We now explore the Bronze Age capacity for ocean-going travel. Gavin researches The Jason Voyage by Tim Severin, as a means of seeing whether such an ambitious voyage might have been possible so many thousands of years ago. When Homer wrote the Odyssey, around the 8th century BC, he said that Jason and the Argonauts’ brave and epic voyage in search of the Golden Fleece was already ‘a tale on all men’s lips’. Critics have been sceptical. The voyage couldn’t have had any basis in reality, they argued, because this was too far back in time; the technology simply wasn’t in existence. However, author and adventurer Tim Severin’s aim had been to find out if Jason could have really sailed to the Baltic in 1300 BC.
“. . . We hoped to track them [the Argonauts] in reality. So we rowed aboard the replica of a galley of Jason’s day, a twenty oared vessel of 3,000 year old design, in order to seek our own golden fleece …”
Could it have been the Minoans who developed the art of seafaring? Did they have a far-reaching tradition that made them better sailors than, say, the peoples from mainland Greece?
Another piece of the puzzle came from an article in the Times newspaper: quartz tools at least 130,000 years old, such as hand axes, cleavers and scrapers had just been found in an area of southwest Crete from Plakias to Ayios Pavlos, including the famous Preveli Gorge. They dated from the Lower Palaeolithic period. The fact that Crete has been isolated from the mainland by the Mediterranean Sea for five million years told the archaeological team that these early settlers must have arrived by boat. Professor Curtis Runnels of the Plakias survey team told the newspaper: ‘[They] reached the island using craft capable of open-sea navigation and multiple journeys – a finding that pushes the history of seafaring in the Mediterranean back by more than 100,000 years.’
Further reading:
Homer – The Odyssey: http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.html
Tim Severin: http://www.timseverin.net/
The Jason Voyage:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671498134/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=gavinnet06-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=0671498134
Jason and the Golden Fleece: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/greeks/jason_01.shtml
New York Times: On Crete, new evidence of very ancient mariners http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/science/16archeo.html
