Why were Greeks so obsessed with coasts?

Why were Greeks so obsessed with coasts?

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walking is hard, boats are easy

Did the Greeks just flee from their ports and cities in the Western Med when they fought against the Phoenician/Tyrrenian coalition in the battle of Alalia?

The sea is bountiful

kinda this a boat is no walk in the park but its fast and can carry alot of goods

Trade, bruh.

This is kind of true. Massilla for example was mostly there to trade with the Celts, shipping things back to Greece by sea was easier and safer than overland trade.

It was faster but not necessarily safer. You could get caught in a storm, catch a disease from the poor living conditions on the boat, or get captured by pirates.

they just copied what the phoenicians had been already doing for eons

Easier to defend
Faster to travel
Warmer climate

Even today, most trade in the world is by sea. And we can fucking fly. Imagine back then when the alternative to navigation were animals or feet.

They get +1 food from sea tiles.

>eons

more like one century before, and still, that's false, if you take into account that Myceneans (Bronze age Greeks) traded with the Western Mediterranean people since 1400 bc.

but I mean you could go from Athens to Alexandria in like a day

In anatolia mountains are parralell to coast so going inland was hard and costly.

>1400 bc
thats within the zenith of their power

phoenician civilization goes back to 3200 bc

>phoenician civilization goes back to 3200 bc

No, it doesn't, you may say that there were some settlement in Lebanon and Syria, but there wasn't a phoenician civilization.

There are no traces of Phoenicians in the Western Med untill the 9th century bc.

The closest ones to Phoenicians in the Western Med before that date could be merchants from Ugarit, which is considered by some to be a Phoenician/proto phoenician port, though they didn't consider themselves Canaanites so I wouldn't call them that, merchants from Ugarit might have joined the nearby Cypriots in some expedition to Sicily or Sardinia, but not Phoenicians from Libanon proper, such as from Tyre or Sidon

Really? How big is the Mediterranean anyway? I don't really have a good handle of the scale of Euro geography.

People who lives generally revolved around sea tend not to succeed when venturing inland.

It would take decades for such a voyage...

Around 2200 B.C., the Amorites came into the Levant, where they encountered the well-established city of Byblos.[xiii]Archaeologists working at Byblos have documented several courses of walls around the city which date back to 3000 B.C., attesting to the city’s longevity.[xiv]They also found signs of burning and destruction several times during the period 2200 B.C. to 2000 B.C., which reflected the repeated Amorite attacks. Each time, the public buildings and homes in Byblos had been rebuilt, and the city continued. The newly-arrived, land-oriented, military force of the Amorites clearly had an adversarial relationship with the well-established, sea-oriented and relatively peaceful Phoenicians.

Phoenician alphabet wasn't invented, and the Levantines hadn't reach the Western Med yet.

There were cities, that doesn't mean that they were the Phoenicians that we know of, they are their ancestors and still didn't have a long distance sailing tradition.

Phoenician trade and colonization of the mediterranean started at the 12 century BC.

False, there is no archeological proof of that, Cadiz dates back to the 9th century BC and is the oldest Phoenician city in the western Med, its foundation in 1100 BC is a Greek myth

large scale phoenician operations indeed came circa 1500bc, after eons of smaller scale seafaring operations

I don't think you people know what aeon means.

Completely false, there is Not even Phoenician pottery in the western Med before the 9th century bc

so phoenicians spontaneously became seafarinng giants with large scale operations circa 1500?

and remember pottery is not static it is dynamic and changes

also the seafaring culture of the phoenicians originates eons earlier in the red sea

Because water is life and if you see, nowdays far more people live on cost lines across the globe than on mainland.

That is right, my bad. I was confused with the start of political supremacy of determined polis (Sidon, I think), which later led to colonization (with Tire).

>circa 1500

What?
It's like the third time that I've states they didn't set ports in the Western Med before the 9th century BC, anyway it's Not like they started from nothing, the peoples of the Levant traded with Egypt and Anatolia by ship since centuries before, and they later established some colonies in Cyprus in the 11-10th century BC before venturing in the Western Med

Overland movement and communications is something like 30 times slower over land than at sea in an age before wagon axles and shit like that.

Nope. Emporion and cities like that survived unaffected.

Would have taken a few weeks as far as I know.

This

>two weeks

More like a few days

It was more profitable to transport goods and people by boat than by land

Why the hell would anyone want to live inland?

-it's easier to take goods to and from a port in boat than from a city in carriage
that makes good for commerce

-it's easier to bring and take lot's of people quick
-it's easier to defend because you have less flanks to defend and your enemy would need to land armies if wanted to attack from the sea (very difficult thing to do)
-in case of siege, you can still have supplies and reinforcements from the sea if not blockaded (giving another thing to bother to you enemy)
that makes it good for war

lastly, good commerce and safety makes it good for whealty people to come to the city, making it prosperous in the three main fields any 4X playes knows, science, economic and military

you can get mugged from bandits or killed by wildlife easy or get sick by land travel too
meanwhile, boats don't only allow you to carry lots of goods easier (try to make a horse or donkey pull a ton of goods and then try to do it with a boat, even an small one can) but also allows several travelers to travel together and even guarded if interested in their safety. also, cities used to make their fleets patroll the close waters to avoid pirates that would damage highly their economy while having guards patroll every fucking road or wood would be too expensive.

i doub't it. considering specially merchant ships used to travel close to coasts to avoid getting lost (remember they didn't had compass and if it was cloudy in night they had not a chance to know where the fuck where they or where were they heading) they would make a travel of roughly 1800Km, and their ships would get speeds of 8-10 knots (16,6-18,5 Km/h) only 4 days of travel. considering they would take some time to visit a couple of ports or get slowed down for a storm or something i would say a week is more possible.

kek, no. im sure you only read the back of the odyssey for kids. it's know miceans in 1400BC cuold get from crete to alexandria (some 600Km) in a day and that's doing half the mediterrean in it's south-north axis. odysseus took decades to do his journey because he was taken out of route several times, getting kidnapped by cyrse, polyphemus, etc.

Because coastal borders are aesthetic

i differ, british coastal borders in pre-hundred years war period in france are a total border gore and don't even get me started with european colonies in asia border gore

>uold get from crete to alexandria

They could go from Crete to the future?

Wow, impressing, shame we've lost such technology

/thread

you are right, i made a mistake due to referring to the other post. what i read was that they could get from crete to egypt in one day, not alexandria wich was obviously founded by alexander the great several centuries later.

>but I mean you could go from Athens to Alexandria in like a day
>It would take decades for such a voyage...
Few weeks

All wrong. It takes about 24 hours to sail in a modern boat with a non-stop decent wind (lack of wind is a constant pain in the ass in that part of the world) from Athens to Crete. It would probably take 5 days to a week to reach Egypt back then.

i highly doubt it, it would take less nowdays but then they didn't have compasses or GPS to locate themselves on a map and direction so easy like now and their ships were heavier and less efective to convert wind energy in ship movement.

Ships in the Bronze and Iron Ages relied more on rowing than they did on wind.

And travel by sea was very dangerous. Estimates suggest that in the bronze age as many as 50% of vessels were lost, but that is probably too high.

Either way, it was quick. Athens to Alexandria would not have been more than a 7 day voyage.

Also, the Greeks relied heavily on trade. Be it trade with foreigners for luxury/exotic goods or just simple grain shipments. Thus it was always better to establish their colonies near the coast.

They were also usually establishing these colonies with very few people initially, so they could not risk attacks inland without a route of escape or reinforcement.

And finally, coastal sites usually had a lot of arable land nearby which they needed for commerce and survival.

Their ships weren't as slow as you think. Triremes could do an average (!) speed of 6 - 7.3 knots, which is quite respectable even by modern standards. They could also go upwind do the the fact they had oars, this is also why the Greeks dominated the seas for a while (other people didn't have such ships).

Now the distance between Pireus and Alexandria is 535nm (source below), if you take an average speed of 6.5 knots that means they would have arrived there in 6-7 days (82 hours).

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first: im the same of and i cited there speeds of 8-10 knots wich was the speed from merchant ships oriented for commerce, not war.
second: the speed you cite of 7 knots in tirremes (wich are warships with very heavy rams in the tip) was the speed they achived in battles with hundreds of rowmen rowing to get high speeds making the ship basically a torpedoe with their ram-designed tips. they normally travelled at 4 knots.

also forgot that the distance you cite is a direct distance easy to achive with nowdays navigation methods. they had to take other routes where they could navigate following the coastlines

Well I just got that figure off google, I'm not an expert BUT that's an average speed not a top speed. And yeah of course if a heavy trireme can do 7 knots a merchant ship could definitely do 9. But I don't think they could keep that up for the whole journey, hence the 6.5 figure. I've sailed from Pireus to Crete a number of times and if the weather is not good it can easily take you almost 2 days.

They didn't sail exclusively following coast lines. You didn't follow the enter eastern coastline of the med. just to reach Egypt from Athens.

Well the only part of the route that is direct is after you exit Rhodes, in the Aegean you can easily navigate by sight, there are very few parts of it where you can't see any islands whatsoever to use for navigation. But yeah I guess it's unrealistic that they would sail from Rhodes to Alexandria in a straight line.

Maybe they sailed to Cyprus then went along the Levantine coast? Only other option I can think of is from Crete to Derna (in Libya), which equidistant to Pireus-Crete and then along the N. African coast.

as i said, you can't compare it with nowday navigation because it's much more easy to get a straighter line between you and your destination. before better methods of navigation, locating yourself with celestial navigation is hard if there are some clouds, even small ones and following coastlines was much safer and easy for them.

Fuck I did 82/12 rather than 24. lel.

It's 3.4 days.

I appreciated your post, OP.

> be sea-faring people
> settle near the sea

No surprise

no, they also used celestial navigation but following coastlines was very common because if the journey was gonna be long (i think from 4 days or more) they risked getting in a storm or cloud formation that would render celestial navigation useless and getting lost in the sea
that's where i took the 1800Km number used in my first post (i added some 100 kilometers to simulate time spent in ports and detours)

How did people sail from an island such as Sardinia then, if they only did coastal navigation?
there were some huge ports there on the island, and we have evidence of trade between Sardinia and the Balearic islands since the neolithic.

you could as well read what i write
"they also used celestial navigation"
doing a short "jump" without coastal navigation is not very risky because you have to keep direction without navigation for a short time but longer "jump" are risky and you may not have time to lose waiting for a storm to pass so you can read the stars

is that an actual modern reproduction or a mock up?

"no"

It is an actual modern reproduction, built by the Greek Navy. I'm sure there are more that have been built.

youtube.com/watch?v=36fiGac4M1c

>i added some 100 kilometers to simulate time spent in ports and detours

Well if you think about it, it probably makes monetary sense to visit as many ports as possible (without deviating from your course too much). Even nowadays, commercial ships tend to do this unless they're specifically carrying a single type of cargo from one port to another.

it makes sense. however i tought that journey as a travel of someone who wanted to go from athens to alexandria, not as a merchant that had a ship full of goods in athens and wanted to sell them, etc.
you are right anyway but not for my particular example i used to calculate the time of travel

In action

youtube.com/watch?v=INGl8LB9Zxo

Most ships would have many many stops, even 'passenger' vessels, which still would have been merchants who just happened to accept civilians as fare.

Fair enough. It would have been pretty cool regardless. Do you know if Greek merchant ships had oars like the triremes? I understand that going upwind when your opponents couldn't is a huge tactical advantage, but it would probably translate to a great commercial advantage too.

Yeah AFAIK that has always happened. In fact you can still book a cabin on merchant ships and travel the globe (not many people know this).

Not him and I don't really know the awnser, but more space for oarsmen is less space for goods.

as far as i know, almost every ancient ship had oars (at least untill they learned to use wind in every direction except upwind) but not like tirremes. being fast may be a commercial advantage but if it also means paying salary, food and everything to ~200 people just for some speed boost probably no one used tirreme like amount of oars just for commerce.

the big difference is that a merchant ship is meant to be fast, so they are made of thinner woods, not reinforced and not armored (like most tirreme tips) wich made them much lighter and faster using only wind. tirremes were much more heavy as they were used for war and to compensate that and still get high speed to attack thay had hundreds of people with oars.

Yeah both those make sense. I wonder why no-one managed to invent something like a horse-powered oar system. You could hook up a few horses on a bigger version of this, but I imagine the mechanics to transmit that power to an oar motion are too complicated.

pretty sure it's about the mechanics as you said but keep im mind, also, that even a donkey needs space, food and water, even more if you are going to have him pulling something for hours.

>decades

nah dummy

>as far as i know, almost every ancient ship had oars (at least untill they learned to use wind in every direction except upwind)

The sea peoples' ships in the Medinet Habu's reliefs are all depicted without oars

They wanted to bait you.

More like boats are fast, they're not exactly easy.

First reply, best reply.

as i said, "almost every", so obviously there were boats without oars.
also sauce, i can't find those pictures

...

No. You really can't comprehend how large the sea is. It takes months if not years to cross the Mediterranean. People would get lost forever in it.

>seriously claiming sea trade wasn't both cheaper and faster at the time of OP's map

If they walked m8...

Which you can do, get in the fucking sea.

And even longer to walk. Even rowing is faster than walking.

Fuck barbarians

Stop forcing this meme.