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The evolution of the Viking ship. (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Hatty
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Jorn wrote:
From what I learned renovating my old boat, and reading on various wooden boat fora, the biggest problem are parts made of oak and iron, as the oak rusts the iron, while the rust rots the oak.

Apparently moss and pine resin (how Scandinavian-sounding!) do the trick, e.g. the Asterix Ship found at St Peter Port, which was 'caulked with a composite sealant of moss and pitch of distilled pine sap'.

For Atlantic voyages they used the knarr.

Everyone seems agreed that this was (even in the 1940's) the quintessential model of an ocean-going ship. While the Phoenicians, Venetians et al. were trading in and around the Mediterranean and building fortresses on tidal islands, their northern counterparts were crossing the Atlantic and North Sea and setting up trading posts on islands along the routes. When and where their paths crossed is anybody's guess.
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Hatty
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Jorn wrote:
That none of these Roman or Greek ships have been found, kind of makes me certain that they never existed.

It looks like a fantasy ship, dreamed up by scholars and art forgers that have never seen one. Three rowers sitting on top of each other, each with one toothpick of an oar is just stupid.

I don't say they never had ships, it is just what we are sold today is stupid. Put three men on each oars in order to lower center mass, and it might have worked.

Why do you suppose ancient ships are never found except in river beds?

A 'fantasy' ship may be authentic for the very reason that someone wishing to create a forgery will ensure the depiction is as lifelike as possible.

It was only in the late fourteenth century that perspective was used in art as far as I'm aware.
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Jorn



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Hatty wrote:

Apparently moss and pine resin (how Scandinavian-sounding!) do the trick, e.g. the Asterix Ship found at St Peter Port, which was 'caulked with a composite sealant of moss and pitch of distilled pine sap'.


All organic fibers shrinks when they become dry, and then swells again when they become wet. As the wood also swells, you don't really need tar to make a boat watertight.

What you need tar or line seed oil for, is to keep the wood and caulking from rotting.

There are many different types of tar though, and not all of them are made from Pine. Tar made from the bark of various leaf trees and bushes was used to treat leather. You also have peat tar.

Tars, often mixed with line seed oil, was also used to make ropes and clothing watertight.

A final use for tar, was to treat wounds, as it is a disinfectant against not only fungi, but also against parasites and bacteria.

I have also read that sailors used to have long hair, and that they dipped their hair in tar when they went out to sea, and washed it off again, probably with tar soap, when they reached the shore.

If you continue to boil the tar, you get pitch, and if you don't separate the leaf bark tar from the carbon you get soot, probably the origin of the word pitch black.

Hatty wrote:
When and where their paths crossed is anybody's guess.


I think they must have been the same people, as I doubt you could have a seafaring culture without tar and line seed oil, and both of these products seem to demand a cold climate.

Line seed oil from warm countries never dries, and to make enough tar for shipping, you need pine forests or peat bogs. That the southern languages lacks words for equipment to make tar, is also an indication that they always imported it.

Nowhere I have seen in Scandinavian archeology were Scandinavia ever separated from the other nations around the North Sea, so if Ireland, France, Holland is supposed to have been visited by Phoenicians, why didn't they go just a little bit longer? Since we traded with those that traded with the "Phoenicans", like tin from Cornwall, we too should have had Phoenician objects in our pre-Roman iron age, even if the boats we had at that time were fairly primitive.

The main reason the I think the story of a separate Phoenician development is wrong, is that you don't find an evolution of boats, from the dug out log boat, to ever more advanced forms of boats anywhere else than in Northern Europe, and then mostly along the North way.

Not only should you find intermediate forms where the Phoenician urheimat, you should find a huge number of smaller boats compared to the larger ones, for each time period. You should also find remains of discontinued seafaring technology in the vocabulary. Like a row of clinkers being called a seam, as the first boats were sewn with linen, bast or boiled spruce roots. These early boats were also tarred.

You should also find the tools you need to build a boat, and these tools should show the same technological evolution as the boats. As the tools improved, like say metal quality, you should also see an evolution in car and wagon technology, not to forget improvements in looms and houses.

To finish it off, here is a link to the Viking Ship museum, where one can see how some of these intermediate type of boats were build. There are a number of pictures that shows most of the process. The page is in Danish only, so you need some kind of translation if you want to read the captions.

http://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/baadevaerft/tidligere-projekter/den-udspaendte-traebaad/bjoerkebaaden-1-aar-450/
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Jorn



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Hatty wrote:

Why do you suppose ancient ships are never found except in river beds?


Wood will last a very long time in freshwater, because the wood is wet when the tree is alive. Trees were not meant to be submerged in salt water though, so they have no real defence against salt water organisms.

Another reason is that rivers carry silt, so that the boat might be covered with materials that keep the oxygen away.

A third reason is that riverbeds are fairly close to the ground, so that the covered ships are found from time to time.

I am pretty sure they are going to find a huge number of all kinds of boats in the northern "dead sea", that is the Baltic, as the deeper water there contains no oxygen.

It is also not completely true that ancient ships are only found in riverbeds. A number of boats have been found in both fresh water lakes and bogs in Scandinavia, and the 5 viking ships in Roskilde were found blocking a tidal channel in the sea.


Hatty wrote:
A 'fantasy' ship may be authentic for the very reason that someone wishing to create a forgery will ensure the depiction is as lifelike as possible.

It was only in the late fourteenth century that perspective was used in art as far as I'm aware.


In principle you are correct, but they were supposed to have had hundreds of these in just one battle, so the ships must have been a greater threat to the enemy than to their own crew. Putting rowers on top of each other moves the center of mass upwards, making for a very unstable ship.

Even more stupid is that they have space in the middle for more rowers per oar, but rather choose to put them on top of each other. Even today we say that people sit on top of each other, when we really mean that they sit densely packed side by side. That some academic read this literally as people sitting on top of each other is something I find highly probable.

If you look at the reconstructions, they were not even supposed to have been tarred, so the ones reporting on them forgot this bit also. Not even the ropes are tarred from what I can see, meaning that they too would rot.

They were supposed to have been painted though, but I doubt they used linseed oil, unless they traded with Northern Europe, as flax produces the wrong fats in a warmer and darker climate than the bright but cool northern summers. This means that the oil doesn't penetrate the wood, and doesn't harden (polymerizes) after it has been applied.

Imported Spanish linseed oil destroyed a number of old boats, windows and panels in Scandinavia a couple of decades ago, as people in the beginning did not know the difference. Putting sikkatives (metal salts) into it to help it dry did further damage, as this created diffusion dense barrier, hindering normal evaporation from the wood.

When the Renaissance painters created their masterworks, they almost certainly did it with imported oil from Northern Europe.
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Jorn



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Hatty wrote:
There are no oars at all on this hefty-looking vessel so presumably it would need to be lugged/ tugged when approaching a port. According to Caesar the Veneti used 'many tidal islands such as Ictis for their bases'. Just going to read Asterix.



The Veneti were the main naval power of Gaul. They dominated the trade with Britain, and had a fleet of solidly build ships well suited to local conditions. Caesar describes them as having shallower keels than Roman ships, which made them better suited for operations in tidal waters; as being constructed entirely of oak, with high prows and sterns which made them more able to resist the Atlantic storms, and also made them almost invulnerable to standard Mediterranean ramming tactics.


So basically the Veneti are the Dutch. The Dutch Cog was most likely flat bottomed, so that you could sail to a beach, anchor, and wait for the tide to leave the ship in an upright position. You could then do your trading, and just wait for the tide to rise enough so you could sail out again.

The Atlantic coast is also different than the Scandinavian, IIRC, in that sandbanks is a bigger danger than underwater skerries, so the cog never became popular there, as you needed a V-shape to keep a steady direction.

I don't know what kind of ships the British used at this time, but it might have been something in between.

As for the Mediterranean that Caesar talks about, if the Caesar story really happened, it might just have been the Baltic.
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Wile E. Coyote


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It seems to me that you might have a number of separate lines of potential development. These contraptions with oars seem to stem from something like an Egyptian river barge and are not particularly functional for longer seafaring journeys. The debate seems a bit fixated on how the oarsmen could be organised in layers? Perhaps the "Phoenician trading" ship developed from this route?

The Viking ship seems to have developed out of the sledge.
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Ishmael


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Jorn wrote:
Perhaps they had seen 15-16 century tall ships, and just imagined something similar with oars?


The exact same thought occured to me when I saw this picture:



...that someone had seen a tall ship and mistook the gun ports below deck as berths for oarsman. Is it possible that such a late-day error was telescoped back into time into records of supposed ancient history??

Actually, as I consider it, it's not unreasonable.

I have read almost all of the Aubrey-Martin ("Master & Commander") novels and one sequence struck me as significant when I encountered it. The author describes the tall ship at the center of the tales sailing into the Mediterranean and there encountering a pirate ship tireme/bireme (it was a rowed warship). I was shocked to learn that such boats were operating at such a "late date", contemporary with classic tall ships.

But of course ship design is as much a function of purpose and environmental context as it is of technology. For the Mediterranean sea, rowed ships make more sense in some contexts and for some purposes.

Now...all we need is a writer living in Greece who encounters tall ships for the first time and interprets them in accordance with the vessels he does know. Those written records get picked up by Europeans as little as 50 to 100 years later and are mistaken for copies of ancient documents of the classical world.
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Ishmael


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It's about time you folks started getting skeptical about chronology!!! For half a decade, I've been preaching this to deaf ears.
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Ishmael


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Jorn wrote:
So basically the Veneti are the Dutch.


Yes!

This is what has been in my head for some time now. The Dutch were the original European explorers of the New World, with the exception of the Spanish.

However....

The Spanish invasion of central america and Mexico was simply an extension of the reconquista which, properly understood, was the Spanish war of independence -- a civil war fought between the eastern and western portions of the Spanish Empire (the Empire that "spanned" Asia and Europe). As soon as the "muslims" (just a different branch of the same world religion at the time) were driven from Spain, the Spanish took off for the New World to take control of the existant slave plantations known as the Aztec and Incan "empires".
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Mick Harper
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The Dutch were the original European explorers of the New World, with the exception of the Spanish.

I trust you are not forgetting that the Dutch were the Spanish from the accession of Charles V in 1516 until c 1580 (revolt of the Sea Beggars etc). In 1580 it was the Portuguese that became Spaniards (accession of Philip II).
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Ishmael


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Mick Harper wrote:
I trust you are not forgetting that the Dutch were the Spanish from the accession of Charles V in 1516 until c 1580 (revolt of the Sea Beggars etc). In 1580 it was the Portuguese that became Spaniards (accession of Philip II).


My suspicion is that everyone was once Spanish. The empire broke into bits for reasons that remain unknown.

But I have a theory.
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Hatty
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The Dutch were the original European explorers of the New World, with the exception of the Spanish.

It seems pretty remarkable that the Spanish didn't know the New World existed. The Reconquista lasted about 800 years, the conquest of the New World about 40 years; as soon as the country was at peace, it turned to invading its 'new' territories.
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Ishmael


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Hatty wrote:
It seems pretty remarkable that the Spanish didn't know the New World existed. The Reconquista lasted about 800 years, the conquest of the New World about 40 years; as soon as the country was at peace, it turned to invading its 'new' territories.


Gibraltar is the gateway to the Mediterranean for those outside. But for those inside, Gibraltar is the gateway to all that is beyond, including the New World.

The Reconquista is all fiction, I suspect, but for the battle to control Gibraltar. The nation we know today as Spain broke away from the Spanish Empire simply by declaration (funny how we write "spanish" and not "spainish").

The war that followed was solely over control of the straights of Gibraltar. The remnant, original "Spanish" Empire (with its capital in you can guess where) had to be cut off from its slave colonies in the New World.

Once that job was done, Spain had a free hand to take control of those colonies---colonies which had been left neglected while the war waged. The independent Spanish would discover, upon arrival, that the slave states had fallen into utter chaos---chaos characterized by mass murder and superstition as the indigenous ruling class struggled to maintain power in the absence of support from their former old world overlords.

That, at least, is a story.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Jesus....

Indo....Germanic...Dutch ...Spanish and you all love the Veneti....Phoneti
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Jorn



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Ishmael wrote:

This is what has been in my head for some time now. The Dutch were the original European explorers of the New World, with the exception of the Spanish.


This is a map of average genetic distance in Europe.


http://www.nextnature.net/2008/08/genetic-map-of-europe/
These maps vary some what, but you always see the countries around the North sea forming a cluster.

As the languages around the North sea also are so similar, and because migration was so easy, I can't really understand how the Dutch could have done something that the rest of the North sea nations didn't do.

Anyway, I remembered reading about Norwegian and Danish emigration to Holland from the 1400-1700, did some searches, and found out that they think it was substantial. The men usually took work as sailors, while the women worked as maids, and both sexes usually changed to Dutch versions of their name, and married into the Dutch population immediately. I also found out that many went straight to America together with the Dutch.

I looked some more and found this:

English syphilis epidemic pre-dated European outbreaks by 150 years
...
Radio-carbon dating tests carried out at Oxford University, together with tree-ring dating analyses undertaken by the University of Sheffield, suggest there was a severe syphilis epidemic in Hull as early as the 1340s.
...
And from around 1300 substantial numbers of Norwegian sailors and merchants began visiting King's Lynn and Hull. Direct contact between Scotland and Iceland also began at about the same time. The main European overseas destinations for Norwegian sailors and merchants in this period was England. And it is precisely at this time that evidence suggests the syphilis epidemic in England erupted.
...
Although, according to other recent discoveries, the disease certainly existed in Europe in ancient Greek and Roman times (and probably even earlier), the syphilis bacterium had achieved an equilibrium with its human hosts and seems to have become much less virulent over time.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/english-syphilis-epidemic-predated-european-outbreaks-by-150-years-706243.html


This was obviously too much, so two American researchers looked at all the 52 reports (not the skeletons themselves) of Syphilis in pre-Columbian Europe, and concluded it wasn't syphilis after all, and if it was, they calibrated the c14 level for seafood, so that the Skeletons become younger.

No mention of the tree ring dating that was done in Hull...
http://phys.org/news/2011-12-skeletons-columbus-voyage-syphilis.html

The 1340 date also fits with the Norwegian bishop councils Statute from 1340, banning all sorts of sex outside marriage for the first time, although they had increasingly condemned it for a century before this.

I haven't looked into if other nations started having stricter sexual policies around the same time, but I don't find it improbable.

Ishmael wrote:
a civil war fought between the eastern and western portions of the Spanish Empire (the Empire that "spanned" Asia and Europe). As soon as the "muslims" (just a different branch of the same world religion at the time)

I think it might be as simple as monotheists against everybody else, and when the monotheists had won, they immediately started fighting over the correct worship of this monotheistic god.

I have a hard time swallowing a world wide empire though, mainly because we don't find a single world wide alphabet, and because we don't any trace of it in Russia. That the Spanish reconquista was a Civil war over some form of Empire, is something that I do find probable though.
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