a revolt in the island of Tyre, made use of 60 Pheenician galleys with 800 men to row them, but |
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was utterly defeated by the Tyrians with 12 ships which took 500 et ereitilies a
Sennacherib, who had sent the Rabshakeh to Hezekiah to reproach the living God (2 K 19? *), and demand the surrender of Jerusalem the second time within three years, took, a few years later, his Phenician shipwrights across Mesopotamia to the Tigris and built a fleet of his own, with which he made a successful raid on the Chaldean settle- ment in Susiana at the north end of the Gulf of Persia. It is these Pheenician cataphract triremes, with two tiers of oars, and having beaks, masts, and sails, that we see represented in the sculp- tures of Kouyunjik.+ In Sargon’s sculptures the Pheenician vessels of this time have 4 or 5 oars- men on each side, but in Sennacherib’s they have 8, 9, or 11, and also two steersmen. It was not until Sennacherib’s time that the Assyrians began to build war vessels, which even then were only imitations of Phceenician ones. These trireme war galleys were what is called aphract, i.e. the upper tier of rowers were unprotected and exposed to view. The apertures for the oars are like those
in queen Hatsepsu’s ships, no oars being shown in them in the drawings in either case. The beak is somewhat like the snout of a fish; the shields of the soldiers are seen suspended inside the bul- warks, they themselves being partly visible; the pilot is in the bow, and the steersman aft, with part of the crew standing near the mast, the two steering-paddles having blades in the form of the letter D, which is perhaps only conventional.
The war ships of Kittim (Dn 11°), which were to conquer Antiochus Epiphanes, are Roman vessels. In 2 Mac 4% we have the first mention of galleys (rperjpar).
B. New TESTAMENT SHIPS AND Boats.—An account of Greek and Roman ships of war (vjes paxpal, naves longe), of which ample details are given by Boeckh,} Graser,§ Guhl and Koner,|| and Torr, seems to be out of place here, as, apart from
* Rawlinson, Anc. Monarch. vol. ii. pp. 405, 449, ’
+ Layard’s Nineveh, 1st series, p. 71, etc. ; and pl. in Rawlin- son, Anc. Monarch. vol. ii. p. 176. 0. :
t Urkunden wiber das Seewesen des Attischen Staates, etc., 1840, § De veterum re navali. \| The Life of the Greeks and Romans, 3rd ed. pp. 253-264. | Ancient Ships, 1894,
5. WAR GALLEY IN THE SERVICE OF SENNACHERIB, KING OF ASSYRIA.
the fishing and passenger vessels on the Sea of Galilee, in which our Lord embarked (described in the AV as ‘ships’ [except in Jn 6”: *, where it has ‘boats’], and in the RV as ‘boats’ [Mt 4” 1422. 24, 32. 33 Mk 622. 45, 47. 51. ba Lk 52. 3.7.11 822. cafe Jn 677. 19. 22. 23. 241), the interest in ships mentioned in the NT centres in the voyage of St. Paul from Cesarea to Puteoli, about 60 A.D. During this voyage he and his fellow-traveller, St. Luke the physician, experienced what seems to have been his fourth shipwreck (2 Co 11%). The account of this voyage is remarkable for pee and conciseness in the use of nautical terms, though wanting in the descriptive details which a pro- fessional seaman would have added. In the Onomasticon of Julius Pollux of Naucratis in the Egyptian Delta, written about a century and a half later, we have a collection of Greek nautical terms, containing most of those used in St. Luke’s description of the voyage. Of the ship of Adra- myttium, a seaport of Mysia (which had then been for half a century part of the Roman province of Asia Minor), in which they embarked at Czesarea,
no details are given; but the two Alexandrian corn-ships in which the voyage was completed from Myra (Ac 2778), a port of Lycia, to Fair Havens in Crete, and to the island of Melita (28*), and thence to Syracuse, Rhegium, and Puteoli (28U- 12. 13), were evidently of large size, if the read- ing in both AV and RV of 276 as the number of persons on board, including the crew, besides a cargo of wheat, is correct.* This number was not extraordinary, as Josephus tells us that only a few years later he himself was wrecked on a voyage from Palestine to Puteoli in a ship having about 600 persons on board.
For the type of these ships we can refer to contemporary paintings found at Herculaneum and Pompeii which ‘afford valuable details, and have the advantage of synchronizing perfectly with the voyage of St. Paul, the catastrophe to which they owe their preservation having happened less than twenty years after his shipwreck.’ t The term mdotoy used by St. Luke throughout his account of this voyage, except in Ac 27, when
* WH and others read ‘about (#s) 76.’ + J. Smith, Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, 4th ed, 1880, p. 182.
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vais is used, was a common one for a merchant | abaft the mast, with ‘stays’ to support it from the
ship in general, but does not point to any one in particular of the many kinds of sea-going ships (phaseli, corbite, cybew, etc.), of the ‘round’ or merchant class (orpoyyiAn vais, navis oneraria) in use at that time; but the fact of the wrecked vessel being a corn-ship of Alexandria suffices. Lucian (2nd cent. A.D.) in one of his dialogues * gives an account of one of the great merchant ships employed in carrying corn from Egypt to Italy about 150 A.D. Her length was 180 ft., and breadth 45 ft., the depth from upper deck to keel being 434 ft. Such a ship moala carry a bur- then of 10,000 talents or amphore, equal to 250 tons. But ships of much larger capacity were built for special purposes, such as the one described by Pliny as having, about twenty years before St. Paul’s voyage, taken the Vatican obelisk, by order of the emperor Caligula, from Egypt to Rome, together with four blocks of stone to form its pedestal, the whole weighing nearly 500 tons, in addition to 1000 tons of lentils in the hold as a bed for the obelisk to rest on. The mast of this ship, which Pliny describes as the most wonderful vessel ever seen afloat, was a single fir spar, and required four men with extended arms to encircle it. This event occurred within Pliny’s own know- ledge as a youth of seventeen ; but if he is correct as to the size of the ship, that of the mast is almost incredible, unless he was in error as to its not being a built one.t Julius Cesar tells us that these ships carried movable three-storeyed tur- rets on the upper deck for defensive purposes.t