Naval power and textile technology: sail production in ancient Greece

ABSTRACT

Sails and textile technology played a key role in enabling mobility and thus shaping historical phenomena such as migration, trade, the acquisition and maintenance of imperial power in the ancient Mediterranean. Yet sails are nearly absent from analyses of ancient fleets, even in extensively studied cases like that of Classical Athens. This paper examines the demand and production of sailcloth, including labour and material requirements, and logistics. A consideration of the Athenian navy demonstrates that making sails involved significant amounts of labour and resources. Managing supplies and reserves of sailcloth constituted a significant challenge, which could be addressed through more intensive exploitation of textile workers, trade, and taxation.

KEYWORDS:

• Textile production
• sails
• ships
• ancient Greece
• Classical Athens

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Lena Hammarlund who performed the sailcloth weaving experiment and generously shared her thoughts on working with linen on the warp-weighted loom, Lise Bender Jørgensen for many helpful discussions on the topic, Edward Harris and Eva Andersson-Strand for sharing literature, Kerstin Droß-Krüpe and Chavdar Tzochev for commenting on earlier drafts, the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Lise Bender Jørgensen first presented calculations for labour, material, and land requirements for the Olympias sail at a conference on held in Cambridge in 2015; Bender Jørgensen 2022.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by the A.G. Leventis Foundation through a fellowship at the British School at Athens and the European Research Council [grant agreement FP/2007-2013-312603] within the scope of the project Production and Consumption: Textile Economy and Urbanisation in Mediterranean Europe 1000–500 BCE (PROCON).

Notes on contributors

Bela Dimova

Bela Dimova is A.G. Leventis Fellow in Hellenic Studies at the British School at Athens. Her research focuses on social change and cultural interactions in the Aegean and the Balkans during the first millennium BC. Her current work explores these themes through textiles and textile production.

Susanna Harris

Susanna Harris is Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She specialises in the analysis of archaeological textiles using scientific, experimental and theoretical approaches. Harris is textile lead for the AHRC project ‘Unwrapping the Galloway Hoard’ and recently co-edited ‘Textiles in Ancient Mediterranean Iconography’.

Margarita Gleba

Margarita Gleba is Assistant Professor in Archaeological Research Methodologies at the University of Padua. Her interests include the archaeology of the pre- and protohistoric Mediterranean, Near East and Eurasia. She specialises in textile archaeology and archaeometry.