Does anyone here know a thing or two about pre 1800 Indian and Chinese shipbuilding?
I am rather interested in how Dhows and Junks were built and how junk rigs sail. I know a thing or two about Baltic, Atlantic and Mediterranean shipbuilding but Indian and Chinese Ocean is a bit of a blank spot. Were junks built without a keel? Were they all designed with inverse lapstrake? How pronounced is the tumblehome and were they built skin first?
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Okay so it's a specialist topic I realize now.
The Chinese had some huge ships which they used to sail to Africa/Arabia.
en.m.wikipedia.org
One problems with the Indians and ships was that some Hindus thought that they couldn't go abroad without losing their caste so some didn't sail much. I know that the Arabs sailed to Kerala to get wood for their dhows
I was actually gonna post something about Zheng He because we don't really know shit about the ships he used to sail. Got any info on that besides the (possible inflated) figure of them being 400 feet long?
I heard about this uncleanliness among Hindu's and that in the British empire the higher classes didn't have to serve overseas, but didn't they have a decent navy around 1300-1400?
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The interesting part is that the whole caste thing only afflicted the north indians, in the south it was a completely different culture, look at the Chola's for example, pic related is the heigh of Chola Conquests, large naval forces are recorded to have taken part in the conquest of the Srivijiyas coasts along with wars against Sri Lanka and one of the first battles that sealed the Chola as the Imperial rulers of the south Kandalur Salai was a battle fought to capture a strategic port and destroy the moored fleet there to suppress the Cheran Navy.
Further details en.wikipedia.org
Cholas were extremely militaristic due to the sheer rapidity of conquest and subjugation so Caste as a obstacle must have not existed for the recruitment of vast armies.
>The Chola raid against Srivijaya was a swift campaign that left Srivijaya unprepared. To sail from India to the Indonesian Archipelago, vessels from India sailed eastward across the Bay of Bengal and called at the ports of Lamuri in Aceh or Kedah in Malay peninsula before entering Strait of Malacca.
>But the Chola armada sailed directly to the Sumatran west coast. The port of Barus in the west coast of North Sumatra at that time belonged to Tamil trading guilds and served as a port to replenish after crossing the Indian Ocean.
>The Chola armada then continued to sail along Sumatra's west coast southward and sailed into Strait of Sunda.
>The Srivijaya navy guarded Kedah and surrounding areas on the northwest opening of the Malacca strait completely unaware that the Chola invasion was coming from the Sunda Strait in the south. The first Srivijayan city being raided was Palembang, the capital of Srivijaya empire. The unexpected attack led to the Cholas sacking the city and plundering the Kadatuan royal palace and monasteries.
>A Chola inscription states that Rajendra captured King Sangramavijayottunggavarman of Srivijaya and took a large heap of treasures including the Vidhyadara Torana, the jeweled 'war gate' of Srivijaya adorned with great splendor.
Never heard of the Chola to be honest. My historical knowledge of India starts with Vasco Da Gama landing near Calicut.
is there any reason why the Southern part was not affected by the Caste thing?
>Even before the accounts of the 1st century BCE, there were written accounts of shipbuilding and war-craft at sea. Professor R. C. Majumdar says that there existed a comprehensive book of naval-architecture in India dating back to the 2nd century BCE, if not earlier.
>During the reign of Raja Raja and his son, there were a complex classification of class of vessels and its utility. Some of the survived classes' name and utility are below.[39][volume needed]
>Dharani - The equivalent of modern-day destroyers designed to take combat to high-seas.
>Loola - The equivalent of modern-day corvettes; designed to perform light combat and escort duties.
>Vajra - The equivalent of a frigate maybe, a fast attack craft lightly armored.
>Thirisadai - Probably the battle cruisers or battleships of the day, they are reported to be armored heavily and could engage more than 2 targets in combat, and relied on its built rather than speed to survive and attack.[40]
>Though all ships of the time employed a small Marine force (for boarding enemy vessels), this class of ship seems to have had a separate cabins and training area for them.[41] This ship also is said to be able to engage in asymmetrical warfare.
That's neat, where they built and shaped anything like Dhows or did their construction differ a lot?
I think it has to do with the supposedly egalitarian inheritence from the IVC or the earlier Dravidian culture, caste was not occupation in the south and brahmins had to be more liberal with their rigidity further south they went because it was hostile territory and Kshatriya clans in the north were already too busy warring amongst themselves in the indo gangetic plain to provide enough bodies for large expeditions in the Deccan and beyond.
Trade and natural wealth made the southern peoples fairly powerful by 300 BC known as the Sangam period and Brahmins simply integrated into the existing complex societies, the south is in parts completely seperate from the north this is mainly due to exposure(often violent) to cultures from central and west asia, but the south remained largely independent of this for the most part until later 13th and 14th centuries.
May look like this, there are even records of two decked ships and coins with double masted vessels on the reverse.
Chola Ships that are closer to what they used back in the day.
The base of a shop dunno which size
Looks like overlapping planks from here.
How did the Chola dynasty collapse and what haperend to their navy afterwards?
Like all empires cost of wars and maintaining a robust and central governments burden the existing authority that eventually becomes bloated and unsustainable, along with the resurgence of the Pallavas and Pandyas, the costly occupation of Sri Lanka and the warrior peoples called Nairs migration into Chera lands.
The navy eventually was defeated by the Pandyas and the Pandyas in turn lost to the kakiteya and early Vijayanagara.
Ah I only heard of Nairs being a sort of warrior caste on the Indian west coast. What kind of warrior people were they? Highly advanced or barely iron age?
t-t-thanks
eh, indo aryan groups. They were largely assimilated and had the same tech level as others in the subcontinent.