Historians have long wondered how ancient mariners sailed against summer winds in the Mediterranean. This ambitious study provides an answer.
“For every day a large number of ships was gathering from every quarter to bring up stores, nor could any wind blow without their having a favorable course from some direction,” Caesar later wrote in his book “The Civil War.”
The researcher, David Gal, a PhD candidate at the University of Haifa, published the results of his study this summer in the“We started with a trivial question: How did Roman ships visiting the Levant return to Rome?” Gal said. “One would simply say, ‘Oh, they turned them around and sailed the other direction.’ However, a windward journey was not practical in the kind of ships they used.
The second phase of the study involved understanding the weather. In addition to reading 3,000-year-old texts, Gal reviewed modern records of the winds and waves around the Mediterranean. He collected data points from 7,000 different locations, taken every hour over the past 15 years. He compared these findings with the ancient data and made a surprising discovery.“The wind and wave oscillations are the same as they were 3,000 years ago,” he said.
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