Roman rostrum recovered

[Cantabrigian]

It is quite probable that ancient galley commanders were more upset at the loss of the bronze ram than the rest of the ship - but equally the loss of rams, given the tactics, was sometimes unavoidable.

If rams being broken off ships was a problem, then you'd expect that the rams would have holes to attach ropes.  Acting as a tether, they would make it possible to recover a detached ram.

[Erpingham]

Whilst recognising that the assemblage of artefacts recovered so far may be biased in ways we don't yet understand, it is certainly a conundrum as to why the victors apparently lost a large number of their own ships for little loss on the other side.

From the loss figures quoted in the papers cited, we have only a fraction of the ship casualties represented.  This may be causing some distortion, as the finds made so far might only represent a particular, perhaps unrecorded, phase the action and not the whole.

[Nick Harbud]

The Tusa et al paper is very interesting, although I disagree with the conclusion that one cannot take the ram off without sinking the vessel.  I base this on the Olympias reconstruction where the ram was a wooden structure attached to the front of the galley as shown in this photo.

You cannot view this attachment.

I would expect this structure to either break and/or become detached whilst the main hull remained intact.  Coates agrees with this, but then he would.  Such a design still allows for metal ram heads being found either with wood contained within or indications (like metal nails) showing it was part of a wooden construction.

From an engineering, construction and maintenance viewpoint, having a separate ram structure would also make more sense.  For example, it  enables the ram to be removed in order to replace hull timbers, then refitted afterwards.  This would also explain the conundrum observed between timber sizes fitted into the ram head and those anticipated on the keel and wales of the hull.  Incidentally, Coates uses the weight of the ram head as a guide to the size of vessel.  The Olympias ram head design is based upon the Athlit example recoved off the coast of Israel, but is much smaller.  Coates notes that at 700 kg, the Athlit ram would make Olympias too heavy in the bows.

Finally, the authors note that much of the adjacent seabed has been fished with dragnets.  Obviously, such nets would not be able to raise 40+ tons of a complete galley.  However, detached ram heads could come up quite easily and would doubtless fetch a good price at the local scrap merchant.  This might well explain any discrepancy with regards to the relative numbers of Roman and Carthaginian ram heads found to date.

[Erpingham]

Another account of the find recovery.  Doesn't add much but has more pictures, including close up of the three-feather helmet motif.