Lionel Casson (July 22, 1914 – July 18, 2009) was a classicist , professor emeritus at New York University , and a specialist in maritime history . He earned his B.A. in 1934 at New York University, and in 1936 became an assistant professor. He later earned his Ph.D. there during 1939. In 2005 he was awarded the Archaeological Institute of America Gold Medal .
64-494: Tessarakonteres ( Greek : τεσσαρακοντήρης , "forty-rowed"), or simply " forty ", was a very large catamaran galley reportedly built in the Hellenistic period by Ptolemy IV Philopator of Egypt . It was described by a number of ancient sources, including a lost work by Callixenus of Rhodes and surviving texts by Athenaeus and Plutarch . According to these descriptions, supported by modern research by Lionel Casson ,
128-577: A basis for coinages: anthropology , photography , telephony , isomer , biomechanics , cinematography , etc. Together with Latin words , they form the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary ; for example, all words ending in -logy ('discourse'). There are many English words of Greek origin . Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may be ancient Macedonian , which, by most accounts,
192-558: A fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts . The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek phonology for details): In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes , a limited but productive system of compounding and a rich inflectional system. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in
256-560: A faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of ink and quill . The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase ( majuscule ) and lowercase ( minuscule ) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word: In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs : three different accent marks ( acute , grave , and circumflex ), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on
320-540: A foreign language. It is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, " Homeric Greek is probably closer to Demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English ". Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizable Greek-speaking minority in Albania near
384-431: A length of two hundred and eighty cubits, and a height, to the top of her stern, of forty-eight; she was manned by four hundred sailors, who did no rowing, and by four thousand rowers, and besides these she had room, on her gangways and decks, for nearly three thousand men-at‑arms. But this ship was merely for show; and since she differed little from a stationary edifice on land, being meant for exhibition and not for use, she
448-470: A single rank with four men on each single oar. Classes of ship could differ in their configuration between regions and over time, but in no case did a "four" ship have four horizontal ranks of oars. From galleys used in the 16th to 18th centuries AD, it is known that the maximum number of men that can operate a single oar efficiently is eight. Further, Casson writes that the oars were the proper length for no more than eight rowers. Mention by Callixenus of
512-407: A trench under it, equal to the ship itself in length, which he dug close to the harbour. And in the trench he built props of solid stone five cubits deep, and across them he laid beams crosswise, running the whole width of the trench, at four cubits' distance from one another; and then making a channel from the sea he filled all the space which he had excavated with water, out of which he easily brought
576-804: Is also found in Bulgaria near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizable Greek diaspora which has notable communities in the United States , Australia , Canada , South Africa , Chile , Brazil , Argentina , Russia , Ukraine , the United Kingdom , and throughout the European Union , especially in Germany . Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout
640-773: Is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece , Cyprus , Italy (in Calabria and Salento ), southern Albania , and other regions of the Balkans , Caucasus , the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor , and the Eastern Mediterranean . It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system
704-479: Is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greeks, some documented in Mycenaean texts ; they include a large number of Greek toponyms . The form and meaning of many words have changed. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin, Venetian , and Turkish . During
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#1732771797926768-519: Is protected and promoted officially as a regional and minority language in Armenia, Hungary , Romania, and Ukraine. It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne . The phonology , morphology , syntax , and vocabulary of the language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to
832-820: Is sometimes called aljamiado , as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Greek: Transcription of the example text into Latin alphabet : Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: Proto-Greek Mycenaean Ancient Koine Medieval Modern Lionel Casson He
896-526: Is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey , and the many other countries of the Greek diaspora . Greek roots have been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages; Greek and Latin are the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary . Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around
960-763: Is still used internationally for the writing of Ancient Greek . In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (•), known as the ano teleia ( άνω τελεία ). In Greek the comma also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι ( ó,ti , 'whatever') from ότι ( óti , 'that'). Ancient Greek texts often used scriptio continua ('continuous writing'), which means that ancient authors and scribes would write word after word with no spaces or punctuation between words to differentiate or mark boundaries. Boustrophedon , or bi-directional text,
1024-650: Is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary . The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin , Cyrillic , Coptic , Gothic , and many other writing systems. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with
1088-495: The Eastern Mediterranean , in what are today Southern Italy , Turkey , Cyprus , Syria , Lebanon , Israel , Palestine , Egypt , and Libya ; in the area of the Black Sea , in what are today Turkey, Bulgaria , Romania , Ukraine , Russia , Georgia , Armenia , and Azerbaijan ; and, to a lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia , Monoikos , and Mainake . It
1152-516: The Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ), but little definitive evidence has been found. In addition, Albanian has also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian, and it has been proposed that they all form a higher-order subgroup along with other extinct languages of the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termed Palaeo-Balkan , and Greek has a central position in it. Linear B , attested as early as
1216-533: The United States Navy during World War II , responsible for the interrogation of prisoners of war . After completing his military service, Casson returned to NYU, where he served as a professor of classics from 1961 to 1979. The author of 23 books on maritime history and classic literature , Casson used ancient material ranging from Demosthenes 's speeches and works by Thucydides to cargo manifests and archeological studies of ancient shipwrecks and
1280-492: The nominal and verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by the genitive ). The verbal system has lost the infinitive , the synthetically -formed future, and perfect tenses and the optative mood . Many have been replaced by periphrastic ( analytical ) forms. Pronouns show distinctions in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual , and plural in
1344-524: The trireme propelled by hundreds of oarsmen to speeds of seven knots by its 170 oars. Illustrated History of Ships and Boats , published by Doubleday in 1964, provided a history of boats from ancient craft carved from wood or made from animal skins up to the day's most modern nuclear submarines . Yale University Press published Casson's 2001 book Libraries in the Ancient World that uses references in ancient works and archeological evidence in
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#17327717979261408-414: The "forty's" thranite (the uppermost rowing level of a trireme) oars leads Casson to determine that the "forty" had three ranks. He points to the practical limit of eight rowers to an oar, giving a maximum size class of "twenty-four", as well as to the need for a vastly larger deck than one ship could provide in order to accommodate the reported numbers of marines. Combined with Callixenus's description of
1472-470: The 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language . Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages . The Greek language is conventionally divided into
1536-460: The 50 vertical sections of three oars each, with each vertical section accommodating 20 rowers (hence the designation "twenty"). Thus there would be 150 oars per side. Casson has suggested that it was possible that the two internal sides were not equipped with oars and that the rowers there acted as reserve crew for those on the outer side, so the "forty" would have had either 300 or 600 oars. Source: It had seven naval rams, with one primary, and
1600-486: The Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet , with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit
1664-425: The Greek language are often emphasized. Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, never since classical antiquity has its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to the extent that one can speak of a new language emerging. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than
1728-495: The Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary ), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. The Cypriot syllabary is attested in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period, in favor of the standard Greek alphabet. Greek has been written in
1792-629: The Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history but with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for: Many aspects of the syntax of Greek have remained constant: verbs agree with their subject only, the use of the surviving cases is largely intact (nominative for subjects and predicates, accusative for objects of most verbs and many prepositions, genitive for possessors), articles precede nouns, adpositions are largely prepositional, relative clauses follow
1856-685: The Greek-Albanian border. A significant percentage of Albania's population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in the country. Prior to the Greco-Turkish War and the resulting population exchange in 1923 a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed in Turkey , though very few remain today. A small Greek-speaking community
1920-598: The Mediterranean in Ancient Times told how civilizations along the Mediterranean Sea began by having their ships travel along the coast and then advanced to voyages across the sea, far from the sight of shore. Commerce and military ventures resulted in journeys to such remote locales as India with more specialized crafts designed that expanded the original flat-bottomed boats into vessels such as
1984-649: The Middle East and the Greco-Roman world to follow the development of writing, the creation of the first books and the process of copying them by hand and assembling them into libraries. In the book, Casson puts Homer at the top of a most-popular author list, "with the Iliad favored over the Odyssey " on his best-seller list. He documents the transitions from clay tablets, to papyrus and parchment scrolls, and
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2048-404: The acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in typography . After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplified monotonic orthography (or monotonic system), which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The traditional system, now called the polytonic orthography (or polytonic system),
2112-402: The ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (from six cases in the earliest forms attested to four in the modern language). Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the distinctions except for a person. Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree with the noun. The inflectional categories of
2176-524: The contents of the amphorae they carried to develop a framework for the development of shipbuilding, maritime trade routes and naval warfare in the ancient world. In a 2005 speech to the Archaeological Institute of America accepting its Gold Medal, Casson recalled a visit to Southern France in 1953 when he had the opportunity to visit Jacques-Yves Cousteau , who was performing an investigation of an ancient shipwreck. Once he visited
2240-470: The deck would have provided a stable platform for catapults that were often mounted on supergalleys. However, the "forty" was likely just a showpiece; Plutarch describes the ship as for exhibition only. In order to launch the huge ship the engineers devised a – then novel – dry dock construction: But after that a Phoenician devised a new method of launching it (the Tessarakonteres ), having dug
2304-617: The development of the codex as the precursor of the modern book. Casson rejects the accepted wisdom that the Library of Alexandria was destroyed in 48 BC and argues that evidence shows that it continued in existence until 270 AD during the reign of Roman Emperor Aurelian . He was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders . Casson died of pneumonia in Manhattan at age 94 on July 18, 2009. He
2368-404: The early 19th century that was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth to Standard Modern Greek , used today for all official purposes and in education . The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of
2432-423: The enormous size of the vessel made it impractical and it was built only as a prestige vessel, rather than an effective warship. The name "forty" refers not to the number of oars, but to the number of rowers on each vertical "column" of oars that propelled it, and at the size described it would have been the largest ship constructed in antiquity, and probably the largest human-powered vessel ever built. The "forty"
2496-618: The epics of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon . Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of the Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world , the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute
2560-468: The fabulous description of the vessel has been questioned. Given the technical problems facing a ship of such size, the vessel would not have existed at all, or the description given was an exaggeration. Frank Boott Goodrich (1858) pointed out several problems of the vessel: Greek language Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized : Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized : Hellēnikḗ )
2624-452: The following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia : the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki , the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa , meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek developed in
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2688-439: The infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. The loss of the dative led to a rise of prepositional indirect objects (and the use of the genitive to directly mark these as well). Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, but neutral word order in the modern language is VSO or SVO. Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn
2752-522: The largest that seems to have been used in battle. Larger polyremes were built, with Ptolemy II Philadelphus eventually building a "twenty" and a "thirty", and Ptolemy IV Philopator building the "forty". The maximum practical number of oar ranks a ship could have logistically was three (Greek and Latin tri- ). Beyond three, the number in the type name did not refer to the number of ranks of oars any more (as for biremes and triremes, respectively two and three ranks of oars with one rower per oar), but to
2816-467: The late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek. It is basically a syllabary , which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor, Linear A , has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language). The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek , is the earliest known form of Greek. Another similar system used to write
2880-640: The membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages . Greek is recognized as a minority language in Albania, and used co-officially in some of its municipalities, in the districts of Gjirokastër and Sarandë . It is also an official minority language in the regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages , Greek
2944-441: The modern period. The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodizations, relatively arbitrary, especially because, in all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it. Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek has varied little: Greek shows a mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has only oral vowels and
3008-399: The noun they modify and relative pronouns are clause-initial. However, the morphological changes also have their counterparts in the syntax, and there are also significant differences between the syntax of the ancient and that of the modern form of the language . Ancient Greek made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, and the modern variety lacks
3072-400: The number of rowers per vertical section, with several men on each oar. Indeed, just because a ship was designated with a larger type number did not mean it necessarily had or operated all three possible ranks: the quadrireme may have been a simple evolution of a standard trireme, but with two rowers on the top oar; it may also have been a bireme with two men on each oar; or it may just have had
3136-536: The objects of study of the discipline of Classics . During antiquity , Greek was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world . It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek . In its modern form , Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union . It
3200-706: The older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected; other modern borrowings are derived from Albanian , South Slavic ( Macedonian / Bulgarian ) and Eastern Romance languages ( Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian ). Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Example words include: mathematics , physics , astronomy , democracy , philosophy , athletics , theatre, rhetoric , baptism , evangelist , etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as
3264-500: The other; and in height up to the gunwale it was forty-eight cubits; and from the highest part of the stern to the water-line was fifty-three cubits; and it had four rudders, each thirty cubits long ... And the ship had two heads and two sterns, and seven beaks ... And when it put to sea it held more than four thousand rowers, and four hundred supernumeraries; and on the deck were three thousand marines, or at least two thousand eight hundred and fifty. And besides all these there
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#17327717979263328-413: The ship by the aid of whatever men happened to be at hand; then closing the entrance which had been originally made, he drained the water off again by means of engines (organois); and when this had been done the vessel rested securely on the before-mentioned cross-beams. It has been calculated that the dock might have needed around 750,000 gallons of water to lift up the vessel. Even in the 19th century,
3392-490: The ship having two heads and two sterns, Casson suggests that the "forty" must have been a catamaran made up of two three-ranked "twenties" joined by a deck. Each column or section of the ship would be composed of twenty rowers; perhaps eight rowers on each section's top rank, seven in the middle, and five on the bottom rank. As a catamaran of two "twentys" with 4,000 oarsmen, there would be 2,000 per hull and therefore 1,000 per side. The 130 m length would allow ample room for
3456-437: The stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks ( rough and smooth breathing ), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the diaeresis , used to mark the full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave in handwriting saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of
3520-448: The warehouse with the hundreds of amphorae that had been brought to the surface, Casson said that he immediately knew that he "was in on the beginning of a totally new source of information about ancient maritime matters and I determined then and there to exploit it" and integrate this new trove of data with the information he had been able to assemble from ancient writings. His 1959 book The Ancient Mariners: Seafarers and Sea Fighters of
3584-574: Was a distinct dialect of Greek itself. Aside from the Macedonian question, current consensus regards Phrygian as the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexical isoglosses , with some being exclusive between them. Scholars have proposed a Graeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated. Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian ) or
3648-568: Was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms , for most of their history. Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population. It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish ) and the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English ). Because of
3712-557: Was also used in Ancient Greek. Greek has occasionally been written in the Latin script , especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek Catholics . The term Frankolevantinika / Φραγκολεβαντίνικα applies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (because Frankos / Φράγκος is an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe
3776-421: Was another large body of men under the decks, and a vast quantity of provisions and supplies. Plutarch , writing in the late 1st century AD, also mentioned this immense vessel in his Life of Demetrius , part of his Parallel Lives series, disagreeing or misquoting slightly on the height to top of stern, which he reports as forty-eight cubits: Ptolemy Philopator built [a ship] of forty banks of oars, which had
3840-460: Was born Lionel I. Cohen on July 22, 1914, in Brooklyn , and later changed his last name to "Casson". As a teenager he owned a sailboat that he would use on Long Island Sound . He attended New York University for all of his collegiate studies, earning a bachelor's degree there in 1934, a master's in 1936 and his Ph.D. in 1939 and was employed at NYU as an instructor. He served as an officer of
3904-546: Was moved only with difficulty and danger. Note that the translation of "forty banks" is overliteral; see below. The trireme , a three-ranked galley with one man per oar, was the main Hellenistic warship up to and into the 4th century BC. At that time, a requirement for heavier ships led to the development of "polyremes" meaning "many oars", applied to "fours" ( tetre- in Greek, quadri- in Latin) or more and "fives" ( penta- in Greek, quinque- in Latin) and later up to "tens",
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#17327717979263968-401: Was reportedly built by Ptolemy IV Philopator of Egypt in the 3rd century BC. It was first described by his contemporary Callixenus of Rhodes in the lost Peri Alexandreias . In the early-3rd century AD, Athenaeus quotes this in his Deipnosophistae . Philopator built a ship with forty ranks of rowers, being two hundred and eighty cubits long and thirty-eight cubits from one side to
4032-580: Was under the control of the Frankish Empire ). Frankochiotika / Φραγκοχιώτικα (meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of Chios . Additionally, the term Greeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications. The Latin script is nowadays used by the Greek-speaking communities of Southern Italy . The Yevanic dialect
4096-673: Was written by Romaniote and Constantinopolitan Karaite Jews using the Hebrew Alphabet . In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known as Greek Aljamiado , some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their Cretan Greek in the Arabic alphabet . The same happened among Epirote Muslims in Ioannina . This also happened among Arabic-speaking Byzantine rite Christians in the Levant ( Lebanon , Palestine, and Syria ). This usage
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