J03: Greek Lightstructures

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J03: Greek Lightstructures 1 Ancient Lighthouses - Part 3: Early Greek Aids To Navigation by Ken Trethewey Gravesend Cottage, Torpoint, Cornwall, PL11 2LX, UK Abstract: This paper offers an analysis of the methods of navigation used by the earliest Greek naviga- tors and their contributions to the building of lighthouses. Introduction his paper will consider groups of people who BCE Tpopulated the central Mediterranean over 0 thousands of years and who proved to be expert Hellenic Pharos of 323 to 31 Alexandria mariners. The landscapes in which they made their 280 homes were rugged and littered with thousands Classical of reefs, rocks and islands from the very small and 500 to 323 barely habitable to the large, resource-rich isles Archaic 750 to like Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete and Sicily where whole 500 new societies could seed and grow to maturity. Travel by sea between these widely separated col- Dark Ages 1100 to 1000 onies was of the utmost necessity, and where sea 750 Late travel was so perilous, the finest skills of technolo- Bronze Age gy and expertise were honed. Diverse at first, these Civilisation Mycaenean small centres of wisdom and progressive ideas 1600 to grew into a unified whole that we now identify 1100 as Greek, and that had a profound impact on the western civilization that many of us enjoy today. Minoan Helladic 2700 to 2800 to 1450 1600 Objectives 2000 The objectives of this paper are: 1. To describe the practices of sea travel in the different periods of ancient Greece. Cycladic 2. To identify the methods by which Greek 3200 to mariners navigated the seas. 2000 3. To determine sites where artificial aids to navigation were constructed. 3000 Early Neolithic Bronze Age Periods of Ancient Greece Period Civilisation ur understanding of the stages and develop- Oment of what is generally called the Greek civilization is as good as any other in history and therefore it makes a good place to start looking at early aids to navigation. Fig. 3-1 summarizes the periods under review, and readers should note that 4000 The Periods of Ancient Greece despite the apparent dividing lines of the different time periods, there is always a ‘fuzziness’ at times Fig. 3-1: The Periods of Ancient Greece. of change, especially in earlier times. 2 The broadest periods of human history have as Minoan. Although the great palace of Knossos been most commonly marked by the materials of was built around 1900 BCE, it was constructed the tools we used. For Greece, the Stone (Greek: on top of earlier layers of settlement. (A separate lithos) Age is generally considered to be divided culture developed independently in Egypt, where into 3 periods; Bronze and Iron ages followed ap- the Nile Valley was settled by homo sapiens around proximately thus: 7000 BCE, and upper and lower Nile kingdoms came together as one civilization around 3000 The Stone Age: BCE.) It was here that two very early forms of Palaeolithic (Early): from ca. 2500 kya to writing were discovered, known as Linear A and 10 kya B. Because they were generally concerned with Mesolithic (Middle): from ca. 11 to 9 kya financial records, Linear A and B scripts contain no Neolithic (Late): from 10 kya to around 5.3 contemporary statements of history of the Minoan kya - 8000 to 3300 BCE. (or Mycenaean) cultures, and a clear idea of the The Bronze Age: from 3300 to 1200 BCE roles of these scripts remains elusive. Our under- The Iron Age: from 1200 BCE standing of these earliest civilizations relies heavily on archaeological evidence and interpretations of It is important to note that dates corresponding the earliest Greek myths and Homeric epics, which to these Ages can only ever be approximate, for were written many years later. they vary depending on the geographical region Before 3300 BCE, traditional archaeology re- because civilizations developed at different times gards the entire region as being in the Stone Age, in different regions. Neolithic times were charac- a period of very modest technology without the terised by early farming activities - the domestica- benefits achievable from the possession of metal tion of plants and animals - and there is evidence tools. There is evidence for the building of monu- of human agricultural activity on mainland Greece mental buildings and fortifications in the so-called at Thessaly (Aeolia) in central mainland Greece, pre-palatial period on Crete of 3300 – 1000 BCE, and on Crete at Knossos (or Cnossos) around but these are always attributable to buildings of the early 7th millennium BCE, though we should high significance. remember that earlier sites may yet be discovered In numerous publications Heyerdahl has pro- on mainland Greece. The settlement of the Cy- posed the export of a Mediterranean culture clades islands of the Aegean occurred in the late across the Atlantic Ocean, based upon the con- 6th and early 5th millennia BCE, but the period struction of rafts made from papyrus reeds in the known as the Cycladic Period was essentially more period before 3000 BCE.3 There is no reason to advanced than Neolithic and took place in the disagree with this hypothesis, except to say that early Bronze Age.1 The term ‘Helladic’ is used to such craft, though paddled, relied on being carried denote an equivalent stage of development on the along by wind and tides and were only crudely Greek mainland. To have reached Crete and the navigable. They were not practical for regular jour- islands of the Cyclades, humans were clearly using neys for the purposes of trading across the entire the seas for travel from an early time. For exam- Mediterranean. Additionally, it is hardly likely that ple, the exploitation of obsidian from the island of the amount of sea travel involved in the use of Melos (or Milos) took place before it was settled.2 papyrus rafts merited any kind of navigational aid Archaeological investigations of the search for ob- worthy of description as a lightstructure. sidian in the Mediterranean have shown that travel Seagoing vessels in the Aegean first used sail to Melos was difficult for early travellers, but long, around 2000 BCE. Trading by sea between the open-sea journeys were motivated by the need to Minoan and Egyptian peoples between 2000 BCE find new sources of this stone that could be made and 1750 BCE is supported by finds of lapis lazuli into sharp edges for cutting tools. (See Part 2 and from Mesopotamia, gold, ivory and alabaster from Fig. 2-4.) Egypt, ostrich eggs from Egypt and Libya, and am- The earliest civilization of significance in the ber from the north.4 Mediterranean as a whole emerged on the island The geography of Greece played a big part in of Crete around 3000 BCE at Knossos and is known determining its early history because the south- 3 ern mainland is essentially an island, joined to the Sardinia. These conclusions remain the subject of northern mainland only by a small stretch of land debate today.5 Whatever, the cause, the effect was 6.4 km in length, centred on Corinth, a location destruction across a wide area of dozens of major that will be considered in more detail later. This cities, including Mycenae, in a narrow time-win- peninsula is called the Peloponnese. dow sometime around 1100 BCE. This event is The Minoan culture flourished unchallenged for often referred to as ‘The Bronze Age Collapse’.6 The about 1250 years from 2700 BCE until 1450 BCE. culture that is today referred to as the ‘Western Over four centuries, a new power arose at Myce- Culture’ is a direct derivative of the blending of the nae in the Peloponnese around 2000 BCE and was Hellenic culture with the remnants of the Eastern in significant competition with the Minoan people Roman Empire that took place around 300 AD, and by 1600 BCE. A struggle for power between them about which more will be written later. However, was inevitable and by 1450 BCE the Minoan civili- we need to briefly consider what is known about zation was in serious decline, replaced by the more ‘the Sea Peoples.’ powerful people of Mycenae. There was significant interaction between Knos- sos and Mycenae, separated by over 200 km of The Invasion of the Sea Peo- sea, and it is clear that travel across such distances ples was common. Whilst much of the distance could here is a well known period of history during have been covered by navigation along the coast Twhich a series of great - some might say, cat- from one point of known land to the next, there aclysmic - events brought about major changes was also a portion of voyage across open sea. Such to the human social order in much of Europe and distances could not have been covered in one western Asia.5 The details of those devastating period of daylight and the ships must have used events are beyond the scope of this short descrip- celestial navigation or some other kind of night tion, but two of them included the termination navigation. In all of the history of these times, of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations and there is no known written or archaeological record major displacements of populations out of geo- of any structure resembling a lighthouse as we graphical areas they had inhabited for centuries. might know it today. The sequence of events - the Bronze Age Collapse By 1450 BCE, the Mycenaean sphere of in- - likened perhaps to the falling of lines of domi- fluence extended across southern and eastern noes, started in the twelfth century BCE and the Greece, the Aegean islands, the western shores of consequences lasted, in some cases for more than Asia Minor and Cyprus.
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