Now that The Flame Before Us is happily released,  my thoughts are turning to the next venture. I have several ideas which I want to pursue, but the one for today involves a sea journey, out from Phoenicia along (and ultimately outside) the Mediterranean Sea.  Right now I do not have a working title, but the action will start very soon after Flame finishes.

But leaving aside plot details, this means that I have been reading up about ships and shipping in the ancient near east and beyond. Now, much Mediterranean shipping of that time was purely coastal, returning to beach on a handy shore as night fell. But there were what you might call “long-haul” vessels as well, which even if they routinely remained in sight of the coast for navigation, were fully able to remain at sea for long periods of time.

A lot of our information about these comes from shipwrecks, such as the one recovered from the south Turkish coast which has provided a wealth of information about 14th century BC maritime life. She was lost approximately 100 years before the events of In a Milk and Honeyed Land. The ship was carrying about 10 tons of copper ingots, a rather smaller quantity of tin, and a wide selection of valuables and other cargo originating in Mycenaean Greece, Cyprus, Canaan, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, and various parts of Europe. The ship herself was around 15m in length. Scientific American reckoned that it was one of the ten most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century.

So shipwrecks give us a lot of information, and pictorial evidence from various sources gives us more. For example, the pictures of Rameses III’s battles against the Sea Peoples show us both Egyptian and other vessels. We do not always know if the artist meant the drawing to be strictly accurate, particularly where rigging is concerned, but they are a good start.

There have been several recent reconstructions of ancient sea-going ships, such as the Phoenician vessel that I blogged about some time ago, based on a ship dating from about half a millennium later than the Uluburun wreck. The best known mariners of this era were the Phoenicians, but many other nations had their own ships as well.

Something else that I recently found out is how prevalent river transport was across much of Europe… but this will be the subject of another blog.