When I googled yesterday how much energy a galley rower consumes a day, I was puzzled. 6’000 calories! That is more than twice my daily intake!!! Having been a rower myself during my High School year, I wonder how I ate that much. Or maybe this was the reason why I was so slim. My physician always told me that I was undernourished…
With the winds constistently blowing West - East during the summer months, the Phoenician mariners had an interesting challenge at hand that no other people faced before. Having enough food and fresh water to feed sailors and rowers for up to one month on open sea.
Prevailing summer wind directions in the Mediterranean
As the world’s first long-distance traders, they had to innovate. Stagnant water usually turns foul, fresh food rots, meat is not preservable, sea water spoils flour and most food is too bulky to be stored efficiently. Also, how do you cook on a long sea voyage? Human beings can not get enough calories from raw food - the human digestive system developed two million years ago for cooked food when our ancestors discovered the use of fire. The famous Greek poet Homer recounts in the Iliad that the Greek mariners went on shore to cook and ate one warm meal in the evening. But how did the Phoenicians do it? They could not hop from island to island but had to cross long open water stretches?
Phoenician long-distance routes over open water
The Phoenicians were an ingenious people - but they were also lucky. Living in the Fertile Crescent, they found solutions in their backyard. About two third of the plants we eat today come from the Fertile Crescent. The cereals rye, barley and wheat are from there. Olives, chickpea, beans, almonds, pistachio nuts as well, apples, pears, peaches, apricot, figs, dates, pomegranate and cherries have their origin in the Fertile Crescent and last but not least, our livestock such as cattle, goats and sheep. Am doing this list from my heart but am sure there are even more if I were to look it up on Wikipedia.
Not only did the Phoenicians have access to many energy rich plants and domesticated livestock, living in towns by the sea let them also discovered the preserving nature of salt as they discovered making glass from quartz sand on their sandy beaches. Ingenious people!
Fertile Crescent spanning today’s Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Southern Turkey, Iraq and western Iran
Not being a specialist in nutrition, I looked up which food had high caloric value compared to weight. As we know, storage room on any boat comes at a premium - even on our most comfortable Dragonfly last year. Remember that your suit case was too large for your small cabin? Here below is a table I found on the internet
Being sophisticated people, the Phoenicians could indeed make high caloric value food for long distance trips on the sea. Whilst they did not have access or did not know many of the foods on the list above, olive oil, butter, beans, meat, bread or raisins were staple food in their cuisine. We know from several archeological sites that they were good bakers who baked a highly nutritious flat bread which was easy to store. They were also cooking stews which preserve well with salt used in the process and knew how to cure meats for cold cuts. Add to this the olive oil carried on the ships which is very nutritious when combined with bread. Fresh fruits as such are unsuitable for a long trips, but fruits can be dried. Dates, dried figs and raisins have such a high sugar content - they are real calorie bombs!
Replica of the Kyrenia Ship found north of Cyprus in 1965
Over the last few decades, underwater archeologist found four ship wrecks from the years 1’300 BC to 200 BC. One of them is the wreck of Uluburun which I already talked about in my blog D - 61. The other one is the Kyrenia Ship, a 47 foot long sailing vessel which sank around 300 BC. Next to the usual relicts such as wine and olive oil amphorae, there was a cooking cauldron in bronze which could have been used for cooking on the boat. Whilst the pot alone is no proof for cooking on the sea there is more evidence from Roman ships where tiled galleys were found. Tiled spaces on a ship make the use of fire possible - maybe this was the first ship kitchen we found? Whether the Phoenicians indeed invented cooking on the open sea will remain an open question until more ship wrecks from that period will be found.
tomorrow I am going to talk about how the Phoenicians exported the plants I mentioned in this blog and thus created the Mediterranean vegetation we know today.