Could we build huge classical warships today?

Factual Questions
1

Gibbon mentions that in the Hellenistic era Demetrius Poliorcetes built warships of fifteen or sixteen banks of oars and that Ptolemy Philadelphus even built a colossus of forty banks of oars, though this was never used in war. Wikipedia says that the latter “was 130m long, required 4,000 rowers and 400 other crew, and could support a force of 2,850 marines on its decks.”

The historian goes on to remark that the art of constructing such enormous vessels was lost to the 10th century Byzantines (whose naval tactics he is discussing) and that the art was also unknown to the “mechanicians of modern days” (ie the 18th century).

So, with the advancements in knowledge since Gibbon’s time, could we build such ships today if we desired or is the secret still lost?

2

Well, I hate to say this, but Gibbon was a terrible historian. He had the obnoxious and dangerous tendency to project what he wanted to see onto the past or outright making stuff up because it suited him. Ironically, he was doing exactly what confused so many of our histories. (It’s also a bad habit that too many modern scholars indulge in.)

The problem with rebuilding ancient warships is that we can only guess exactly what they looked like, as we don’t have any surviving examples of the really big or complex ones. These were pretty rare even in ancient times. But yeah, given enough time we could do it assuming we had the exact specifications. It would take us longer and be more expensive, of course, because we don’t have a bunch of crasftsmen already skilled in making the things in that exact nowadays. If they lashed their quinquireme beams using a particular technique or knot, we’d have to learn that very well and then get a dozen guys to do it over and over.

Also, the reasons many of these technologies were “lost” is because they were utterly useless. Massive ships (relative to the standards of a given era) are usually few in number and ineffective in naval combat. Similarly, many of the cool tricks some old civilizations had were too closely tied to a specific resource. This might be a kind of iron, critical to high-quality Damascus steel , or perhaps the volcanic ash so necessary to Roman concrete.

3

we build the schooner Wyoming in 1909, 14oM long.

4
5

Or maybe the ancient stuff wouldn’t actually be called high quality today, but was only considered high quality at the time because it was superior in quality to it’s contemporaries. I’m sure we could make better cement than the Romans but we choose not to because of added cost and shortsightedness of our government when planning projects. Also our stuff (like roads and building) are subjected to much higher loads than what the Romans built.

6

I think the important question is if you mean build giant wooden ships using the exact ancient techniques originally used, or building giant wooden ships that look pretty much like the ancient ships but use modern advances in their construction. Making it wooden on the outside but with a steel frame and some sort of modern method of keeping it from sinking (including bilge pumps) isn’t impossible. I see that the most recent big wooden ship was 140 meters long, comparable to the ship that you cited, and it worked fine until it sank, killing all hands.

We did have access to a couple of relatively giant-ass ancient ships belonging to Caligula to study (for a while–they were recovered in 1931 and burned in 1944) so we do know a bit more about ancient techniques than we did in Gibbon’s time.

7

Why would it be difficult to built such a ship (rather small by modern standards)?

It certainly would be difficult to build a close copy of a ship for which there’s no plans or drawings. But if the goal is a vessel propelled by 16 banks of oars, no problem (apart from the cost and the fact that it would be useless). Among other things, we are much better at getting things like strength, shape and stability right before even starting construction.

8

Benito Mussolini drained Lake Nemi and recovered two very large Late Roman ships in a very small lake. I’m gonna speculate on pure guesswork that he would have later used them as models to reconstruct shops. He was kinda a blowhard, and ( like Napoleon ) big on historical parallels between him and the Wonder That Was Rome.
However they perished in the Second World War and so did he.

Ninja’d

9

I strongly disagree but even if he were what is there in what I quoted from him of ‘projecting what he wanted to see in the past’ or ‘making stuff up’? Gibbon is renowned for his use of primary sources, which he always cites and quotes from extensively. That’s not the mark of a terrible historian.

As for elsewhere in his work, yes, of course he is guilty of projecting the values of his age on to the past but there are few historians even today who do not make such value judgments.

Have you actually read his work BTW? That’s a very odd comment for someone who has.

10

Not difficult at all … but it may not be exactly like the original … we have the HMS Discovery floating around but no one wrote how the original was rigged … we can only make educated guesses today …

Another problem is that building ships this way may no longer be lawful … my understanding is that restored steam locomotives cannot use the original design for the boiler … too unsafe … it has to be new with contemporary design … I don’t think we can chain 4,000 slaves to the oarstocks anymore …

11

There’s a difference between “lost because we don’t know exactly how they did it” and “lost because we don’t know any way they could have done it”.

And then there’s “lost because you can’t afford to pay thousands of skilled craftsmen for 20 years to build this stuff, and besides you’d need to train those thousands of guys in the first place.”

Also note that although triremes had three banks of oars, the higher numbered polyremes weren’t numbered for their oar banks. So a quinquereme probably only had 3 banks of oars as well, not 5.

12

As suggested in another post, the advancement between 18th and late 19th/early 20th century wooden shipbuilding was iron strapping to increase the longitudinal strength. Ships such as Wyoming (140m), or the wood hulled ironclad Dunderberg from the 1860’s (115m) and others over 100m in modern times had this feature, ie were not purely wooden ships, though still considered so in general category. And even so the longitudinal strength of the longest ones was typically a weakness in practical service. Although, the use of iron strapping definitely increased the max length of truly practical wooden ships.

OTOH the dimensions of similarly long ancient ships (or Chinese ones of the Middle Ages of similar claimed length) are not rigorously documented. There’s limited value to trying to guess what techniques made 100m+ wooden ships practical prior to the 19th century when besides not knowing the details of their construction, we’re not 100% sure they were really as long as claimed, or if so at all practical.

ETA: the general techniques of building galleys is considered well enough understood that the Greek Navy’s Olympias is viewed as a true replica of ancient Greek triremes. Only 37m long though so the great claimed length issue doesn’t enter in. As was pointed out above, above ‘trireme’ the numbers don’t imply more than three levels of oars, but more rowers per oar and/or the number of oars longitudinally.

13

It’s pretty easy today to go back and look at Gibbon’s sources.

The book is available on archive.org, the relevant passage on p. 235.

The discussion is of ancient reports of giant ships, which he refers to as being more for “Ostentation than Use” and mentions that some contemporary that saw them said they were “built with more than human art.” Modern-day historians might take this as a sign that art involved was exaggeration, but nevermind. The particular passage is the last in a series of ever-increasingly ridiculous large ships. Arbuthnot says “I shall not enter into the Credibility of this Description…” Well, of course not. He knows about the propensity of ancients making their rules more powerful and their foes more deadly than reality could warrant. He merely goes on to say that, if this were true, then it would have compared to a modern ship in these ways. He also preceded that with a discussion about how the highest row in triremes would have difficulty reaching the water, and that more banks of oars couldn’t be stacked over one another but would have to be stepped or “chequer’d.”

Gibbon ignores the context, skips over the caveats, and abstracts the largest number for his footnote. BTW, Arbuthnot does mention a floating palace on p236, but that’s a different ship by a different king. This is rotten historical research and writing.

14

Ark Encounter.

15

A nice smackdown on the idiocy of the design of Ham’s Ark.

16

The Antikythera clockwork mechanism is dated to about 150 BC, and the art and science to build that was definitely lost in the succeeding centuries, but there’s no doubt we could build one today: Antikythera mechanism - Wikipedia

Why would there be the slightest doubt 21st century technology could build a 130m wooden ship? The airplane with the world’s largest wingspan (97.5m) was built from wood in 1946 and had a max gross weight of 400,000 pounds: Hughes H-4 Hercules - Wikipedia

The Metropol Parasol is supposedly the world’s largest wooden structure which was completed in 2011. It does not appear modern man has lost the ability to build large things out of wood: http://www.thousandwonders.net/Metropol+Parasol

17

I think the knowledge of exactly how the boats were actually built period is lost.

I am sure we could build large wooden ships today, but would they be exactly to the splinter like what was built then?
I dont think there are any documented blueprints from back then to look at?

18

There’s a lot of criticism of Gibbon out there, including contemporaries. It’s no secret that a great many scholars did not think highly of his work. He didn’t merely project the values of his age, but invented history more to his liking by, at times deliberately, handwaving facts or even changing them in ways he liked.

Edit: There’s also a huge difference between liking his prose and admiring his judgments. The man could write very well, and he was in fine form for D&F.

19

Single biggest problem will be finding the wood. Back then the default vegetation across a lot of Europe was forest. Very old mature forest filled with large mature trees. Now it is just pasture. The trees are long gone.

We do still make replica ships. (eg Endeavour, Batavia) They cost a lot of money, and take a long time. When you are in competition with the fine furniture industry for the remaining oak, the price of your timber is going to be astronomical. Wiping out 1000 old growth oak trees for a single large warship simply isn’t a possibility.

Overall, we probably have enough information from archaeological finds to know how the boats were constructed. Knowledge of the tricks of the trade to do the work may have been lost - so we may go about things expending more effort than needed. Some information relating to exactly how the boats were made watertight or finished might be harder to get right. But there are likely traces on artefacts that provide most of the clues needed.

20

Gibbon is writing some absolute nonsense.
There is just no truth in it. He is only writing about attacking ships, which shrunk to make use of sailing speed and agility with the cannons,
and completely ignorant of transport , cargo ships, which were growing increasingly larger from the the 10th to the 18th.

He is just simply not stating that the Byzantines didn’t dissapear, they just stopped attacking with triremes, due to their uselessness against latin galleys (also with oars,but smaller so as to allow sailing … due to the requirement to tack when sailing, large was unworkable. ) and had no need to build attack triremes. Yes the Byzantines starting building biremes (two deck) boats with oars, but they also started building sailing transports larger than triremes.

“Michael of Rhodes also wrote a treatise on shipbuilding, which provided construction instructions and illustrations of the main vessels, both galleys and sailing ships, used by Venice and the other maritime states of the region in the first half of the 15th century.”. Ergo, nothing was lost, any 10th,11th,12th,13th,14th,15th century warship builder could build a war ship with or without oars, with or without sails. A ship is two or three decks high, it has 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 masts… it has oars, or it doesn’t. Its 10 metres long, or 20 metres long, or 30 metres long. Width doesn’t vary that much , the smallest ocean going ship is sort of short given its width … but to make a larger ship its far better to extend its length… just add more middle, add a module in with one more mast, 6 more cannons, 8 more oars, to the middle… if you want it longer just add more middle. All that happenned was that with the smaller sailing warships around, having a huge row boat for attacking became redundant… it was easy pickings to the enemies fleet of small attack boats.

BUT they certainly had larger transport ships for cargo , and for war use, for transporting horses , soldiers and supplies.