Although the evidence is slim, I think we may conclude that if Neolithic boatmen
were able to carry cattle from Anatolia to Crete ca. 7000 BC, mariners ca. 1600
BCwere capable of carrying horses across the Black Sea and the Aegean. With a
sail assisting the rowers a ship would probably have needed 2 or 3 weeks to sail
from the Sea of Azov to the coast of Attika. According to Diodorus Siculus 3.34.7
ships sailing from Lake Maiotis reached Rhodes on the tenth day and Alexandria
on the fourteenth, but horse-transports would surely have made more frequent stops
at coastal anchorages.
For any information about horse-transports we must go to times much later than
the Bronze Age. Julius Caesar does not tell us much about the transports he used
when, in one night in early July of 54 BC, he brought 2000 cavalry over the channel
from Gaul to Britain. He does say that because the channel waves were seldom
high he ordered that the hulls be built lower than normal, and that “in order to
transport a large number of animals they were somewhat wider than those we use
in other waters.”^129 What the Roman transports “in other waters” may have looked
like remains a question. In the Byzantine period ships called chelandiawere built
to carry horses, apparently between twelve and twenty per ship.^130 The Byzantine
chelandionwas equipped with a ramp (klimax), essential for loading and unloading
the animals, and was rowed rather than under sail. The same kind of transport
seems to have been used by William, Duke of Normandy, when in late September
of 1066 he shipped at least 2000 horses across the English Channel for the battle
that eventually was fought at Hastings.^131
The Classical Greek horse-transport—the hippagogos—is supposed to have
been much larger than the Byzantine chelandion. Lionel Casson described the
hippagogosas rowed by sixty oarsmen and carrying thirty horses.^132 This is
certainly true of transports in the late fifth century BC. Thucydides says (6.43)
that in 415 BCthe Athenians included in their fleet for Sicily one horse-transport,
carrying thirty horses. Thucydides also says (2.56.2), however, that when Perikles
in 430 BCsent a fleet around the Peloponnesos and wished to include horsemen
in the force, the Athenians “for the first time” (πρῶτον τότε) converted several
old triremes to serve as horse-transports. Thucydides’ words imply that after 430
BChorse-transports were often converted from old triremes, but that before 430
BCvessels were always purposely built to carry horses. The purposely built
hippagogos, like the Byzantine chelandion, was probably much smaller than the
converted trireme. Specially built horse-transports were certainly in use early in
the fifth century BC, when the Persians prepared for expeditions against Greece.
Herodotus (6.48.2) says that Darius ordered his coastal subjects to build both
warships and horse-transports for the campaign against Athens in 490 BC, and
that 10 years later (7.21.2 and 7.97) Xerxes’ fleet included many horse-transports.
For what it is worth, Diodorus Siculus (11.3.9), probably following Ephorus,
specifies that Xerxes had 850 hippagogoi.
The existence of horse-transports in the Late Bronze Age must mostly be
inferred, but a few pieces of evidence are available. For New Kingdom Egypt we
have a dubious inscriptional reference: a ship named The Stable, which Torgny
Säve-Söderbergh—in his study of the New Kingdom navy—surmised was a
204 Militarism in Greece