Talk:Ancient maritime history

Lack of dates in lead

The lead is notable for its lack of data about timing, other than the very vague "dates back thousands of years" in the leas sentence. (What, 600,000? 3,000?) This does a disservice to our readers, especially the ones who never read past the lead (the majority of them). The second paragraph leads with "The first true ocean-going boats were invented by the Austronesian peoples" without ever giving a clue as to when that was. It isn't until the end of that paragraph that some timing (1000–600 BCE) is given, but by then it is two millennia later. But we know some approximate dates, and we can and per Who what when where why, we should provide them. Mathglot (talk) 09:01, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

Have started to work on this, with some dates added to the lead. Mathglot (talk) 11:10, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

The earliest seafaring is thought to have been carried out on rafts. These substantially pre-date logboats. The settlement of Australia (say 50,000 years ago) is considered likely to have used rafts.

But before going any deeper into this, it is important to remember that the study of early maritime history is beset with a huge list of problems: the archaeological survival of early boats or rafts is unlikely – any that are found may not be a representative sample of what was used (consider a log boat versus a contemporaneous skin boat – one has a much higher chance of survival than the other); changing sea levels will have obliterated many coastal communities, destroying evidence of communities making a living from the sea and the methods they used – the isostatic rebound in Scandinavia and the tectonic uplift of Eastern New Guinea are among the rare examples of prehistoric shorelines surviving. As a solution to this problem, maritime prehistory has to look at (a) comparative ethnography, extrapolating back from the earliest records to work out what technological capabilities existed before then (as a bit of WP:OR, I find this to be wholly unconvincing); (b) linguistics, to try and date innovations from tracking back words for boat parts to a common origin which can be dated; (c) migration – possibly the hardest of evidence, especially for events like the first humans to arrive in Australia. Where the migrants are not the first arrivals, genetics can be used; (d) evidence of deep water fishing – this is one where there was huge excitement over the discovery of tuna bones in human settlement. Now tuna can only be caught in deep water, so sea travel was essential to catch them. Then it was realised that (i) the behaviour of fish may have altered due to the selective pressure of humans catching them close inshore and (ii) young tuna can still be caught from the beach and the bones at some sites were of young fish. Therefore any mention of pelagic fishing as a means of dating seafaring is a potential trap for a Wikipedia editor. Some of the above is sourced from The global origins and development of seafaring. Cambridge, UK : Oakville, CT: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge ; Distributed by Oxbow Books. 2010. ISBN 9781902937526.. An essential source for early seafaring is McGrail, Seán (2001). Boats of the World: From the Stone Age to the Medieval Times. Oxford University Press. pp. 289–293. ISBN 9780199271863 (already used in the article) and his two volume Early Ships and Seafaring.

One key problem is dating the arrival of the sail in each part of the world. The easiest region to deal with is the Caribbean, where sail did not arrive until Columbus. Northern Europe has a range of dates proposed: from 50BC to late first millennium AD (i.e. when Vikings started sailing). The Nile is happily served with iconography (late 4th millennium BC, pg 7 of The Global Origins.., apparently citing McGrail 2001) and archaeological evidence – combined with the useful geography of the Nile's current heading North, whilst the wind goes in the opposite direction. (Same geographic phenomenon in the Guayaquil River in Ecuador, another place where sail was possibly independently invented. pg 9 of The Global Origins...). The development of sailing in Island Southeast Asia has a full range of theories, with the Doran/Horridge ethnographic extrapolations being widely known, but Atholl Anderson dissenting (I believe the reference is Anderson AJ 2000, Slow Boats from China: Issues in the prehistry of Indo-Pacific seafaring, but I do not have that to hand at the moment.)

Sorry to ramble on, but there are some important problems to be aware of when tackling this article. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 21:05, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

Article title at variance with content

The article title refers to Ancient maritime history. So I presume that means after historians started writing about the subject matter of the article. We have written history for most of the Roman period, then something of a gap until we get Saxon and then Viking invaders from Northern Europe; further east there is not much written history of voyaging in and out of India, there is some Chinese written history, some Arab writings which address the subject (from memory well after the BC/AD point), but nothing heading into the Pacific – in all these cases we have a big increase in written material as soon as Europeans start arriving in these areas. Note that, on these terms, the boundary between prehistory and history is at a very different time in Europe from the rest of the world.

In contrast, the article is strong on prehistory: Austronesian expansion, Ancient Egypt, Phoenicians , Minoans, Trojan war, pre-Roman Britain, etc. At a guess, more than half the article is about pre-history.

Given that early historians usually tell us very little about ships and trade, most of that being written as if the reader knows all about the subject, I don't think that neglecting the boundary between pre-history and Ancient history is actually a problem. Both rely a great deal on archaeology to understand the subject, so keeping the two in the same article seems helpful.

Others may disagree. But we still need a solution to the misleading article title. The options appear to be (A) split the article into a prehistory article and am Ancient history article or (B) find a new title for the article. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 23:10, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Again, what about the pre-Columbian Americas?

There's information about other countries, but nothing about the pre-Columbian Americas! Angrythewikipedian (talk) 14:52, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

Probably to do with the shortage of WP:RSs on the subject. The only mention of the Caribbean in all the academic works on early seafaring that come to my mind is the fact that sailing was not invented there, whilst it appears to have had independent origins in the Middle East (Nile and Mesopotamia) and Island Southeast Asia. I would cite that here, but it would take me a while to find the exact reference. The point being that the Mediterranean and Island Southeast Asia are considered "nursery" regions for humans to learn seafaring. The Caribbean and the continental coastline in the same latitudes has many of the characteristics of these other regions, but no use of the sail until after Columbus.

Though you have probably spotted that the article does mention the independent invention of the sail in South America, in the Guayaquil river region. This is known through accounts by Europeans of their first encounters with those living in this area. This is generally taken as pre-Columbian technology. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 19:14, 8 April 2025 (UTC)