Talk:Ships of ancient Rome

Other types

Noting some types listed in Ematinger-2015: navis aperta, moneris, navis longa, navis tecta, navis strata, navis constrata, or liburna. Mathglot (talk) 20:15, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Those which don't already have an article should have redirects created for them, pointing to the appropriate section. Mathglot (talk) 06:27, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Günther quotation

Cross-posting the translated quotation (diff) from Günther-2007, because it may be useful here:

Strikingly, the term aktuaria, which is encountered again and again in the written record, according to Isidor von Sevilla is to be assigned to the class of oared sailing ships. It is sometimes even used as a synonym for this type of ship, as can be seen from a remark by jurist Vulpius Marcellus (mid-second century AD). Regarding the question of whether or not a given class of ships in the empire can claim postliminium or not (Dig. 49, 25,3), only four categories count for him: the navis longa (long ship = warship), navis oneraria (= cargo sailor), navis piscatoria (= fishing boat), and the navis actuaria.

According to Livy, naves actuariae could be manned by up to 30 oarsmen (remiges), which according to the usual thwart spacing on ancient rowing ships suggests hull lengths of over 20 m, but they also operated in much smaller versions as so-called actuariolae. The ship marked as actuaria on the Althiburos mosaic shows a galley equipped with a large square sail and a small artemon sail (headsail), which has a very peculiar front contour with a nose tapering directly above the waterline and a bow parapet swinging back concavely above it and at the same time diverging in a V-shape. These features can be observed in a number of other representations of ships in the Mediterranean region, some of which offer clear indications of cargo (e.g., amphorae) and function (such as for transporting wild animals). The bow shape just described probably also made it possible when the need arose to quickly equip vessels of this type with a ramming device and to use them for naval combat.

The Livy comment that Günther quotes above is at Livy XXI:

"The navis actuaria, 'pinnace', was worked by sails and at least 18 oars, and as many as 30 (cf. 25, 30, 10), (distinguished from the onerariae, which had only sails). They were used as transports, and for active service".

Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 21:34, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Expanding article scope

I'd recommend renaming this along the lines of classical ancient ships so that it corresponds with medieval ships. Limiting it to just the Roman Empire would make for very abrupt and artificial cut-off points at exactly 27 BC and (possibly) 330 AD. It would kinda exclude any non-Roman seafaring entities before they were gobbled up by the Romans. Peter ^Isotalo 01:32, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to this in principle, but it seems too soon to make a good judgment call now, before we know how much material we're going to end up with as the article is fleshed out and expands. I believe I understand what you're going for here: a desire for parallelism in that the "Middle Ages" is a historical periodization without mention of place, as is classical antiquity, implying that your choice might be a better title wrt parallelism with the medieval article; is that a fair statement of how you're viewing this? If so, consider that "Medieval ships" actually is limited in place also, starting from the very first sentence, where the definition of the article scope is "The ships of Medieval Europe were powered by sail, oar, or both" and on through the remainder of the article which never mentions anything outside Europe; the point being, that Medieval ships is already defined by both time and place (i.e., "medieval" + "Europe") in its content, if not in its title, which parallels the current Draft title. Maybe I missed what you had in mind there, if that's not it. Anyway, the more important factor for me, is we don't know how much stuff we will end up with here, and maybe it will be easier to organize an article on a more limited scope, and maybe even there's even too much available and we'd just end up having to split it again.

That said, I get the point about the artificial cutoff points, and that does seem problematic. If we changed it from "Roman Empire" to "Ancient Rome", would that allay some of your concern? That would eliminate particular cutoff dates, and also bring it closer to the scope of your title. I think where we should go from here, is to see how the sources treat this question: are there books about ships in ancient Rome (or the Roman Empire) or primarily just "ancient ships", and is there a strong tendency to one versus the other? Something else that might be helpful, is to check out tertiary sources, and see how they divide things up. The whole concept of periodization and scoping choice is an interesting historiographical question, and to the extent possible, we should probably reflect the sources for the title choice, although I don't think we're straitjacketed by their choices either, since we are an online encyclopedia, which is a different animal; nevertheless, we can take some guidance there. Mathglot (talk) 03:52, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

I think the definition at classical antiquity might be something to work from. The emphasis is on the not-too-strict "centered on the Mediterranean"-notion. What you'll definitely find in a lot sources is that the focus is on the Mediterranean, but that it extended to the Black Sea and Read Sea in the east and the Atlantic in the West. Just estimating here, so don't quote me on that.

Either way, I agree that there's no rush to choose a scope before creating a decent amount of content. I'll dig into the sources I have now and see how they deal with periodization. Peter ^Isotalo 12:20, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

At a broader historical perspective, I would say that solid secondary sources are focused on antiquity ("ancient history") as a cohesive period. The starting point goes as far back as 3000 BC but always ends before the 5th to 7th centuries.

• Casson (1971) Ships and seamanship in the ancient world
• de Graeve (1981) The Ships of the Ancient Near East
• Meijer (1986) A History of Seafaring in the Classical World
• Morrison (1980) Long ships and round ships : warfare and trade in the Mediterranean 3000 BC-500 AD
• Morrison & Williams (1968) Greek Oared Ships 900-322 B.C.
• Rodger (1937) Greek and Roman Naval Warfare
• Rougé (1975) Ships and Fleets of the Ancient Mediterranean
• Starr (1989) The Influence of Sea Power on Ancient History
• Torr (1895) Ancient ships

Works about later ships are focused on the Middle Ages, more or less narrowly defined in time:

• Hutchinson (1994) Medieval ships and shipping
• Pryor (1988) Geography, technology, and war : studies in the maritime history of the Mediterranean, 649-1571
• Rose (2002) Medieval naval warfare, 1000-1500
• Unger (1980) The ship in the medieval economy, 600-1600

There has to be hundreds, if not thousands, of works about ships or maritime history more tightly focused within these timeframes. Probably plenty that cover both ancient and medieval (or simply all of human history). But I believe it's rare to find works that have cutoff points in the middle of the ancient and medieval periods, say from 150 AD to 1300 AD. If they do, it's because they are focused on the timelines of specific political entity or something that is independent of the history of ship design as such. Peter ^Isotalo 12:37, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

I totally believe you that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of works out there for the broader topic, and it would all be fine, if we could actually get someone to volunteer the time to do it. But that is quite a major expansion in time and in space, and so far, no else has stepped up even for the narrower scope (except for Gog, thanks!) so I've gone ahead and pushed to get a draft together based on the more limited scope for now, just so we can get *something* out there fairly soon, rather than expand the scope too much now and risk a draft that becomes stagnant for lack of volunteers to fill out a much larger topic and then see the draft end up getting auto-deleted. That said, I've no objection to expanding a wee bit from "Roman Empire" to "ancient Rome", but if we start including Greece, the Mediterranean, and eras back to the Egyptians and forward to the Middle Ages at this point, it'll never get done, at least, not by me. There will be plenty of time to expand the scope once it is published, so that's my goal, now. I think that can be achieved within the week, and maybe sooner than that. Once it's out there, it will start to be interconnected to other articles and have more visibility, and will start to attract more editors who might be willing to help expand it along the lines you suggest, and all the time in the world to do it, without fear of deletion. Mathglot (talk) 07:03, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

I was actually planning on adding content regarding trade ships from a more relevant broader perspective, especially ships used by Greeks and Phoenicians. Are you opposed to that? Peter ^Isotalo 17:46, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

As long as it can be sandboxed in a section apart, like, "Comparison with other eras" (or other nations), or "Precursors" or something like that and the topic remains the same (for now), then I think that's fine. Let's get it out there (I just did) so other editors can jump in and fix or add what needs to be fixed or expand it just for this narrower topic, and once that settles, we can figure out how best to change the topic of the article itself. There's still plenty to do on just the current topic. Or, you could even create a new article on the broader topic, of which this would become just a child article of that one in summary style. Mathglot (talk) 22:43, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

I was genuinely interested in helping out here, but it seems you've gone off and done your completely own thing here. I think the narrow scope is forced and unhelpful to readers. Fencing the topic off in this way only makes it harder to work on the article.

I'm pretty shocked at the quality of the text you think is okay to move directly into article space. There's not even an attempt at a lead and it's full of pointless expansion templates. It looks like a WP:COATRACK with some extremely obvious errors, like a pic of a 17th century carrack or galleon and the "Terminology" content is a misrepresentation of the cited source followed by editorializing about Latin grammar. Most of the article seems to be recycled material from other articles. Peter ^Isotalo 23:16, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Shipbuilding

I was pretty much assuming the § Shipbuilding section here was just going to follow summary style and be a brief summary of a nice, long section about it at Ship building#Roman empire. To my surprise, there is no such section at that article, and in fact, the subtopic of Roman shipbuilding is mentioned only once in passing, in section Shipbuilding § Mediterranean. So we might as well develop content about it here first, and if it gets very long, then we could just export most of it to the "Shipbuilding" article, and then write the summary version here, topped with a {{Main}} link. That's kind of how I hope it goes, but it depends how much is out there about the topic. Seems to me I ran across a couple of books on the topic iirc, and if that's true, there's probably no lack of material for a comprehensive treatment of it. Mathglot (talk) 02:53, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

That section might also include something about maintenance and repair. I forget where I read it, but they didn't have dry docks, so maintenance was problematic for them. They didn't even have the technique (which has a special name which I forget) of rolling the ship way over on one side, then the other to permit repairs of the hull that way. Mathglot (talk) 06:32, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Sources

I would say that https://www.worldhistory.org works as a "External links" entry here. It's a pretty good starting point as a tertiary source to get a broad overview, but we already have plenty of solid secondary sources. It won't actually add any additional details and any synthesis it might contain is questionable since the author is not a published author or expert, just an enthusiast. Peter ^Isotalo 10:29, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes, my sentiments exactly. Mathglot (talk) 05:55, 15 July 2023 (UTC)