Ships in southern Scandinavia
It is very likely that in southern Scandinavia the long ship—propelled, like a pentekonter, by dozens of rowers—was an innovation that came with the region’s militarizing and its entry into the Bronze Age. In Neolithic Scandinavia boats were small, and were either made of skin or were dug out from logs.104 This primitive tradition persisted into the second millennium bc, but with the Nordic Bronze Age came a much more seaworthy craft: the long ship made from planks and rowed by lines of men seated abreast. How important the long ship was in the Nordic Bronze Age is shown by its prevalence in rock carvings in Norway, in Denmark and especially in the Bohuslan and Ostergotland provinces of southern Sweden. The long ship was also a favorite decorative motif on bronze objects, and these have been especially helpful for establishing a chronology (some 800 ship images have been found on some 400 bronze objects from the Nordic Bronze Age, most of the objects coming from graves).105
Until recently the ship images did not attract much attention, but this is changing, thanks in part to work done by Johan Ling. Ling’s 2008 dissertation at the University of Gothenburg has now been published as Elevated Rock Art: Towards a Maritime Understanding of Rock Art in Northern Bohuslan, Sweden.106 Ling’s starting point is the consensus among geologists that the land in southern Scandinavia has been slowly elevating since the end of the Ice Age, and that the uplifting of the land has exposed much of the coastal landscape that 4000 years ago was still under water. Ling attempts to understand the rock art of Bohus lan within the context of the Bronze Age landscape/seascape, and also to show that the varying locations of the rock carvings reflect the progressive retreat of the sea from the rock (thus allowing him to reconstruct a probable chronology for the carvings). The rock art has traditionally been seen as carved by farmers and pastoralists in their idle hours, but when the carvings were made most of them were visible from the sea and some were visible only from the sea.
Since the BA, however, the landscape has been transformed by shore displacement, so today most of the rock art, on bedrock of granite or gneiss, is located around 10 km inland. The most common figurative image is the ship; the region is known to contain some 10,000 ship images.107
Ling places the earliest of the ship images at the end of the Ia and the beginning of the Ib period of the Nordic Bronze Age, or shortly before 1500 bc on the historical chronology.
The maritime tradition of the Nordic Bronze Age was apparently initiated by contact with the eastern Mediterranean cultures, and it is very likely that the amber trade lay behind the extension of the Mediterranean maritime tradition to Scandinavia. Before amber was carried over a land route through central Europe, that is, it seems to have been brought to Greece by ships: from the North Sea through the English Channel, around Gibraltar, and then through the Mediterranean.108 Kristiansen and Larsson pointed out that in Bronze Age Scandinavia and in Mycenaean Greece there were not only “shared traditions in picturing ships during 1700-1400 bc,”109 but also similarities in the way that ships were designed and built:
The early Nordic Bronze Age ships are in form and construction clearly inspired by east Mediterranean ships. Ships are very complex constructions, transmitting tradition. The construction of the Nordic sea-going Bronze Age ships as depicted in rock art and an early example on the Rorby sword from the seventeenth or sixteenth century (Figure 92) could hardly have originated in small drawings. It demanded an understanding of the craftsmanship behind the techniques of bending the wood for the high curved stems, and for the complex double construction of both keel and stem.110
The Rorby sword, a chance find in 1957, has a tip curled upward and inward, imitating the curved prow of a ship, and was obviously meant for display rather than for battle. Along its blade is the image of a “pentekonter” propelled by at least fifty oars. Like the other decorations on the sword, the “pentekonter” was not engraved or incised on the bronze, but was included in the casting, thus indicating that other swords with the same image were produced in the foundry.
