SYRAKOUSIA III

NE PLUS ULTRA !  - The Lines of...

The form of the hull of Syrakousia was probably relatively simple compared to modern - post medieval - ships.

The shell-built, draw-tongue edge-fastened hulls of ancient ships tended to take simple forms before frame-building allowed for much more secure and variable shapes to be tried.

The two main forms were long parallel hulls used for war galleys and rounded elliptical hulls  used for sailing freighters.

Syrakousia was a sailing freighter not a rowed galley. Her hull was therfore of the elliptical type.
Exactly what form it took, though, needs a closer look.

Athenaeus tells us that the Syrakousia was built after the pattern of an eikosoros. This is sometimes mistranslated as a 'twenty' and therefore misconstrued as a galley. In fact, the eiksoros was a slang name for a type of common freighter which got their name from the fact they had 20 oars  - in all - which could be deployed when needed. This type is mentioned in the Iliad and was apparently an early form from before the extended narrow galley hull had been developed. These ships could carry freight and sail and also be moved under oars more successfully than the freighters which Aristotle describes as being like beetles in water flailing ineffectually with their legs.

The ship Tim Severin built for his Jason Voyage project is something in this vein even though it was not built strictly after an ancient plan.

At the other end of the spectrum we have the Nemi ships. A quick glance at them shows they are unseaworthy. They are flat barges even though the techniques used were the same as for ocean going freighters.

Nemi 1

Nemi 2

They have no keel and are so flat that swell and waves would have quickly worked them to pieces.

Warships tend to having parallel sides because oars must all reach the water together and guns must be able to be aligned. Freighters can have curved sides. - but not to the extreme of the Nemi barges !

Ocean class 3-decker. parallel -sided. Bluff, with fine tail.

We have no complete wreck of a Greek or Roman freighter to work from but the small Uluburun ship from 1300BC and the Kyrenia ship from 400AD show us the general form remained over the whole of the ancient era.

 

A thousand years apart but hull construction and form are the same !.

Viking ships give us an parallel example of narrow long warships and rounded freighters.

Ottar - Skuldelev 1 - fat for freight (reconstructed modern shape with widest beam forward!)

Gokstadskibet : elongate, a jack of all trades

Long ships and round ships - viking style

 Medieval sailing ships were built after the principal of being 'cod-headed and mackrel-tailed' which meant they were bluff in the bow for stability and had sleek after-lines to allow water to slip away past them without creating slowing eddies.

Matthew Baker's naturalistic hull design. Tudor tech.

Ancient ships do not appear to ever have this contrast in form from bow to stern. Near-symmetry seems to have been the rule.


In addition, the bow is made high enough to be mostly out of the water when under way to avoid taking water in if a wave is broached.

The dangers of taking waves over the stern when under way in a high sea are an existential threat to sailing ships and for this reason we also see that ancient freighters have a raised stern.

The ship from Madrigue de Giens near Marseille - 1st century BC - seems to be a  good pattern to incorporate in our exercise, too. It is a good size and exhibits a form which is neithr to narrow nor to broad. The stem is near vertical and the stern was probably high.The high stern sweep achieved a clean exit from the 'hole' the vessel creates in the water.

Medieval and later sailing ships tend to have the broadest beam midships or nearer to the bow.
Finely designed yachts can have the broadest point midships, carefully incorporated in the design.


Ancient ships seem to have gone with the idea that the broadest point should be midships or slightly aft of there.

reconstruction of freighter Isis -

In summary, we should have a generally elliptical form at the waterline which could be almost parallel down the beam for a distance on the basis the length of this ship.

The bow should rise up, being relatively sharp with a near vertical stem. The stern should be higher than the bow and upswept.

We should also remember that ancient ships have large steering oars at the rear - one on each side. These were mounted on a frame built onto the hull so they could be balanced well enough that one man could control the pair from the poop deck.

 LASTLY! Not LEASTLY

The narrowing to the bow and stern typically takes up about 1/7 of the shull length. We must remember that we want to preserve as much deck space as possible to build all the superstructure and install all the towers and weapons and good stuff! 

PRACTICAL STEPS FOR MODELLING

What I did next was to draw a few profiles on card.

I used strips of correct length and folded them in half over the length. Draw and cut form so so you then open  both sides and see the symmetrical hull form. Don't try to draw both sides freehand !

Try to preserve as much beam as possible down the length.
Try to give it an historically authentic look.
Try to give it a curve pleasing to the eye.

After doing a few of these and comparing them to some of the profiles above I ended up with a waterline hull shape to use for the model.....

A was too sharp and lost too much deck space.

B was too narrow forward of midships.

C was just right. For my purposes.

The waterline shape for my Syrakousia model



 Ne plus ultra! I accept this main deck template for the model of Syrakousia  Next... what is on the decks ?

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

Back at the Helm. As in Helmet.

 

Another special  helmet found at Egadi..'...there have been found 2 very fine Montefortino types... with animal crests - along with 4 plain examples.

The first has a reclining cat-like figure ...

  Now the second is shown ,cleaned a bit.

Foto from Archaeology News Network

It reveals itself to be an ornate Roman type a Montefortino with extra ornamentation. A beautiful gryphon head which may be a holder for another fitting - see the mouth.Somehwat resembling later heavily ornamented cavalry helmets or even some infantry officer helmets. The cavalry and officers, especially in Republican times, had plenty of cash to display their status in their equipment.
There are small feather holdrs on the sides too.

This one shares its knob with the Egadi helm.

 A nice report at Archaeology News Network gives details HERE.

Did it fall overboard as the wearer stumbled under a blow or did it find its way into Davy Jones' Locker still attached to his noble head?

You can read a Master's Thesis about the 6 Montefortino helmetsfrom Egadi  HERE

This season has revealed 2 more bronze rostra and a sword ....
.... see RPMN website slide show HERE

You can see video of the recovery operations if you click on this foto.

Click to see video of recovery at TP24 Cultura via Facebook

 You can read more about Egadi under my previous posts or at the RPMN website HERE.

pROGRESS IN pRINTABLE pLASTIC

Some time ago I commented about the advances in 3D printing and what was coming down the pike.

Here is a splendid example of what is possible and what is happening..over at My Mini Factory.

A 'bireme' for the tabletop.

Iain Lovecraft has produced files to print this splendid galley at 28mm scale (or, presumably any scale?) fpr just 36 dollars. If you have tried to buy a resin galleyfor 28mm  you will know this is a reasonable price.

Of course, you need a printer, but if a friend has the machine a pint or two will see him right....

Sadly, they do not seem to have any other galleys in thier catalogue. Yet...

Print and assemble.

Heer and now is not the place to discuss how accurate the model is but it is a) glorious and b) perfect for gaming c) something to impress people that ancient war galleys are something to get into!!


You can find Iain Lovecraf'ts model here. ROMAN WARGALLEY BIREME

SHED WARS der der de de de derrr derrr etc.

Two weighty tomes have appeared in the last few years dealing with 'ship garages'. Shipsheds are the buildings in which galleys were housed when drawn up out of the water, to protect them from the elements and allow craftsmen to work on them out of the elements.

SHIPSHEDS..

These two books are not really in competition with each other - at first sight, Shipsheds is a catalogue of all known shipshed remains and Ancient Harbours of the Piraeus Volume II (AHP II) is a detailed excavation report from a single location -Zea Harbour.

Both books are well worth buying if you are a galley freak but Shipsheds obviously has a broad range of comprehensive content compared to the narrow focus of AHP II.

Shipsheds is presented by Blackman, Pakkanen et al,  HERE on vid.
 

AHP II

There is more to this pair of books than meets the eye, however, these academic volumes conceal a universe of competing egos, betrayal, error and misrepresentation that is more than your usual fare when looking for stuff about where the ancients kept their boats in the winter - we are talking

SHEDWARS.

The cast:

 AUTHOR OF AHP II......
Young Loven (now somewhat older) : PhD student working for Athens Harbour Project and Zea Harbour Project sponsored by Danish Institute at Athens.Upcoming and yet-unspoiled.

Yaaaay. Let's dig and find stuff!

 AUTHORS OF SHIPSHEDS....
Old Rankov and Old Blackman along with Ja Ja Pakkanen and the lovely space princess Kalliope, established British grizzled academic researchers and their cohorts, authors steeped in shipshed lore. But totally absorbed into the Dark Side.

The Darth-Ran-Kov and Black-man Axis of Evil - Tell daddy what you found Luke! We will explain it!

The TOMES OF WISDOM line up somewhat equal. In a straight bar-room fight they are probably worth about the same but the more robust cover on Shipsheds could probably have someone's eye out. In monetary terms there is quite a difference, however,

£113 Shipsheds Hardcover                       £45 AHP II Flex/Hard Cover

Shipsheds appeared in 2013 and AHP II in 2019. It turns out, though, that AHP II was originally to come out in 2013 also. It was pipped at the post but this gave Loven a chance to discover, to his horror, that the Dark Side had stolen a march and mishandled him in a decidedly nefarious mode. AHP II was shelved in disgust.

The Dark Side utilised the Rebel Alliance's data against them and constructed a model to show the world which we shall hereafter know was The Death Shed.

The Death Shed was constructed from a series of surveys and discoveries made in 2003 to 2006 and prior to then. It is finely illustrated and reconstructed in Shipsheds.
 

Key aspects of the Death Shed (at the risk of boring with minutiae)

1) The gradient of the floor of the sheds at Zea

2) The length of the sheds at Zea

3) The quality of the survey data from Athens Harbour Project

4)  The form of the shipshed floors at Zea.

5) The ancient sea level used as a reference to model the harbour

(That's enough minutiae, Ed.  - there are plenty more)

SURVEY DRONES FIGHT FOR THE INTEGRITY OF THEIR RESPECTIVE DATA MODELS

Young Loven had a whole range of stars from the world of ancient galleys allied with him to form a Rebel Alliance that gave him the necessary support to rewrite his volume and put it out with the necessary explosive and incendiary content to combat the Death Shed.
Battle-hardened heroes such as ....

John Hale       William Murray       Ionnas Nakas       Vincent Gabrielson   allies to be proud of.


All guns blazing, Loven went full speed into attack on the Death Shed.

Academic writing has often seen a clash of opinions. Darwin's evolutionary theory got its fair share of public debate and discord. Indeed, the idea that the Earth is round still has its critics!  The subject of' the trireme' was a flashpoint for years in the period after the reconstruction was mooted. But usually error or misinterpretation has been dismissed with a corrective footnote or a letter to the TES but not so for this unholy construction. The Death Shed required the nuclear option of direct contradiction and accusation in black and white in the body of the text of a major academic reference work.

Let's look at a few of the missiles Young Loven sent crashing into the mass of the Death Shed.



Loven left the harbour project in 2006 due to disagreements over LEADERSHIP, AGREEMENTS, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ISSUES !     And at that point he had 'simply had enough'.

CRASH



Despite a variety of suggestions for the difference in mean sea level since antiquity - these ranged from 3.5m to 1.5m - Shipsheds uses 1.40 metres and not the 1.90m established by the Zea Harbour Project. The 1.90m figure was firmly established using the depths to which stone had been quarried around the harbour. It has even been subsequently revised to -2.25m of the present level.
Shipsheds' figure assumes that stone was quarried below water level !! Loven is curtly dismissive of this idea when he says that to suggest the ancients quarried or worked stone - stone available nearby on dry land - in the surf zone or under water is to deny their evident  mastery and sophistication in masonry. Rankov and Blackman suggest casemates and temporary walls could keep out the sea while works were conducted...

THE HEIGHT OF THE WATER WILL INFLUENCE WHERE THE TOP OF A 40 METRE RAMP IS LOCATED

In the same discussion, to reduce the amount of sea level change required, Rankov and Blackman also try to say that solid rock can be liquified in earthquakes and cause large structures built on it to settle......

SMASH

At various points Rankov and Blackman give measurements of gradient to 3 or 4 significant figures whereas the original data allows only for 2. The Dark Side seem to do this to promote a hypothetical 'foot' which is 0.308m. This foot is easily disproved by Loven by simple calculation.

SPLAT


WONKY SHEDS AND RAMPS

The dispute over gradients - the two factions model the gradient diferently from different aspects of the survey data - leads to two main problems with recosntrcution of Phase 3 shipsheds.

1) How steep a ramp has to be to meet the ancient shore and therefore how long it extendsboth  inland and under the modern shoreline.

2) The gradient of the roof construction set over the ramp.

The Dark Side suggest that Loven's model requires that the ramp has a kink in it as the gradient changes sharply and also that the roof had a steepened upper end.


Loven refutes these ideas, by demonstrating that a more accurate ancient sea level figure and with the realisation that the top of the ramp was inclined to fit the stern of the ship, means the roof does not have to conform to this.


These diagrams illustate the main differences shematically -(technical draughtsman not I am. Ed.)

A : LAND SURFACE
B: MODERN SEA LEVEL
C : ANCIENT SEA LEVEL
D : UNNECESSARY INCLINATION OF ROOF
E : PROFILE KINK CAUSED BY CLASHING GRADIENT DATA
F : EACH AUTHOR ARGUES FOR A DIFFERENT LENGTH OF TRIERES
G : SHIPSHEDS' MODEL RAMP DOES NOT REACH THE ANCIENT SEA


BANG! THUD! CRUNCH!


Loven repeatedly proves errors in the Shipsheds reconstructions of the Zea structures. He is not backward in coming forward with criticism.

'the reconstructed length presented here is based on hard data not on architectural hypothesises(sic) such as the alignment of the columns of the lower end or guesswork about the length of ancient triremes.'

'Calculations such as these, which disregard the established measure of sea level change, inevitably lead to erroneous results.'

'Rankov fails to understand that an extrapolation to this depth, or to a minimum sea level change of -1-90m, as presented in Volume I, would automatically invalidate his construction.'

'No evidence found in the shipshed superstructure at Zea or Mounichia supports Rankov's reconstruction.'

etc etc.  CRASH BANG WALLOP




One of the unkindest cuts of all is where Rankov actually cites Loven in support of reconstructions which Loven does not agree with !!!
 

Specifically, Shipsheds reconstructs the roofs of the shipsheds as being steeper at the top of the slipway because the ramp is inclined more steeply at its end to accommodate the upcurving stern.

This can be seen here where the ramps are almost fully preserved at Oiniadai on the north side of the Gulf of Patras.

Diffendale at flickr has many great fotos - HERE

Loven and the Zea Harbour Project team, however, have established that the uppermost parts echoed the steeply curved sterns of the ships but the roof did not need to as the ship remained at a constant angle all the way up the slipway.As shown above -- Wonky Shipsheds.

CRUUUUNCH


The number of brickbats, slings and arrows which Loven casts upon his foes is too many to fully recount here. We will finish with the deadliest payload delivered to the heart of the Death Shed which cruelly damages and undermines the structure erected by the Dark Side.


In establishing the plans and reconstruction  of the Phase 2 and Phase 3 shipsheds at Zea, Shipsheds uses findings of the Zea Harbour Project, and Loven personally, without accrediting them!

The ZHP excavated the submarine parts of Phase 2 shipsheds in 'some of the harshest and most difficult conditions in the history of archaeology'. Unacknowledged in Shipsheds.

 The divers had to contend with all kinds of pollution in the restricted waters of the harbour. Chemicals damaged their suits and bodies....

The submarine parts of the shipsheds were identified by Loven. Unacknowledged.

59% of the planned features on the reconstructions by Pakkanen were identified by ZHP. Unacknowledged..

Other figures present findings misleadingly or ambiguously.

In summary, as Loven puts it..
' The failure of these scholars to follow accepted citation practice is disappointing,'

 One of the most egregious aspects of the whole matter is that Jari Pakkanen was Loven's PhD supervisor at the time of the fieldwork being carried out !!!!!!!

 The last word, as the fragments of Shipsheds' chapter on the Piraeus scatter in the wind, is Loven's....

'The resulting catalogue entry, "Piraeus", is thus fatally flawed and should be treated with extreme caution'

THE FINAL SALVOES WERE ENOUGH TO DEMOLISH THE DEATH SHED (Thanks Cornelia Parker)

'Well it turns out we were not needed. The whole thing was about Death Sheds, not Death's Heads.'

Bjørn Loven atZea Harbour Project here

 

Loven Skywalker

DISCLAIMER
Confused ? I was. All actors and events in this production may not have any relation to your or anyone else's reality.

See Loven describing Zea Harbour Project here




See a reconstruction of the military installation here