Seagoing ships, tunas, and tassels in the Aegean Sea of the 3rd millennium BCE

By Dimitra Mylona.

As the 19^th century was coming to a close, Christos Tsountas, a charismatic and dynamic curator of antiquities in Athens, excavated the cemetery of Chalandriani in Syros on behalf of the Archaeological Society of Athens. This excavation was part of a wider research program in the Cyclades that pioneered the systematic definition and conceptualization of the Cycladic Civilization of the Bronze Age. Tsountas excavated 640 graves and brought to light many objects, offerings accompanying the people buried there: marble vessels and figurines, bronze tongs, needles and hooks, and many clay vessels.

Rowboats on the mysterious “frying pans” that didn’t fry anything

In those tombs were discovered for the first time the so-called “frying pans,” the shallow, circular clay vessels with a flat “base” and a short handle.  No one knows exactly what they were used for. They are consistently decorated on their external flat surface with a combination of rowing boats, stars, and abstract motifs.  Continuous spirals that cover the field around images of boats appear to represent the waves of an Aegean that never stays still.  The boats feature a fish emblem on one of their ends, their stem- or sternpost. They were certainly not actual frying pans, as they had not been exposed to fire. Were they oil mirrors used in fortune-telling? Were they wall decorations? Were they ritual vessels or perhaps vessels for the processing and trade of salt? These and other possibilities have been suggested, but the mystery of the frying pans remains.

The best preserved of these objects can be admired in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens and some in the Archaeological Museum of Hermoupolis as well as in many other museums abroad.

Frying pans were later found elsewhere in the Cyclades by other researchers, the number of known examples reaching today about 200. Also, engravings of spirals and ships, some as large and some smaller than the ships depicted on frying pans, were found engraved on stones and rocks in various Aegean islands. Some decorated walls of buildings or fortifications, yet others guarded passages and paths. Most ship images/engravings of this type have been identified so far at Korfi t’Aroni on Naxos, Strofilas on Andros and on the mysterious coastal site at Vathy, Astypalaia. Many of them (e.g. Strofilas) date even earlier than the ships on the frying pans, in the 4th millennium BC, at the point of transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.  Some are smaller vessels while others, like those at Vathy, seem to be as impressively large.

Based on these depictions, many researchers of the Aegean prehistory saw in the oared ships of the Cyclades the beginning of a long maritime tradition through which some settlements accumulated wealth and became centers of regional power. Those developments in the maritime ability of the inhabitants of the Aegean later contributed to the emergence of the well-known wealthy settlements and palatial centers of the 2nd millennium BCΕ.

The questions raised were many: why did the Cycladians choose to depict ships, stars, and spiral waves? Why were these ships long and narrow, like canoes, with a raised stern or bow and many oarsmen? What was their function? Was it commercial, piratical, or perhaps ritual? How are they related to earlier boats, whose images were carved into the rocks of the Aegean islands? What was the significance of the fish emblem? In other words, how are these ships connected to the societies of the Aegean islanders who depicted them on their pottery or on the rocks that formed part of their inhabited landscape?

How to understand ancient representations of ships

Understanding the artistic expression of past societies that no longer exist is one of the most difficult undertakings of archaeological research. How can one access what those who painted or carved ships, such as those on the frying pans, were thinking and how the images were received by those who viewed them? How did these depictions relate to their daily experience? In other words, what can we say about the importance of those long narrow ships had for the seafaring inhabitants of the Aegean in the 4th and 3rd millennium BCE?

Scholars approach this puzzle in many ways. Some, as Roxani explained in a previous post, study how people deal with the same issues in the present or in the recent past. They look for analogies between the present and the past, and seek to uncover multiple parallel possibilities for how things may have been in the past. Images such as those of the Maori war canoes (Waka taua) in New Zealand show us how the large Cycladic long boats may have functioned, although they are of course separated by thousands of years and vast geographical distance. They were encountered by James Cook in his 1769 expedition in the region and survived into the 20th century.

Ancient ships rarely survive to this day, and even known shipwrecks seldom provide a full picture of ship structure. Their traces are often indirect: stone anchors scattered on the seabed or the presence of exotic (imported) objects in places accessible only by sea speak of the presence of ships in the past. Engraved vessels on marble slabs at Strophilas, Andros, dating at the end of Neolithic period, in the 4th millennium, show rowed boats with raised bows (or sterns?) loaded with domestic animals, goats or sheep, or perhaps cows.  Those animals could have been part of expeditions to colonize uninhabited islands or transferred between established settlements to strengthen the existing herds. These images of ships and animals also remind us of the complementarity of land and sea economic activities, a theme also present in the decorations of the Musandam battils as Roxani noted in our previous post. The existence of ships that crossed the ocean or sailed close to the coast is certain. Their form, details, and use remain the subject of scientific debate.

Recently, new technologies have proven to be a very powerful tool in this research. For example, graduate researcher Panos Tzovaras, utilized the evidence from all the available representations of the rowed boats of the 4th and 3rd millennium and answered, with serious arguments, the question of whether the boats on the frying pans were commercial or not. He used computing and design programs to create the most likely 3D representation of these vessels and to simulate sea conditions (waves, currents, etc.) and the ship’s performance in them.  He concluded that the largest of these vessels must have been about 26 meters long and only two meters wide and must have had very low freeboards. It is not clear whether the high planked element represents the bow or the stern for most of them, although things are becoming clear on the engavings at the “Gate of te Ship” at Vathy on Astypalaia, where teh rudder is clearly depicted. These ships carried up to 34 people, rowers and others. It thus seems that with a full crew, there would have been no space for cargo. Additionally, the vessel would have been very unstable in the often choppy waters of the Aegean.

So what were these ships used for if not for commercial purposes? Why did the relatively small communities that built them and sent them out to sea think that it was worth investing resources and the labor of many people in them? According to Panos Jovaras, who refers to a story told by Herodotus (Histories 1.5.2), they could have been pirate ships, raiding other islands and foreign shores in search of glory and recognition of their power. Their adventures would be told again and again and their glorious ships would be depicted on the pan-shaped vessels.

Tunas, tassels and ships

The large long boats are depicted amidst waves that move incessantly like galloping spirals. These waves are also often depicted with stars or the sun. Ships, narrow and far, seem to tear the waves. Each had the powerful propulsion provided by dozens of rowers. On their prow, or on the sternpost according to others, large fish stand proudly gazing at the sea. With a torpedo-like body, crescent-shaped tails and large upright fins, it is clear that these are big tuna (perhaps Thunnus thynnus).

The largest of the tunas, the bluefin, and various smaller related species, appear in the waters of the Aegean twice a year: first when they migrate in large, dense schools, heading for warm waters, where they lay their eggs, and a second time, when they return, exhausted and scattered, to their feeding areas. Tunas pass by the Cyclades in spring, mostly in May and early June, and then again in the fall. Tunas are pelagic fish, and with the exception of some phases in their reproductive migration, they swim far from shore, often close to the surface of the sea, developing great speeds, up to 43 miles per hour! It is one of the few creatures that sailors encounter on the open sea.

The time tunas appear in the Aegean coincides with the sailing season, a crucial fact in the long age of sail (and oars!). An article by Christos Agouridis entitled “Sea routes and navigation in the Aegean of the 3rd Millennium” analyzes in detail the subject of sea voyages. The tunas therefore seem to have been the appropriate emblem to decorate (possibly as wood carvings) and perhaps to enchant the majestic long boats of the Cyclades at the beginning of the Bronze Age. Both boats and fish tore through the open sea, and both were indescribably swift. Beneath the sun and the stars, on the vast, ever-moving surface of the open sea, there seemed to be only the tuna and rowing ships. Tunas and ships had a lot in common!

The importance of tunas in the intellectual universe of the Cyclades islanders of the time is evident not only by their choice as emblems of the ships. We find fish, probably tuna, even without a boat, swimming among the waves under a bright sun on a pan-shaped vase from Naxos, and two more carved on stone floors at Strofilas Andros, all more or less contemporary with the pan-shaped vessels of Chalandriani.

One detail in these representations that has not, so far, caught the attention of scholars, is a pattern carved below the tuna emblem and seen in the images above. By a strange coincidence, these mysterious triangular or linear elements with fringes are reminiscent of garlands of cowrie shells and colorful decorations hanging from the prows of the fishing battils of Musandam, which Roxani wrote about in the previous post. It is not clear what exactly they are. Garlands of red feathers hang from the raised bow of the Maori war canoe Waka tua observed  in 1769 by James Cook’s expedition (see image above), while on traditional long-tail Thai fishing boats, the stern is decorated with colorful ribbons, garlands and scarves in honor of Mae Ya Nang, the deity that lives on the boat. It is possible that the tassels shown hanging from the Cycladic ships are something similar to these examples from other seas.

The significance of these decorations will remain nebulous. After all, as Roxani explained, symbols are fluid and change when circumstances change. The large Cycladic long boats sailed the Aegean for many centuries and such changes in the meaning of their decorations are more than possible.

However, the tradition of decorating long boats with emblems inspired by nature did not end in the third millennium BCE in the Aegean. It continued in the 2^nd millennium as well. The adorned, impressive ships that are depicted on a wall painting at Akrotiri on Santorini (Thera island), the city that was buried by a volcanic eruption in the 17th century had butterflies, flowers and birds as their prow emblem. But that’s material for a future post!

Do you want to know more?  We have suggestions.