Homer and Navigating by the Stars in Prehistory
Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2014 2:32 pm
Dear All,
I'll have much more to say about this in an upcoming publication but as someone with the relatively rare experience of having rowed, sailed, and navigated large open wooden boats I feel obligated to, at least briefly, bring some clarity and practical insight to those with little or no exposure to basic seamanship and navigation with the unaided eye - "non-mariners". There are several highly counter-intuitive aspects to seafaring that typically are only acquired through experience and/or with the guidance of a master. When it comes to "all things nautical" very smart people with the best of intentions are capable of creating great falsehoods and myths when using only their intuitive thinking in a vacuum of experience. The most erroneous idea ever conceived regarding Mediterranean prehistory is that the cultures in the west (Iberia, Sardinia, etc.) originated and developed in total isolation from any maritime contact with those in the Aegean and east. The only way this concept can have any validity is if prehistoric humans were physically incapable of voyaging over these distances and/or they could only take to the sea blindly, unable to accurately navigate across open waters. The only credibility either of these assumptions has is in the beliefs and ideologies of non-mariners. They are completely fallacious and utterly unfounded in confirmable evidence.
Here's a passage from Book V of Samuel Butler's English prose translation of Homer's Odyssey (Od. 5.270-275) from 1900:
"Moreover, she made the wind fair and warm for him, and gladly did Ulysses spread his sail before it, while he sat and guided the raft skilfully by means of the rudder. He never closed his eyes, but kept them fixed on the Pleiads, on late-setting Bootes, and on the Bear - which men also call the wain, and which turns round and round where it is, facing Orion, and alone never dipping into the stream of Oceanus - for Calypso had told him to keep this to his left. Days seven and ten did he sail over the sea, and on the eighteenth the dim outlines of the mountains on the nearest part of the Phaeacian coast appeared, rising like a shield on the horizon."
Homer is describing a long-distance voyage, most probably in "winter", across the vast open sea conducted mainly at night by visually navigating with the stars. According to the isolationist "myth" a voyage of this kind in the Bronze Age was impossible. Yet this is exactly how I would have undertaken such a journey but with one very important addition. It's obvious that Odysseus was no "master mariner" for if he was he would have known of the "home" stars as referenced by the Bootes constellation that would have accurately guided him to the "latitude" of his beloved Ithaca. This would have allowed him to steer a direct course home. As described he was merely travelling generally to the east by putting the celestial north pole on his left shoulder. No master mariner would ever have been so imprecise.
Accurate navigation at sea with the unaided eye is based on the very simple observation that stars that pass directly overhead of you through the night at one location are not the same stars that pass overhead at another location with a different latitude. This can easily be confirmed today by anyone willing to patiently study the motion of the stars at night. I don't know when this observation was first made but everything was in place by the end of the Mediterranean's Cardial Neolithic coastal expansion (the late 6th Millennium BC) for this knowledge to be recognized and begin to spread.
Accurate prehistoric maritime navigation with the unaided eye in the Mediterranean was all about "latitude" just as it was for the Polynesians in the Pacific. So the next time someone tells you that ancient mariners knew their direction only by timidly clinging to coastlines you will know that the speaker is doubtlessly a "non-mariner".
Kindly,
W. Sheppard Baird
Official Website
Art Galleries
Etc.
"Like most humans, prehistoric people were simply born into a different cultural and technological environment. They were us."
I'll have much more to say about this in an upcoming publication but as someone with the relatively rare experience of having rowed, sailed, and navigated large open wooden boats I feel obligated to, at least briefly, bring some clarity and practical insight to those with little or no exposure to basic seamanship and navigation with the unaided eye - "non-mariners". There are several highly counter-intuitive aspects to seafaring that typically are only acquired through experience and/or with the guidance of a master. When it comes to "all things nautical" very smart people with the best of intentions are capable of creating great falsehoods and myths when using only their intuitive thinking in a vacuum of experience. The most erroneous idea ever conceived regarding Mediterranean prehistory is that the cultures in the west (Iberia, Sardinia, etc.) originated and developed in total isolation from any maritime contact with those in the Aegean and east. The only way this concept can have any validity is if prehistoric humans were physically incapable of voyaging over these distances and/or they could only take to the sea blindly, unable to accurately navigate across open waters. The only credibility either of these assumptions has is in the beliefs and ideologies of non-mariners. They are completely fallacious and utterly unfounded in confirmable evidence.
Here's a passage from Book V of Samuel Butler's English prose translation of Homer's Odyssey (Od. 5.270-275) from 1900:
"Moreover, she made the wind fair and warm for him, and gladly did Ulysses spread his sail before it, while he sat and guided the raft skilfully by means of the rudder. He never closed his eyes, but kept them fixed on the Pleiads, on late-setting Bootes, and on the Bear - which men also call the wain, and which turns round and round where it is, facing Orion, and alone never dipping into the stream of Oceanus - for Calypso had told him to keep this to his left. Days seven and ten did he sail over the sea, and on the eighteenth the dim outlines of the mountains on the nearest part of the Phaeacian coast appeared, rising like a shield on the horizon."
Homer is describing a long-distance voyage, most probably in "winter", across the vast open sea conducted mainly at night by visually navigating with the stars. According to the isolationist "myth" a voyage of this kind in the Bronze Age was impossible. Yet this is exactly how I would have undertaken such a journey but with one very important addition. It's obvious that Odysseus was no "master mariner" for if he was he would have known of the "home" stars as referenced by the Bootes constellation that would have accurately guided him to the "latitude" of his beloved Ithaca. This would have allowed him to steer a direct course home. As described he was merely travelling generally to the east by putting the celestial north pole on his left shoulder. No master mariner would ever have been so imprecise.
Accurate navigation at sea with the unaided eye is based on the very simple observation that stars that pass directly overhead of you through the night at one location are not the same stars that pass overhead at another location with a different latitude. This can easily be confirmed today by anyone willing to patiently study the motion of the stars at night. I don't know when this observation was first made but everything was in place by the end of the Mediterranean's Cardial Neolithic coastal expansion (the late 6th Millennium BC) for this knowledge to be recognized and begin to spread.
Accurate prehistoric maritime navigation with the unaided eye in the Mediterranean was all about "latitude" just as it was for the Polynesians in the Pacific. So the next time someone tells you that ancient mariners knew their direction only by timidly clinging to coastlines you will know that the speaker is doubtlessly a "non-mariner".
Kindly,
W. Sheppard Baird
Official Website
Art Galleries
Etc.
"Like most humans, prehistoric people were simply born into a different cultural and technological environment. They were us."