALLEY
trieres Olympias  7

The same relationship holds.

But our ship must sail the high seas so we must drop the width of 36m down somewhat to a quarter of 65 i.e. 16metres. Following the block model would now mean we stretch the heigh to maintain the timber mass...adding a third or so to the height to give keel to top deck height of 20metres or so.

Mackintosh et al (Syracusia as a giant cargo vessel, IJNA 1999) arrive at dimensions of 61.5metres  length   15.5metres beam  by 10metres high. Not a million miles away.

So we have a length and beam that is useable. I will take 64metres and 16 metres as nice round figures to base my model upon.

The rather top-heavy figure of 20 metres for keel-to-top deck can be controlled by Athenaeus' statements that there were three exterior gangways - parados - plus a hold.  This means 3 decks with ceilings (terrestrial use of the word..) at 2 to 2.5 metres. and a hold of simliar depth would give 10 metres keel to top. Height above water level would therefore be around 7 metres ?

If the topsides were too high then Vasa-Mary Rose syndrome could occur.

Vasa had a poop deck 19 metres above the keel and c.15m above the waterline. In addition, it had a very high centre of gravity. Ancient ships tended to have little superstructure, keeping their centre of gravity low. There was no incentive to have several decks for guns and massively strong superstructure.
 A schooner of similar dimensions from 1920 was c.8m waterline to deck.

A similar sclae vessel for comparison can be provided by the French 118 gun Ocean class warships from c.1800. Larger than the Victory, these were 3-deckers with similar domensions to our prospective Syracousia. at  65.18 metres by 16.25m in beam. They were massive platforms for 118 cannon and survived in service until 1860 or so.

Ocean class 118 gun French warship c. 1800 

These ships stood about 10.5 metres from the waterline to the poop deck.
Their holds were 5 metres deep - most below the waterline.
They had four deck levels above the waterline but these had overheads at under 2 metres each.
These would not be appropriate for the Syracousia which had to accommodate high status guests and had luxurious fittings.

All in all 11 metres over the waterline would seem to be a maximum for a ship of these general proportions.

DIMENSIONS FOR THE MODEL

Erring on a slightly larger 'monstrous mass' I decided to go for the following dimensions.

LENGTH : 64 METRES   BEAM : 16 METRES   HEIGHT ABOVE WATERLINE : 11 METRES


This gives a hull more seaworthy than the Nemi ships, which, although built with the same quality as a sea-going ship are essentially barges not intended to be exposed to waves or swell. or to move under sail. Thus, ot as enormous as the greatest dimensions we know of from the classical world but somehwat according to modern era giants.

The large size of the hull allows stability, higher speed under sail and the carrying of sufficient defences to hold off pirates.

Equivalent of Syrakousia and pirates : 'Standy by to repel boarders!'

 FIGHTING PIRATES : just have to watch again..... HERE  and HERE


Next we will work out the ship's lines.

THE HELLENISTIC FLAT TOP

THE most remarkable ship we know about from the ancient world is
 the Syrakousia - the Maid of Syracuse.
 

Syracousia as reconstructed in 1798.

Despite some translations and reconstructions deciding the opposite, Syracousia was a sailing ship and not a galley. Even so,  it is more than worthy of discussion here. She led, for example, a small flotilla of support ships which were mostly galleys.

Flipped Prof is an Italian 3D graphics team(?) who produce reconstructions of the ancient world. They look great but have some errors of detail.

Flipped Prof show here a reconstruction of Syrakousia as a galley with 3 tiers of oars.

Youtube HERE

 

 The error is simply made, because the ancient Greek text is somewhat garbled, technical and difficult to understand if one knows little of ancient ships.

Having held the idea in mind for many years I finally decided that I had to make a model of this behemoth and try to make some sense of the ancient account.

SOURCES

The Syracousia was constructed in a special place and time which allowed for such futuristic, cutting- edge  projects to be carried out.

Hieron the Second of Syracuse was a hellenistic ing who had access to great wealth and great technologists. Hieron started the First Punic War(264BC)  on the Punic side but was obviously gifted in diplomacy for he ended it on the Roman side (241BC) and remained friendly with them until his death in 215BC. As if to demonstrate what a feat this was, within 4 year sof his death the romans had seen fit to sack Syracuse and swallow his kingdom.

Hieron II lived until 92. Barely a bad word written about him (enemies all very dead)

Hieron II was admired and successful and wealthy. Hellenistic kings were supposed to give public displays of their wealth and excellence as a kind of public and religious duty. What would today be seen as wasteful junket would have been interpreted as a demonstration of how the gods smiled on the kingodom's ruler and therefore the kingdom and therefore each individual citizen. Big parades, tours and festivals were de rigeur for an Hellenistic king.

Vulgar to Romans but essential to Hellenistic royalty

 Hieron was fortunate enough to have a bevy of beautiful brains at his disposal. Hellenistic courts loved knowledge, fine arts natural sciences and engineering. Just as his predecessor, Dyonisius I, Hieron patronised the wise and clever. He was lucky enough to have the great Archimedes at the head of his brains trust and this combined with a penchant for shipbuilding led to the Syracousia.

We shall see, Carl, we shall see....

We have an account, a detailed account, (but not wholly clear, dammit!) of the great ship. It comes, bizzarely enough, from a long and rambling work from the 3rd century AD known as 'The Philosopher-Gastronomes'  (Deipnosophistae), by the Egyptian-Greek  Athenaeus of Naucratis. In his work, which survives in incomplete form, Athenaeus manages to name-drop no less than 800 ancient authors and 2500 literary works. He is a mine, (some might say a pile) of information about the ancient world.

Athenaeus, then, scratched an account of a work by Moschion who was an earlier writer. How early we do not know. He could also have been writing AD. But Moschion had knowledge of the Syracousia project and preserved it due to his delightful profession of 'paradoxographer'. His bag was to create the 'wierd tales' or 'stranger than fiction' pulp of his day.

Just now we stick to construction rather than seduction...

Bored with scoffing for a while, the Philosopher-Gastronomes are treated to a lengthy morsel from Moschion which tells of how Archimedes was entrusted with a project to build the biggest and best grain freighter by Hieron II.

But the tall tale told for the delectation of the well-stuffed Hellenestic aesthetes has been a target for scepticism.

THE ENTERTAINMENT PUT ME OFF MY CUSTARD AND LARK-TONGUES...FOR A WHILE.

.WHY COULDWE NOT JUST HAVE STORIES AND POEMS ABOUT SHIPS INSTEAD ?

Dawe, Diggle and Page, in thier survey of the Greek epigram*,  (p. 27) see the tale as an 'absurd yarn' - as absurd as their Dickensian assemblage of names, no doubt. Part of Moschion's account includes an epigram attributed to one 'Archimelus'.( Incidentally, we know sweet Fanny Adams about these two apart from their naming in Athenaeus.)Epigrams should be pithy, witty, ingenious and brief. They originated as tombstone inscriptions and memorials  - our modern epitaph - where every letter cost money.

(Remember,  'Many archaic epitymbic epigrams are monostichs'  A sentence I have vowed never to remember)

'I told you I was Milligan!'

The problem Dawe, Diggle and Page have with the Syracousia epigram is that it lives up to none of these criteria. Get this.....

Who placed this monstrous mass upon the earth;
What master led it with untiring cables,
How was the deck nail'd to the mighty beams,
And with what axe did men the vessel form?
Surely it equals Aetna in its height,
Or any isle which rises from the sea
Where the Egean wave entwined foams
Amid the Cyclades; on either side
Its breadth is equal, and its walls alike.
Sure 'twas the giants' work, who hoped to reach
By such vast ladder to the heights of heaven.
Its topmast reaches to the stars; and hides
Its mighty bulwarks 'mid the endless clouds.
It holds its anchors with untiring cables,
Like those with which proud Xerxes bound the strait
Which between Sestos and Abydos foams.
A deftly carved inscription on the side
Shows what strong hand has launch'd it on the deep;
It says that Hiero, Hierocles' son,
The king of Sicily, pride of Dorian race,
Sends it a wealthy messenger of gifts
To the Aegean islands; and the God
Who rules the sea, great Neptune, convoys it
Safe o'er the blue and foaming waves to Greece.

You may notice that the 'epigram' is almost as large as the monster ship herself, but we must remember tha the form did get extended with time to allow flowery praises to be heaped on the subjects.
The judgement of DD&P is that this epigram is 'the most fatuous to have survived from the Alexandrian era'. Also . 'the hyperbole is grotesque'. Academics stamping their feet are never a pretty sight. DD&P conclude that the whole tale is a fanciful crock and dismiss it.

Unfortunately for the poetry-inclined latter-day dodgy legal firm, they were not naval architects nor were they sailors. Like Livy they write about nautical themes from the security of their bathtubs where the most complex vessel in sight is a plastic duck.

Now we can explain the most complex ancient ship ..Oh I can anyway because  I built it.....

 DD&P used a naval expert upon which to base their judgement. The one they chose was the intrepid, and impressive Cecil Torr. I will devote a whole blog page to Cecil Torr. He is one of my favourite writers and researchers on classical war galleys and ancient nautical topics in general, not to mention ancient Greek music.  To an Englishman he also has to his credit the publication of one of the most profoundly English books ever. Ranking with Tristram Shandy. But that was nothing to do with Syracousia. The point about Cecil Torr is that he is rather dead. Even in 1981 when DD&P published their tome he was long gone.Cecil's feet failed to retain their wooden enfurbishments in 1928.  Torr's classic  ' Ancient Ships' was published in 1894. DD&P missed out on almost a hundred years of research, discovery and debate and the birth of maritime archaeology. They dismiss Syracousia as an absurd yarn on the basis of an earlier generation's knowledge of ancient shipping.  Apart from that, they were probably correct about the poem's artistic merits....

The facts that we have from Moschion via Athenaeus are fabulous but can be shown to lie within the technical capabilities of the classical world.

The Nemi ships, Caligula's pleasure barges proved such colossi were constructed by the ancients. (may the German army be ever cursed for burning them!). Accounts of the Ptolemies' massive Nile-cuisers - Thalamegoi - back the concept up. Many authors have pored over the after dinner tale - probbly often after dinner - and worked out that Syracousia lies well within the realm of capability for men of the calibre of Archimedes. 

Queus to see ships excavted at Nemi in 1932

Caligula's pleasure-ships : 70 and 73 metres long. with beam 30 and 24 metres

I wanted to build a model of this thing and now I will lay out how I proceeded in the following blog entries.


HELLENISTIC FLAT TOP ?

If the Hellenistic world had aeroplanes they could have landed on this thing ! With the ingenuity of the modern era's early naval fliers a seaplane using a combination ofI Icarus' wings (with perfected non-melting glue!) Heron's jet engine, the torsion devices invented for artillery etc. could have allowed a microlite type thingy to have been produced and operated from a Syracousia type vessel, more than 50 metres long and with a flat top.

HUMAN FLIERS HERE

 Just a crazy thought which I will not pursue further ! ;)

(The silver lining in the cloud of Covid19 is that I have time for this ....  More follows...)


 *Further Greek Epigrams. Cambridge 1981

SHOCK AND OAR : PART II

The ram is an instrument used to project the kinetic energy of the attacker into the hull of the target. If the energy put into the structure of the target exceeds the stress limits for that structure then it is damaged. At sea a damaged structure fills with water to the disadvantage of its crew.

Sometimes, one must improvise.

Studies of ram function have accelerated since the discovery of the Egadi rams. Previously there were only three known and only 1 in perfect condition. Now we have many rams including some which show battle damage which can be analysed.

Bent blades - from Egadi

What is surprising is the similarity of form the rams show. They are similar across time from monuments in ancient Greece of 4^th century BC down to Rome of the first centuries AD. The found rams also show great similarity between Roman, Carthaginian and Greek examples.

Rams from Athens 4thcenBC?, on Arc de Triomph d'Orange 20BC, Egadi3(Carthaginian)241BC

We know the ancients were no slouches in the technological sense. If something could be made to function better then it would be adopted if the economic situation allowed. Witness the use of mechanical pumps, piped water, katapelta and the experimentation that produced Hero's steam turbine, Archimedes steam cannon etc. The Antikythera mechanism has been shown to be a wonderfully complex 'laptop' for celestial time and place calculations. It cannot have existed in isolation.

Not made by numbskulls

 The structural similarities the rams are showing us reveal effective mechanical principles that had been developed from experience and were held-to because they worked.

The earliest images we have of rams show – if they are true military rams and not cut-waters – rounded spike-like forms. 

Phoenician Ship ? From Nineveh

These would do the job of holing an opponent but the big problem with ramming as a tactic is at once apparent. Once one has smashed the ram into the opponent there is the problem of extrication. If the ram has a uniformly increasing size then the point exerts massive stress and will penetrate easily. As the point moves into the target the hole is widened as the rest of the ram follows.

At some point, however, the compressive and resistive forces counter the attacker's momentum and the intrusion is stopped and the ram is gripped. This is nicely illustrated by those of us who have energetically tried to split logs which are too wet or tough and, even though one strikes along the grain, they allow the blade of an axe in but grip it tight at some point allowing no escape.

Stuck in a slightly different way...

Boar spears and bayonets also have this problem – hence the cross-piece use to prevent deep penetration and the standard advice for bayoneteers to twist their weapon before attempting to pull it out of their adversary. 

 

The hull structure of ancient ships comprised planks laid edge-to-edge that were joined with many mortise-and-tenon joints. These were very tightly made. The resulting shell is very resistant to splitting and to lateral disruption. This kind of structure would grip a flat blade or a spike-formed penetration. A sheet of steel will simply fail and be punched open but a composite wooden structure will react elastically and grip the intrusion.

 

The solution to the problem of holing and disrupting a wooden hull of the type used in triereis is rather more cunning. One must break the planks to make gaps and one must also overcome some of the joints to make recovery impossible and one must prise the hole wider to allow a serious amount of water in.

Not surprisingly the ancient rams fit this purpose perfectly.

The form is at first somewhat disguised by the ancient aesthetics of seeing the only appropriate device for penetrating an enemy at sea as a trident. This is the weapon of Poseidon or Neptune, the lords of the undersea. If one's maritime enemy should be smitten it is only fair to call upon and to acknowledge the help of the earthshaker. So when we look at an ancient ram we see a trident from the side superimposed on the geometry of a technical solution to staving-in the hull of a ship. 

One of Poseidon's tridents on the sea floor at Egadi

It is not accidental that the ram has the three 'blades'. A single blade can wedge and be stuck. Two blades may penetrate but hold a single plank. Three blades can strike across two planks and three joint-lines giving a better chance of success. More blade are superfluous and begin to dissipate the force applied.

The blades hit the target like chisels or axe-blades with their blades entering along the grain. The widening profile splits the wood. The vertical extent of the ram means at least one joint line will be hit and, hopefully, burst. The strakes on ancient triereis wer in the order of 20 to 30 centimetres wide. The separation of the ram blades is of the same order thus ensuring a spread of attack across at least one and probably two joint lines and three or four strakes.

Side of hull impacted by ram (Oldfield2012)

 Once the blades have wedged open the target's planking then the momentum of the attacker is transmitted across the whole of the ram's cross-section – the so-called 'driving centre' – because the blades have a vertical cross-piece which joins them and presses all the wood in front into the target. This breaks the tenons out from their mortises. Once out of place they will never go back. There is no need to drive the ram deep into the target hull. It must just break the hull shell's integrity. (Steffy(1983) refers to this when he says the ram 'pounded' rather than pierced the target).

The hull shell of the target ships has now suffered a devastating blow from piston with sharp blades. The force developed by a triereis of circa 50 tonnes hitting at 10 knots has been calculated by John Coates as circa 66 tonnes. This is applied over the driving centre of the ram which is less than 50cm square. Something will give !

Hole made in hull. Police are looking into it.

Computer simulations (Oldfield 2012) have been run to discover how much energy is needed to breach hulls in relation to woods used and the relative velocities and inertia of triereis. The results confirm that the concept of ancient warships as massive hulks engaging each other like mastodons with rams instead of tusks and delivering terrible damage to each other until one succumbs are completely wrong.

 

The first point to be aware of that it is not speed we are discussing here but relative velocity. It makes a big difference to the impact if two ships are moving in the same or opposite directions. This will also have big implications for how we imagine triereis to operate, as we shall see. If the ships move towards each other the impact forces are much greater than if one is stationary or the target is moving away. 

Luckily, this is not a head-on collision so the force of impact will be reduced. Somewhat.

Oldfield discovered that the forces generated by a trieres ram are more than sufficient to catastrophically damage a trieres hull so long as the collision velocity was 0.5 knots ! No need for cries of 'ramming speed' and extra lashes for the galley slaves ! A smooth approach at reasonable speed would result in a nice smooth impact and busting of the target's flush. The best angles for attack were, as may be expected, those closer to perpendicular. The strength of the mortise-and-tenon hull is greater against acute-angled attacks. Also, attacks with high closing velocities had a much greater chance of success than those pursuing – but this has a downside we shall discuss later.

Successful attacks can be made in the arcs shown -for set relative velocities and wood(Oldfield2012)

These finding mean that the kybernetes would know he could count on holing the target in a head-on attack and in an attack against a fleeing enemy he had to strike a careful balance to deliver his maximum effect which, if done correctly only need a 0.5 knot advantage in speed to hole the target.

What we stand with now is a model for trieres battles which involves combatants more like first world war stringbags than mastodons.

Gertcha...!

The opponents can easily damage each other if they are given the chance but each also has a high degree of manoeuvrability to use in evading being hit – or making a hit. Once hit effectively the game was probably quickly up (see this blog entry -  'Get Down Ship' 20/08/14).

The weapon developed to equip the trieres was well suited to its purpose. It is hard to imagine a better form. It was developed with full knowledge of the hull construction techniques then in use and exploited their weaknesses. These weaknesses would be well-known to the commanders – kybernetes, pentekontarchos and trierarch, as they stood anxiously on the poop-deck and sought to manoeuvre their ship to ensure its survival and success.

"And all depends for its safety on one little old atomy of a man, who controls that great rudder with a mere broomstick of a tiller! He was pointed out to me; Heron was his name, I think; a woolly-pated fellow, half-bald."                             -Lucian:'The Ship/The Wishes'(Sean McGrail in control of Olympias from Trireme Trust)

FEAT OF CLAY ?

 The terracotta model that is in the Danish National Museum and known as the 'Erment Model' was fuel for a debate in the long-running saga af the ancient galley.

My reconstruction of the 'Erment Model'

Lucien Brasch argued in 1969(1)  that the model supported the idea that there was more than one type of trieres. His reasoning was that the Greeks had their own interpretation of an original idea by the Phoenicians. The model was found in Egypt and must represent a trieres tradition from the eastern Mediterranean which differed from the Hellenistic variety.

Just how one could make an alternative trireme is a  bit of a puzzle but not beyond ingenuity. We have today the advantage of having seen a working trieres in the form of Olympias  (2) and must admit that this colours our vision. Notwithstanding this, there are still critics such as Alec Tilley(3) who have alternative suggestions for how a trieres could be constructed on other lines.

The '3' is here three men sitting side-by-side

Tilley would have the oarsmen on the same level - ergo Erment cannot be a trieres

 Tilley thinks the Erment model could therefore be a hexeres !(x) With two men on each oar because only with such a large number of men and oars would  tiers be necessary.

After Brasch the Erment model is seen as supporting a version of the trieres which is first seen on the Sennacherib stela from Nineveh and that show the flight of Luli from Sidon.

Nineveh stela c.701.bc.

 It is narrow and high, with no apparent outrigger - the parexereisea. Even 'The Athenian Trireme' supported the idea that there is a an unused tier of oarplaces in these reliefs. Odd. If one is fleeing why not use full speed? A rather unbelievable illustration of these ships was given in the Osprey New Vanguard 196 'Warships of the Ancient  World' book.

 In 1975 Alan Lloyd(4)  pretty much knocked the 'Phoenician trieres' theory into touch with his thorough-going rebuttal of Brasch's paper. It includes a quote from R.C. Anderson's 1962 paper(5) which is rather damning. viz.

'It may be made for a trireme, but there is nothing whatever to be learnt from it.'

Subsequently, an expert on specifically Egyptian Hellenistic terracottas  remarked (6)

'Technically Græco-Egyptian terracottas are clumsy work, made with few moulds and the minimum of effort.'

Lloyd's conclusion/broadside...

'M.Brasch may well be right in claiming that the craftsman had in mind a Phoenician trireme but it seems hazardous in the extreme to use such an object to prove that the ship did not possess a parexeiresia, was not equipped with wales - neither of which occur  on Egyptian ships and may well have fallen outside the potter's experience - and had a hull whose proportions differed fundamentally from its Greek counterpart.'

Erment/Phoenicia to the left,: Olympias/Greece to the right

The model has also been used as a possible blueprint for an eastern Mediterranean penteres (7) which is supposed to differ from the Syracusan version by, again, having no outrigger and with double-manned upper oar-tiers.

Straight.sided penteres(removing hanging oarbox

Making the model gave me a little insight into the potter's task. Forgetting any high ideas about an accurate scale model - the concept of which was probably some way ahead in history from when the clay ship was produced.

As any clay structure is built up it tends to sag under its own weight. One can avoid this by a) avoiding overhangs and b) ensuring all points are supported from beneath c) making the structure lighter in the top.

I think the Erment model has its final shape because of these factors. The original profile of a trieres is almost impossible to make in a model of this size if one is not going to take time-consuming steps to support it and let it dry progressively as one builds.

Looks Ementish but WRONG. From Napoleon III's reconstruction of 1882 by Admiral Serre. A classic failure.

Still wrong profile - perfectly round is BAD (puking imminent)

Profile of Olympias by John Coates. Too broad for a clay model.

This is no problem for some smaller, more primitive ship models. Pottery has alway sbeen a lowly trade and pot items very cheap. The idea of taking an inordinate amount of time on a cheap votive item is unlikely.

I also  think the Erment model does have an outrigger but it is misunderstood by the maker. AND transformed so that it fits with the clay's characteristics.

Instead of the oar tiers being set further outboard as in the real thing, the model has them set over each other for the sake of constructing something easily from clay.

The strips supporting the upper two tiers are there because they look like they should be there when one looks at a real trieres but they are also necessary to support the oars in the model. They cannot be set out from the hull or the thing will sag and break so they are set over each other. They show a gunwale and an outrigger but they cannot be set out from the hull or the whole lot will collapse.

The parexeiresia is beneath the upper oars but squished inboard

The epibatai (which could aequally have been the hyperesia) must be set on last. When the decks have dried a little and gained some strength the figures and shields can be glued -on with slip without fear of collapse.

The ship's profile is explained by these factors also. It is flat-bottomed because it must stand solidly as it is built. It is high and stright-sided because an open, low form will collapse unless a time-consuming process is adopted for construction.

I would say the modeller wanted to give a good impression of a trieres and he does. It is a slim, sleek ship with many oars. It has a fierce prominent ram and efficient prominent pedalia which look like they can really affect the ship's progress.

Version 2 may be painted to look a little less like Sonic the Hedgehog!

 Along with the many odd-shaped clay ships i think the Erment model has to be considered just that. In the broadest sense of the word. It is not a scaled-down copy of any ship, penteres, hexeres nor trieres but it is a representation interpreted by the non-sea-going potter and made within the limits of the chosen material. This trieres really does have feet of clay.
It's awful, but I like it.....
(Ref.list to follow)